The Jordan Harbinger Show - 153: Adam Grant | How to Know the Real You Better

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) has been Wharton's top-rated professor for seven years, is the host of podcast WorkLife with Adam Grant, and is the author of three New York Times Best Sellers: Option B (with Sheryl Sandberg), Originals, and Give and Take. What We Discuss with Adam Grant: Why you probably don't know yourself as well as you think you do. Why you're prone to believe things about yourself that are patently false. How people closest to you benefit from reinforcing these falsehoods. Why the people who would most benefit from helping you see these falsehoods are the least likely to point them out. What you can do to become more accurately self-aware. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  The One You Feed is a podcast by Eric Zimmer and Chris Forbes that hosts inspiring conversations about creating a life worth living. Check it out here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Adam Grant and I go back a long way. He's an organizational psychologist who studies how to make work, not suck, as he puts it. We grew up in the same area of Michigan, and Adam has consistently broken the mold by outworking, outproducing, and outshining almost everyone in our age group, which I think is great. He's written a bunch of books. He's like one of these all-star professors, really a great thinker of our time. And it's kind of cool that he was just like this youngest tenured professor ever at Wharton Business School. Kind of a big deal. He was tenured at 28 instead of, you know, like 40 something. That is incredible. And whenever I talk to Adam, I'm always by his ability to take a freakinomics style look at the workplace and to do so in a way that us Gen X slash millennial types can actually pay attention to and wrap our heads around. Today on the show, why we probably don't know ourselves as well as we think we do. In fact, it's not just an absence of knowledge about ourselves, but there's a near certainty that we actually believe the things about ourselves that are patently false.

Whether it's trying to land a job, we're to press a date, we spend a staggering amount of time making claims about ourselves. And it makes sense, right? You're the only person on earth who has direct knowledge of every thought, feeling an experience that you've ever had.

So who could possibly know you better than you? Sometimes, though, that direct knowledge is what causes the problem we're talking about here in the first place. Think of it like owning a car. Just because you've driven it for years

doesn't mean you can pinpoint why and when the engine broke down. And that's kind of what we're going to delve into here with Adam Grant. We've got some drills and exercises for you to get better self-aware and help others do the same, which I think is just a really interesting and a little bit of a scary way to do that. So I really enjoyed this episode.

The time flew by. And if you want to know how I managed to keep people like Adam Grant on speed dial and have this great network, it's all about systems. It's all about tiny habits. I actually just taught a bunch of this to some intelligence agencies, some espionage types. So even if you're already really good at networking, which a lot of you have been saying you are, there's going to be some stuff in here, unless you are already clandestine, MI6 type, which you're not. So check out our level one course. It's free over at jordanharbinger.com slash level one and get a nice taste of that. It's the stuff I wish I had for the last 15 years. All right, here's Adam Grant. Shall we dive into this? I read the article. The podcast is really

interesting. And so you only did like a handful of those. Is that kind of the deal with that? The basic thought was that I was going to think about each podcast episode as like a mini book. And so we decided a season would just be eight episodes and then two bonus. And so we're working on season two now. And in part, it was a chance for me to really turn upside down the way my own work life works. Because I've basically spent the last six years since I think you and I first connected, getting invited into organizations to tell them mostly things I already know. And I go to all these interesting places, and I don't get to learn that much because they want to hear like the greatest hits.

And so the podcast was kind of a flip of that to say, all right, what if I invite myself in to places that are reinventing work and making it suck a little bit less and try to figure out what we can learn from them? So that was the hook. And it's been super fun. I like the idea that you get to go to these places and really dive in. And in fact, I thought it was pretty interesting that you got to sit in the writer's room on the Daily Show. I'm imagining a bunch of really funny, quirky people. Some are like kind of hipstery. Some are really alt and some look square, but those are like the real weird ones. And then Trevor Noah are sitting there and they're like, all right, everybody, be really funny. What are your

ideas and go? And everyone's just ready with some hilarity. I mean, what's the reality of sitting in a room like that? Or is it not even a room anymore these days? That, you know what? Jordan, that's not that far from from what I saw when I walked in. So it was a little surreal because I've watched the show since I think we were in college, right? Yeah, were we? And I remember going news. I'm not doing that. My friend was like, trust me, you'll want to see this guy talk about funny, make fun of the news. And I thought, well, how disrespectful is that? And then dot, dot, dot, my favorite show, right? Exactly. I think I had a very similar experience. And, you know, I'd watch Trevor stand up and thought he was hysterical. And so I was excited to, you know, to get a taste of his show and then,

or his version of the show. And so, you know, I reached out and said, look, we basically want to do a show about the making of your show. It's like a Seinfeld coffee table book about coffee tables. Right, right. Very meta. And they were surprisingly, like, I don't know, I don't know exactly why, but they were surprisingly receptive. And they said, hey, you know, you're with Ted. You want to do a work life episode? Sure. Come on in. And so. And so, So I literally just arrived at the writer's room one day, and it is tiny. It's like it's an undersized living room, essentially, with a few couches. There are bagels sitting everywhere.

And it is full of probably 30, mostly hipsterish-looking people, many of whom are in their 20s and 30s. It looks like a total melting pot covering every possible culture and hairstyle. Yeah. When I walk in, they don't even notice that I'm there. They're just, they're riffing on, you know, on the, the previous day is news. And every two or three minutes, somebody will hit play on a clip. And then it's like an immediate competition to see who can make the funniest one-liner on, on that particular clip. And then when they feel like they've run out of steam, they cycle through the next one.

And Trevor walks in and nobody even notices. They just continue with the routine until he finally calls the meeting to order. But it was kind of like watching, it was almost like watching a basketball team in warm-ups where they don't realize anyone's in the audience. It was just pretty fun to see it in action. That's got to be a pretty fun, but also a pretty stressful job, because if you have an off day and you're just not being funny and you're just sitting there, all your colleagues and Trevor Noah are like expectantly looking at you deadpan with eyebrows raised and they're like impress me and you're just like, yeah, I'm not feeling it today. You know, I had to go to the vet. My stomach hurts a little.

And they're just like, all right, you said that yesterday. So when are you going to be funny and earn money that we're paying you? And you're just like, I'm getting fired from this job. immediately. I was a little terrified because, you know, I think probably it took six or seven minutes from, you know, from the time I walked in for somebody to make a really bad joke that no one laughed at at all, just completely bombed. And I'm like, oh, no, that person's life is over. Right. Trevor thinks they're an idiot. You don't get that much time to pitch in front of, you know, the top guy necessarily. And they actually just jumped on it and started making fun of it. And treated as an opportunity to make more jokes. And I felt like it actually, it made it easier for the

person who bombed to laugh at themselves because they were kind of laughing together knowing that they've all bombed at some point. And I was like, you know what? We need to do that more. Yeah, good point. How glad, though, were you at that point that that wasn't you, right? Like, I'm glad I don't have this job. That guy's screwed. Oh, I think, I mean, we've, we've all had that moment, right, of kind of even just in a meeting, pitching a joke and having it fall flat. And I was like, okay, that's painful enough. But at least I can say that's not my job. I'm not supposed to be funny. It would have been a bonus if anybody laughed. Here, like, this is the definition of what they're supposed to be good at. And how can they just fall flat on their

faces? But they seem to do it almost every hour. It's got to be a tough gig. And it sort of segues nicely into what we're going to discuss today because in order to get a job writing jokes, writing comedy, by the way, I just want everyone to know my dream is to have a team of people writing funny things for me to say and then I get to say them on the show and everyone thinks I'm the funny one. That is a great place to be in your career. You really have to think at some point to be a comedy writer, to be in that room, to be in any position at all like that, that you're funny.

You have to think that you're funny, but people who think that they're funny generally are the people that are not funny at all. So you have to have to have this balance, right, where you're like, I know that I'm kind of funny, but I'm not so funny that I'd go around telling people this. And yet here's my resume telling you how good I'm going to be in that writer's room, right? How do you manage to slide in there? It's a hell of a paradox. I think that most of the people I met at The Daily Show, they'd just been told over and over again that they were funny by other. people or they just, you know, they noticed that when they made a joke, more people laugh than when other people make jokes. And, you know, at some point they realize like, all right,

I'm pretty good at this. But once they did that, they started surrounding themselves with funnier people. And, you know, a lot of them sort of moved in a slightly more professional direction. So they do stand up on the weekend or, you know, they'd start submitting applications to, you know, to write a column for a newspaper. And as they do that, they automatically catapult themselves into a world where people have much higher standards and clearer taste. And so really quickly, it's like, okay, I was funny in my high school class, but I'm not funny compared to Jerry Seinfeld or Allie Wong.

And so I've got a lot of work to do. And I think that feedback seemed to help a lot of them calibrate. It is funny, though, because I, you know, I remember. in high school, actually, I had a friend who told me that I had no sense of humor. And, you know, like only someone who's a future psychologist could do,

I was like, well, why? Explain it to me. Like, what's your logic? Like, what's your evidence? Back it up. And she said, well, you don't laugh at all my jokes. I'm like, oh.

Well, I'm the problem. I'm the problem, huh, Cheryl? Yeah. Exactly. So I do think that people have a really hard time judging how others are supposed to respond to their humor. And to your point, I think that that goes to a larger question about how self-aware are we really. And that's what we're going to discuss. That was a brilliant. We just landed that glide, gliding that plane

right down on the runway. That was great. I learned a lot from you over the years. Yeah, man. I should be taking notes on this as well. I think that that was smooth. Usually we have to slam that transition in there a little bit, but that was probably as smooth as it gets. Their work in the area of self-awareness is a little bit scary, and that's a topic for today. Because I think it does come down to the fact that, look, I want to believe, I really want to believe that I not only know myself better than anyone else, but the knowledge I have about myself is actually the most important information about myself that exists. And I know that's kind of confusing, but it's sort of a two-prong thing here.

If you're listening and you're confused, what I'm saying is people think, they know themselves really well. And that is only true in certain areas, except the problem is those areas in which you know yourself, not that big of a deal for the rest of us, like not really going to make or break your career, et cetera. Am I close? Yeah, actually, I think you nailed it. So, Jordan, I do have some good news for you, right? There are some things you know about yourself that other people don't know and that are, you know, probably useful to know. So if you take an internal state like anxiety, for example, you are a way better judge of your, your own anxiety levels and how neurotic you are than other people because nobody knows what's going

on inside your head. And you might be really neurotic on the inside, but very good at putting on sort of a cool front on the outside or the opposite, right? You might come across as really anxious, but you're actually pretty chill internally. And so I think to, you know, to really understand any emotions that you're experiencing, any particular patterns of, you know, of thinking or feeling, you are the best gauge on that. The problem is that most of your success in life, depends on how other people perceive you. And sometimes we are at gaging that. Yeah, that seems like it could be a big problem.

I mean, it's kind of a waste of time for me to know all this stuff about myself and then have it all be largely irrelevant to how I work, how I relate to other people. It seems a little bit unfair is not a great word for it because that's how things are. I mean, it's just a statement of facts. but it doesn't really seem to be a pattern that we can easily break. And not only that, if we're supposed to develop self-awareness, and we know a lot of workplaces grade you based on self-awareness, which is probably a good thing,

it sounds like we should be focusing more on this, and yet all of these personality tests and things that we take, Myers-Briggs, it's like, hey, what about you, you're really just evaluating yourself, and then you get this acronym or, I guess, at the end, and it's supposed to define you, and yet it's all based on my own perception of my own data about myself. It seems like, wow, talk about a recipe for disaster. Yeah, I think it's scary. And, you know, I guess a few years ago, I publicly broke up with

the Myers-Briggs because I was so appalled at how the ratings are done and the lack of updating of science that went into that, which is a whole other conversation. But I think the, you know, some of this we know immediately, right? You would never judge somebody's intelligence by asking them how smart they are. You'd actually watch them use their intelligence, knowing that, you know, they're probably going to be pretty motivated to think that they're bright and that, you know, watching them solve problems or answer trivia questions or try to figure out a complex, task would be a better way to go. But I think we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, overlooked the fact that this is true across a whole range of domains. If you think about job performance,

for example, the best personality predictor of performance in most jobs in the U.S. and actually in most industrialized countries is conscientiousness. Are you disciplined, hardworking, organized, dependable? Or are you more spontaneous and carefree? And it's not hard to figure out that, you know, conscientious people tend to set higher goals. They tend to be more persistent in, you know, in achieving those goals. They work harder. They also work smarter because when something doesn't work, they don't give up. They look for new ways of solving problems. And so, you know, people are aware of that and they're pretty motivated to see themselves as conscientious. And the problem is they have access to everything they've ever done. And so, Jordan, if you want to see yourself as really

conscientious, it's pretty easy for you to search your memory for nine situations where you were super organized and on top of stuff. And what you don't have is the comparison of your best nine against everybody else's best nine. And so you can overestimate how much you really have your act together. That's a good point. I hadn't really even thought about the idea that someone could say, well, how nice are you? And I skip over all of the asshole area of like the last 29 days. And I go to like the one. You had a bad 29 days. Right. Yeah. But then I go to the 30th day and I'm like, well, I did pick up that dollar that that lady dropped and say, hey, you dropped this. And She was like, thanks.

So I'm a pretty good person, right? And that's the memory that I'm going to latch onto because it's desirable and because nobody wants to be like, yeah, well, there's all these times where I've done really horrible things and that's what I want other people to know about me and that's what I want to believe about myself. We're just going to filter that. But the problem I would imagine is this is unconscious, right? This is happening to us in a way that is riddled with cognitive bias.

Constantly. And yeah, I mean, it's actually, it's pretty fun to watch people do it, right? Because it's almost like they've told their life story just by writing their own Wikipedia page. And there's no editor kind of going through to figure out, okay, well, wait a minute, what else have you done? And is that really true? I think that one of the places this plays out is there's a classic study in psychology of married couples where they're put in separate rooms. And they're asked to estimate of the total work that goes into their real. relationship, how much they personally are responsible for. And so each person gives a percentage.

And three out of four couples add up to over 100 percent. So somebody's lying. And it turns out that some of that is ego, right? We all want to think that we're doing most of the work in our, in our relationships. But more of it is just information discrepancy, right? You know every act that you've ever done to contribute to your relationship, right? You were there when you cook dinner. And when you planned a vacation and when you walk the dog. And by definition, you weren't there when your partner did all those things. And so on average, I think people are able to come up with 11 of their own contributions and only eight of their partners. And so I think one of the ways we can become more self-aware is actually learn more about what other people are up to on the same dimensions that we're trying

to judge ourselves. So that's interesting. It's not just a matter, a simple matter of cognitive bias, right? It's a information asymmetry. And exactly. That, that, makes a lot more sense because I'm thinking to my own relationship and there's no way I would put anything over us I would never be like I'm doing at least half the work I know damn well my wife is doing a lot more work in the relationship and we've also talked about this one day this is not the same thing but the other day she asked me something like what percentage of the housework do you think you do and I was like um like five percent and she goes oh I'm so glad to hear you say that. And I said, yeah, why? And she's like, well, you know, she's talking to her

friends and all these husbands out there. And you don't have to admit guilt at him, but all these husbands out there are like, yeah, I do like 40 to 60 percent some days. And it's like not even close. Yeah, not even close. And I would imagine this gets mirrored in how much work goes into the relationship because we're thinking like, well, you know, I come home and I say hello to her and I buy stuff on the way back from the office, and it's like, yeah, that's not even close to what your wife did all day. You just weren't around. Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly the trap that a lot of people run into.

And it's, I mean, I think it's a fundamental challenge we have any time we try to gauge our generosity or our contribution to others. But, Jordan, the question your wife asked is sort of, you can't win, right? No. Either you're going to get in trouble for overestimating it or you've got a lot of work to do now. Well, I kind of went this way. By the way, if anybody's worried about this walking into that trap. Yeah, what happened was I said about 5% and I said,

but I hope you don't feel like I'm not contributing because what I'm doing is working on the business, earning revenue so that we can pay for things, et cetera. That's where I look at my contribution. Let me know if I need to do more. She's like, no, I'd rather you just don't try to like get in the middle of all these other things that I'm doing. You know, because it is the problem with this. My dad tried to do housework like once or twice when I was a kid. My mom was like, just stop.

You're just making everything worse. I've been in that position. So after reading a lot of this research on how out of balance things are between husbands and wives, I came home and I told my wife I was feeling really guilty that I wasn't doing enough at home. And she's like, first of all, like, do not touch the kitchen. Like, you can't even make spaghetti without it being really crunchy. And I'm afraid you're going to set the place on fire. But secondly, I would love more help.

And we then had this conversation. It sounds like similar to yours about, okay, what are the things that I could actually be stepping up and contributing in that you don't enjoy doing or you feel like I'm good at? And did you come up with a balance or were she like just stay away from everything and go back to your office? No, I got permanent garbage duty. So that was, that immediately landed on my plate. That's not bad. Yeah, I've actually found I like taking out the garbage because it's the perfect time to listen to podcasts. It's also oddly satisfying for me.

It really is. It's like, I'm getting rid of all this stuff. Wait, I'm not alone? Yeah, isn't that weird? That's so weird. So what do you find satisfying about it? You know what it is? It's like you open up this bedroom garbage can that you've kind of been over stuffing for two weeks

because you're like, I got to take this out, but it's four o'clock in the morning and you just wanted to blow your nose. You're not doing it then. And then, you know, some that they're like take this thing out or you're taking out like all this heavy sort of food garbage. and there's this area where now where you would have normally had to push down on a garbage can full of stuff, it's empty. You can just drop it in leisurely. I don't know. I must have some sort of, some sort of, there's a deeper complex here probably. But I find it's like cleaning things up and making them orderly except for you're actually getting rid of something that is objectively not supposed to be in the house anymore,

as opposed to just making things perpendicular and parallel on a desk that you're going to mess up in five minutes. Yeah, you know, it's funny because as I hear you say that, I think that I wonder how much of this is unique to the fact that, you know, neither you, you definitely, and I also don't, we don't have a job where we create much that's tangible. Right. Right. It's like, okay, you're, you're going to put out some ideas or some conversations and they're never really done. And you don't ever get to kind of ship them off and feel like I created something today. And so I feel like when I take out the garbage, like I've actually accomplished something that I can see in front of me. Right. Which is very satisfying in a Marie condo sort of way. It's also a little sad that that's like the one tangible thing where we sort of brush our hands off, go wash with our Myers Clean Day hand soap that literally everyone in America seems to have now.

And then dry our hands and we're like, oh, that's a job well done. Like I'm imagining people who do woodworking or working on a car in a garage. They wipe the grease off their hand and they're like, yeah. That's a beauty. I never will have that experience with garbage especially. No, no, that's true. Although I do occasionally stack the cardboard boxes in a pattern. Also satisfying. Yeah. Now, we just have some sort of weird complex that we get. We grew up in the same area. For those of you listening, we grew up basically in the same town. There's probably some weird stuff in the water. We aren't that far from Flint now that I think about it.

It's true. And not only that, but you were college roommates with one of my good high school friends. That's right. That's right. I feel like Serge might have put something in your water. It's very possible. Yeah, some sort of Russian spice that now is colonizing our brains. Yeah, exactly. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Adam Grant. We'll be right back after this.

Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode, so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Adam Grant. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe.

Now back to our show with Adam Grant. All right. So back to self-awareness in which everyone just got a glimpse of our kind of overly self-aware selves here just a minute ago. You mentioned in some of your work that, and there's a great article on this in the Atlantic, that will link in the show notes, people's coworkers, colleagues, et cetera, are better than they are at recognizing how their personality will affect their job performance. So in other words, people we work with are much better at evaluating us than we could possibly be. This sounds a little terrifying because I feel vulnerable knowing that. Yeah, well, I don't think it's as vulnerable

as it sounds because your coworkers do get to see you do your job every day. And so, you know, if you think about it for a minute, Jordan, if I were to give you a conscientiousness scale and, you know, have you fill out a bunch of items about, you know, do you always finish the things you start? Are you a reliable person? Do, you know, do you feel like you are, you're good at, you know, keeping yourself organized and on schedule? I could take your ratings and then ask your coworkers to fill the same scale out about you. And then your co-workers' ratings might be twice as powerful as yours in predicting your performance. And if I do that in reverse and I have your co-workers fill that out, the ratings you give yourself add nothing. And so whatever you know

about yourself that your coworkers don't is either wrong or sort of irrelevant to your performance. Wow, that's bizarre. So they can see things that we either can't see probably a little bit of what we won't see or refuse to see. And all the information that we know, about ourself doesn't really affect our job. So, okay, that means that in some way our blind spots as humans have to be somewhat predictable. And this is, you know, your area of research, right? You've got to have seen this. If we really can't evaluate these things about ourselves and our colleagues and coworkers can, there must be, those must be the same areas or similar areas for pretty much everyone. Is that the case? Yeah, it seems to be. So the areas that we have the biggest

blind spots in are the areas that are evaluative where we really care about looking good or we know the difference between positive and negative. Like generosity or something like that? What's generosity? Generosity, intelligence, creativity, anything that's desirable or virtuous. And then also that are highly observable. So, you know, much more something like assertiveness, which everyone can witness as opposed to more of the internal anxiety that we talked about earlier. Ah, okay. All right. And why is this important, the fact that other people, can see us more clearly than we can. What should we take away from that?

Well, I think you captured it really nicely. That, you know, there are things that we can't see because we're stuck inside our own heads. And then, you know, it's kind of like, well, if you go back to the, if you go back to Aristotle's era, you know, astronomers being totally convinced that the sun revolved around the Earth,

you would really easily be able to see that if you weren't on the planet Earth, right? Because you would see Earth moving. Right. But the fact that you're on it makes it really hard. And I think that that's, you know, the same thing is true about the mind. The, you know, the very fact that you live inside your own head makes it really hard to see what other people can from outside it. And then the other part, you know, that's the observable part. Then the evaluative part is there are just things that you do not want to see about yourself that are uncomfortable to admit, that are blows to your ego. And so, you know, one of the things I had a lot of fun doing in the first season of work life was, going into workplaces that tried to fix that and say, hey, you know what, we're not going to let you keep those blind spots. We're going to hold up a mirror and let you see yourself as other people see you in the hopes that that will help you get better at your job or maybe turn you into a less terrible person. Yikes, that's got to be tough because, of course, it's really easy

for me to look at what I would evaluate myself in, right? I'm looking in my own head and I'm like, oh, okay, but then the question is, what am I ready to admit to other people? people because I'm not just going to spill everything that I find in there, right? Even if I could get rid of my bias and see things even remotely, clearly, which you have sort of shown that we can't, even if I do find something, I'm not going to be like, hey, everybody, guess what I found out? I'm really not that emotionally stable. Go figure, right? I'm not doing that. Yeah, well, I actually think you might, but most people would. Maybe I would, yeah, for purposes of this show only, for science.

No, I think, you know, there's, I've never, I've never known what to do with this, but there's a psychologist Bill Swan who has argued for decades that, you know, against this backdrop of us thinking that we all just want to see ourselves positively. Bill's, Bill said, yeah, but we also have this motive to be seen accurately. You know, we don't just go around, you know, trying to impress other people. We also try to express ourselves. and we kind of want to align the ways that we really are with how other people see us so that we're not constantly disappointing them and so that we feel like we're understood. And I would guess, Jordan, from the times we chatted over the years, that you probably score pretty high on his self-verification scale,

where you are willing to trade off a little bit of being seen positively for being seen accurately. Yeah, and this might not be the exact same thing, but I am very much okay with having people trust me more than they like me in certain business situations especially. Huh. And that's been cultivated over time, though. You know, of course, I spent most of my young life really trying to get people to like me more as every kid does. And then it just got kind of horrible as an adult and is not a great way to exist and doesn't

work with dating. It doesn't work with friendships. It doesn't work in the workplace. And then I realized starting my own business. It's actually more important for people to be like, look, I know that Jordan's going to do what he says he's going to do. I'm going to get what I paid for, et cetera, versus having people be like, you know, he's just a really nice person. I like being around him. It's great to have both, but if I had to choose one, I think trust is probably a little better because, you know, and this is just a theory.

This is something that I thought about a little bit here. It's better to do business with people that you trust. I'd rather do business with people that I trust but don't necessarily like than people that I like but don't. necessarily trust. I think that's so critical and unusual. It's actually, it's a theme that jumped out when I did an episode with a crew of NASA astronauts who had to trust people that they didn't like. Oh, yeah. So imagine that you are, you're coming out of the U.S. Navy and you've gotten picked to live your lifelong dream and fly into space. And you were told that one of your crewmates is going to be a Russian cosmonaut

who, when you were in the Navy, was your enemy, and you were going to fight the Cold War against him. And now you've got to fly with the guy, and he's not particularly friendly, and he's kind of nasty about, you know, whether you're any good at your job and clearly thinks that he's superior. And, you know, you probably don't enjoy interacting

with that guy very much, but your life depends on being able to trust him and know that he's competent and also that, he believes you're competent. And I think it's really hard for people to get past that, right? To say, hey, I want to put my life in the hands of somebody that I don't even enjoy interacting with.

And I thought that's something that more people ought to learn how to do. So how did you get to that point? Oh, good question. I think probably it comes down to the one thing that's coming readily to mind here is little decisions. So if I have the ability to say to somebody, hey, you know, the reason that you know, the reason that you're not getting this speaking slot, for example, is because you're actually not as dynamic of a speaker as the other people that got chosen around you. I could have, I could say that, right? And I probably would. But the other thing I could do is go, but I really want Jim to like me. And so I'm not going to tell him that he's not as dynamic of a speaker and that he should improve that. I'm going to say, you know, that whole event is kind of just a popularity contest. It's kind of just a boys club. You're never going to get that. I should have told you before, but I thought maybe they changed their ways, but they haven't.

Same old crap. You're great. Don't let them get you down. You know, and that would have made that person feel better and be like, Jordan's got my back. He's on my side. I like him. But I think I was able to achieve that by saying, look, you're not as dynamic of a speaker. You should email this guy and take some lessons and it will really go far.

You're not really what they're looking for right now at this type of event, but don't feel bad. you just don't have enough reps under your belt. It doesn't necessarily make that person like me. It doesn't have to make them dislike me, but they sure like me less than if I had stroked their ego or protected their ego. It's just that I was able to give them feedback that they could use instead.

And so I have to make those decisions in real time as those situations arrive. I kind of just take note of when I have the ability to give somebody real feedback, for example, or blow sunshine up their skirt. It's a lot easier for me to just to now make that decision knowing that it's the long game that matters for me and them. That is exactly what Ray Dalio tries to do at Bridgewater in saying, look,

you've got to be willing to cause people a little emotional pain in order to help them improve. And the reality is that most of us are afraid to do that. We don't want to hurt people's feelings, even if in the long run it's going to help them. And I think that's a disservice to other people. especially when you're dealing with things like financial markets or well any business actually it seems like a great idea i would imagine in that workplace though there's a lot of you really have to get down to people's motivations because when i hear about what happens at bridgewater which is everybody gives each other feedback that's pretty brutal and you can even

give it to ray i guess if you feel the need to do that um is there's got to be a little bit of like well, you know, I got feedback from Adam, but then I also think that Adam is secretly mad at me for this other thing. So I'm going to discount that feedback. Or thanks for the feedback, Adam. And then you're thinking, like, I'm going to give you feedback now. And then when you get that, you're like, is Jordan just mad at me for the feedback I gave him before? Like, how do you get rid of the idea that maybe they're motivated by something else other than just giving you realistic feedback? Maybe they're mad at you for your feedback. How do they mitigate that, right? How do they control for that? So I've spent a couple years studying Bridgewater and doing some work with them.

And actually, I was on a call yesterday where I was quoting a study. And Ray just interrupted and said, bullshit. Wow. I was like, at first I was like, whoa, that's harsh. Like I'm a social scientist. I have pretty high standards for what counts this rigorous research. I'm pretty sure this study is not bullshit. And then the next thought I had was, all right.

I finally reached a point where he's brutally honest with me and isn't pulling any punches. That's great. That's what I need in my life, especially from somebody who's gone to the extreme on a skill like giving and receiving feedback. So he has a bunch of systems in place that have really been designed to solve the problem you're describing. So, you know, I think in a lot of workplaces, you're right, that, you know, I might give you negative feedback because I'm mad at you for rating, meeting negatively or, you know, I'm trying to get ahead in some way and you're a threat to that. At Bridgewater, one of the things they do is you get rated on about 77 different dimensions of performance in real time. So you're in a meeting right now and I could be rating you on, you know,

whether you're demonstrating higher level thinking or getting stuck in the weeds. I could be rating you on whether you're standing for truth and fighting for right as opposed to, you know, being a little bit political and you can then rate me on being, you know, being, being distracted when I'm busy rating you. But they aggregate all these ratings that are done in real time. And then what you're given is a believability score, which is a score in each domain for how accurate your feedback has been in the past because we have everybody doing the ratings. And so what that means is I might be given a high believability score on feedback about your personality, but a low believability score on my predictions about markets. And so then you would know whether in general you

should trust my feedback in that domain. And there's a very strong disincentive for me to then game a feedback system because I'm going to kill my believability score if I, you know, if I give you feedback that I think is not accurate in a domain where I've proven accurate. Oh, wow. So we want to build up our credibility, which is great because of course, I think we want to, and we touched on this earlier, We want to convince everyone, including ourselves that we're smart, creative, and intelligent. And if we're just sort of trying to game the system in that way or when we give other people feedback, then we lose on this other metric, which is actually arguably more important, having discussed the whole trust versus likeability thing in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think one of the things that I was surprised to see happen when I watched this play out at Bridgewater is, I kind of expected that people would always be second-guessing the motives, right, and trying to say, okay, you know, when somebody tells me, I had, one of the craziest things that I saw happened there was a guy named Kieran walked into a meeting and a slide came up ranking managers at Bridgewater. And he was ranked dead last in a room of several hundred managers. Dang. And I'm like, oh, that guy, he didn't even get stabbed in the back. He just got punched in the face. Yeah, burn.

front of all his colleagues. And they're the ones punching him. And, you know, what I would feel inclined to do in that situation is, you know, start thinking about all the reasons why people might be biased against me. And that didn't even cross his mind because they have all bought into a system and opted in where they agree that they're going to listen to critical feedback because they want to help each other get better. And so you build up this experience over time of knowing that if people rate you negatively,

even though we all tend to feel uncomfortable about doing that, then odds are they're probably trying to give you accurate feedback and hold up that mirror and help you get better. That is a brilliant way to try to mitigate cognitive bias because that would be my first thought. Everyone's biased against me or maybe I'm biased against, I've got some other bias. And by the way, you would know this.

Is there a bias whereby I think I'm less biased because I think I have that bias? Yeah, this is. This is Emily Pronin's work on what's called the bias blind spot, which I've always thought of as the I'm not bias bias. Yeah. So people actually think that they are more objective than other people are, which of course is ridiculous. Yeah, that makes sense. And the more objective, I think, I think a lot of people who don't realize they're vulnerable to bias, the more vulnerable they might actually be.

because since we all have that, the fact that they don't see that or we don't see that means that maybe it affects us even more strongly than other people. Yeah. I mean, it's terrible, actually, because the more convinced you are that your objective, the less work you do to try to catch and check your own biases. And so the more unbiased you think you are, the more bias that makes you. Oh, my gosh. That's such a mess.

Watch out. Yeah. Ugh. So in what areas do we need to have other people hold a mirror up for us? And then how do we do that? Who do we choose to do this? Because if I ask my wife, hey, I need a realistic assessment of myself, she's still not going to do that. She has to, first of all, she has to rationalize the fact that she married me in the first place, right?

She's not going to be like, here's all the stuff that's wrong with you without running into a cognitive dissonance of her own where she's like, wait, I married you? Damn, what was I doing? Right? Yeah, although, you know what, there's some Murray and Holmes work showing that that high expectations of your partner can become self-fulfilling prophecies and that, you know, if your wife has an ideal view of who you are, that you become more motivated to try to become that person. And so maybe her best option is to say, hey, you know, Jordan, like, on your best day,

here's who I think you are. And here are all the times you've fallen short of that. Let's close the gap. Yeah. which maybe allows her to maintain her positive view of you, but also motivate you to make some improvements. But I think you're right. I think at a basic level, it's often hard for people to know what to give you feedback on, and then you have to gauge, okay, how honest are they being and where are they relevant. I think the place to start, though, is with specific

skills. So, you know, other people tend to be pretty good if they're knowledgeable in a domain. and you're new to it or you've gotten inconsistent feedback in it, they tend to be pretty good at giving you feedback, especially if you aggregate a bunch of people to give you feedback. And so there's actually an exercise that I tried out after seeing it in action at Bain, the management consulting firm. So they have a version of an owner's manual or a user manual. Like, you know, when you get a new car, it comes with a manual to tell you how to operate it? Yeah, I've never even cracked that thing.

in any car I've ever had in my whole life. But yes. Well, you're clearly less clueless than I am then, because I've been, I've actually not, I think I probably read parts of everyone because I couldn't figure out how to work pretty much every car I owned. Ah, yeah, so my dad worked for Ford.

So if I was like, hey, there's a little light that says OD off. What is that? He's like, oh, you hit the overdrive switch on the gear shifter. You should just hit that little button that you probably never knew was there. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I guess I sort of lived with a manual for, a car? Clearly. Yeah. I'm mechanically completely incompetent. So those manuals are useful to some of us,

right? Especially, you know, if you think about any piece of technology that you're not good at, you know, a DVD player, a phone, a laptop, some new product that you've never tried out before, the user manual is supposed to be helpful. And what I think is interesting is that the human mind is way more complex than anything we buy, no matter how technologically sophisticated it is. And there's no owner's manual. And I think we need our own owners manuals, but we also need to give them to the people we work with. And so what this manager had done at Bain was he was going to write a user manual for new employees to say, look, here's what I'm good at, here's where I struggle, here's what brings out the best in me and the worst in me, so that they could get to know him

faster. And then he was like, wait, why would I do this? I don't know all that stuff. The people who've worked with me know all that stuff. And so he challenged his team and he said, I want you each to write a draft of what's all the stuff you know about me now that you wish you had known in your first week of us working together. And he had the team put that together. And then, you know, they kind of, they had a rough draft and then they compared notes on which things were important and less important. and then it ended up getting turned into a one-page document that is given to every new person who works for him. And I just thought that was a great idea. And so I reached out to a few people who work with me. And I asked them to write out just a draft of the user manual for me. And I only

predicted, I made a list of what I thought I was going to be in it first so I could test myself awareness. I only predicted about a third of it. Oh, wow. Wow. So you try to write an instruction manual for yourself? Yeah. Yeah. So I, you know, I knew I would be told, for example, that I was constantly late and that if, you know, if you want to work well with me, one, you need to, you need to be aware of that, that I have a chronic inability to disengage from the current task until it's done. And then, two, if there's something really important, you either need to stress the importance of timeliness for that activity for me, or you need to lie to me about when it starts. So that was predictable. I knew that was going to go in there. And I wrote it almost verbatim

matching what one of my colleagues did. But there are a whole bunch of other things that I just did not anticipate at all. So, okay, we created an instruction manual for ourselves. And I'll talk about how we do that in a second because I'm very curious about that. But then you didn't really, it's not just as simple as you sitting down and going, oh, okay, I know these things about the way I operate. let me notify you. There were things in there that you didn't know, right? Yeah, quite a bit. I was like, oh, this is either really uncomfortable

or a great learning experience, and I'm going to try to turn it into the learning part. Yeah, probably a little bit of both, because I would imagine the people you work with closely, guys like Jason, my wife, Jen, the rest of my team here, they've got a vested interest in making me better at everything or an indefinitely invested interest in making me less difficult in other things that we do together. Yeah.

But the problem is, and Jen knows this, Jason knows this. The challenge is, of course, if there's something that I need to hear but they know I don't want to hear it, they're probably not going to jump over themselves to deliver bad news and then get me kind of riled up. Yeah, because that's only going to make their lives more difficult, right? Right. Yeah. And I mean, I try to be aware of this and not shoot the messenger because the last thing you want to do is train your spouse and your producer and people you work with really closely to be like, hey, if you have a problem with Jordan, definitely don't tell him because he's going to make your life a living hell.

So just bottle it up until you find a better job. Like, that's not who you want around you, right? No. So, Jason, we should talk offline. I've got some ideas for you. Yeah. How do we get that more accurate picture of ourselves then from our coworkers and colleagues? I mean, I assume we need to be working closely with them,

but the weekly Skype or Zoom meeting is not going to cut it for most people. No, I think one of the things I've learned from a couple leaders I've worked with is, I heard a version of this story from, I think, three different leaders was they felt like as they got more senior or, you know, more influential, people stopped giving them the candid feedback they used to get. And, you know, at first they would just ask for it. and nobody told them anything. And eventually they said, all right, you know what, I've got to, I have to really go out on a limb here to try to make it safe for them to speak up.

And one of the things a bunch of them did was they said, all right, I'm going to give feedback on myself out loud. And so I ended up trying this to get my own team to write my user manual. I said, all right, here are a couple things I think I'm really bad at. You know, and then, okay, which of these do you agree and disagree with? And what am I missing? What are my blind spots? And once I put the blind spot question in there, it was like the floodgates just opened.

It was like, well, sometimes you crush people with your negative feedback on an idea. That was a point I heard multiple times. I was like, what? I feel like I'm encouraging. I don't do that. Oh, wait. No, never. That's a terrible idea.

And I think what I didn't realize was I was just trying to be efficient. I thought, okay, you know, I've got a meeting. with nine people on my team, you know, and I think part of my job is to, you know, to quickly vet which ideas are new and rigorous. And so, you know, if something didn't, didn't meet that bar, I'd be like, nope, that's probably not going to work. Let's move on to the next one. And, you know, I'm just like, yeah, you can say that to me, too. And what I was totally unaware of is there's a little status hierarchy there. And people are feeling really discouraged and demotivated by that. And so that was a kind of a big wake-up call for me on making sure that people recognize

that I see potential in their ideas. How do we put ourselves then in situations where maybe we can't ignore feedback from multiple sources short of, or do we need to have like an intervention kind of situation where it's like, hey, roast me. You know, I don't really know how this would look in practice. No, I think I actually think most of it is about just making it easier for people to tell you the truth. So, I mean, I'll give you some things that I've been doing that I've found helpful that, you know, in some cases come out of the research. In some cases, are just ideas that occurred to me when I was, I was grappling with this. One thing I do is every talk that I give after I get off stage, I ask, what's the one thing that I could do better? And it's such a simple

thing and totally non-threatening for people to answer it because who couldn't do at least one thing better. And, you know, in some cases, I get immediate suggestions. In other cases, I find out that they actually do an audience survey that they never bothered to share with their speaker before. And now I've got a whole bunch of data points to learn from. And then what I do is once I collect that feedback, I loop it back with my team and say, look, you know, I got this feedback. What do you think of it? And that puts them in a position to hold me accountable for making changes. Wow. Okay. That's, that's, that seems like a great idea. Is there something we can do?

Look, let's say we're not the boss. Let's say we just want to get some great feedback from those around us. I know you've got this reflected best self exercise. Would you take us through this? Oh, yeah. This is one of my favorite exercises and not just because it comes from Wolverine territory. So I was first introduced to this when I started grad school at Michigan. A bunch of my colleagues and advisors at the time.

had noticed that not only are people often uncomfortable giving negative feedback, but sometimes they're uncomfortable giving positive feedback. They feel like, well, actually a bunch of reasons. So, yeah, I might be hesitant to compliment you because I think it's going to be awkward or because I'm afraid that you'll just think that I'm trying to brown nose or kiss up in some way. And so I don't do it. And then you miss out on some helpful information about what you're good at. or, you know, something that at least would energize you a little bit because it's, it's nice to hear when you have a strength. So the reflected best self is an exercise that's designed to counteract those problems. And what you're asked to do, I've had students do this for a decade.

I've had senior executives do it, military generals. People find it really informative and pretty uplifting. What you do is you reach out to 15 to 20 people who know you well. and it's up to you who those people are, so they might be colleagues, they might be friends, family members, and then you ask them all to tell a story about you when you're at your best. And it doesn't have to be long, so just a paragraph about a time when you really were great or excelled at something. And you get these stories coming in, and pretty soon 17 people have told you about a time

when you were able to shine in some way. and the first thing is people are surprised because sometimes they don't even remember the stories they hear and they're like, what? I did that. I'm pretty sure you're talking about someone else. I have no recollection of that story at all. Huh. Then there's another layer of surprise,

which is often strengths are highlighted that people don't know they have. And that goes back to the blind spot issue. We don't just have blind spots about weaknesses. We have blind spots about strengths too. There are things we just do instinctively that we have a talent for or that we approve.

in a creative way, and we don't even think twice about it. And so people come out realizing, hey, there are a couple of things I'm good at that I'm not using those strengths as often as I could. And your job then, once you collect all those stories, and this is the part that involves some work, is you create a portrait. You analyze the common themes, and you say, look, these are my three strengths that stand out most around when I'm at my best through the eyes of the people I trust. and here are the situations where I've seemed to be good at using them,

and here are some ideas on where I might be able to use them that I'm not already. And I recommend it to anybody who has a, I guess, who has a human brain. Yeah, that seems useful. And we'll put this in the worksheets as we do with all practical exercises from the show, this reflected best self exercise, which is from Wolverine Territory. That's the University of Michigan, not the Marvel comic book. for those of you wondering what the hell we were talking about there. Good clarification.

I like the idea of getting 15 to 20 people that I know well to tell a story about a time when I was at my best. What happens when they go, I don't know, can you give me an example? Should we feed them some kind of example? Or is that just going to screw up the whole thing and skew their results? You know, I don't know. I think that's actually a good empirical question. So I'd want to see the data. You could run the experiment where some people are given examples and others aren't.

I've seen it done both ways. I think sometimes a little bit of direction is helpful. So, you know, if you want to offer an example or two, that's fine. But if you just Google the reflected best self, it's pretty clear from the instructions to most people. They're like, oh, I just have to think about a time when you were really outstanding. I can do that. And then I'll write what you did and how it mattered. So I don't think the examples are necessary, but I think it's possible they could be helpful.

And this is something for, it's context dependent, right? Because I guess a close friend of mine might be like, you know, one thing that was great was when we were at that fast food place and there was that old lady and she couldn't find her wallet and you just paid for her food. That was really cool. That said something about you. Whereas somebody who works with me might be like, remember that time that something broke and you stayed up all night with us to help fix it? That was pretty cool. Made us all feel like a team. It's going to be different, I would imagine, for each person given context that you work with them or that they have with.

you, right? It is, although I actually like to see people do it across different contexts, because two things can happen. One is you start to see consistencies, and you say, all right, you know, I'm not a totally different person with my colleagues as I am with a good friend. Like Jordan, in your two stories, even though they sound really different, what I hear is a common thread that you like to be the hero, or that, you know, in crisis or under pressure or in a difficult situation, you step up. In those two made up examples, that is correct. Totally. Totally. But, you know, what examples did you make up? I wonder if that says something about your psyche. Who knows? Probably. So there's, you know, I think it is helpful for people to realize like, hey, you know, I went, I went to a coworker and I went to a friend and they've never met and they've seen me in totally different situations and they hit on one of the same strengths. That must be, you know, that that must have happened because it's pretty representative of what I'm good at. And then the other part is when the opposite happens. When, you know, you know, something that you feel you're very strong at in one domain, you realize that none of the stories in another domain highlight that. And you're like, huh, you know what?

that generosity I show with my family, I could probably show more of at work or vice versa. That's really fascinating. This is really awesome. I'm so going to annoy my friends and family with this immediately. Jason, you're getting this task, ASAP, you're welcome. Yeah. Like, this could yield some really interesting results. Wow.

Wow. And I like that it's for when you're at your best, because if you did it and you're like, give me feedback on how it could become better, I feel like you could easily. get really overwhelmed with all these things that you need to improve in all these different areas of your life, although that might also be useful. So we were assigned to do this when I, when I took a class that was, you know, trying to help us with our own personal development. And at first, I was like, huh, this is interesting. And then my second thought was, well, I wonder this is kind of, it's only one side of the coin. What happens if I get a

reflected worse self? And I asked people to tell a story about a time when I was horrible. And then look at the themes in those stories. It was way harder to your point earlier to get people to tell me those stories. But I actually learned a lot from it. Yeah. So did you really just invert the exercise? And what kind of stuff comes up than reflected worst self? I did.

I found that a lot of my worst self moments were stories about times when I was distracted. And I, you know, it was like I'd be back. back to back in meetings and then, you know, checking email and really not engaging with people, which ironically was supposed to be one of my strengths. But I, you know, when people, when I, when people had my attention, they had my full attention. And then I guess when they didn't, they really didn't get any of it. And so I took that and said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to start carving out time between meetings to make sure I have, you know, a moment to to check my email or, you know, my voicemail.

And that way I'll feel like I'm not missing something. important. I also, what else did I get? Oh, like, I got feedback that that I was essentially, I'm trying to remember the way it was articulated. It was pretty funny. The gist of it was that I was so nervous that I was causing other people to shake in their seats when I got on stage physically. Wow. So you were so tangibly anxious, other people started mirroring your nonverbal communication essentially instinctually and everyone. felt awkward or nervous about it that is that's really yikes that's something you definitely want to fix but yeah that must have been hard to hear yeah especially as somebody who's about to become a

professor and you know one day give TED talks uh I was like uh my anxiety is contagious this is not a good thing no like it was it was the fuel I needed to go and start working with a with a speaking and teaching coach oh my gosh yeah because you think like oh I'm I'm anxious of course is because the one thing we learned earlier in this episode was that we're really good at evaluating that kind of thing for ourselves. But hey, at least I'm covering it up well and nobody can really tell. Oh, I thought, I really, I mean, I guess I was just so anxious that what I was doing to cover it up only just scratched the surface. But yeah, I knew I knew I was anxious. I did not know I had telekinesis and I could transfer my anxiety across a room. Wow. Bravo. So I was really excited to do

this reflected best self and then until we started talking about the reflected worst self, which seems like you probably have to do both. And now I'm kind of dreading that one. Well, you know what, though? I think there's actually a workaround. So I'll say the evidence suggests that the reflected best self, we do know that it can help with development by, you know, allowing people to recognize their strengths

and, you know, and use them productively. I've never seen anyone study the reflected worst self. So I can't vouch for it with data. But I have noticed a work around, which is you can just do the reflective, best self, and then at the end of it, once you finish making a list of what your strengths are, most of your weaknesses are going to be the opposite of those, right? So if one of your strengths is that you're really good at performing and, you know, kind of capturing people's attention,

chances are that you're not listening as well as you should be. If, you know, if one of your strengths is actually keeping your cool and not being a neurotic mess, there are probably times when you underreact to, you know, to emotionally intense situations and you want to be more aware of that. And so I think, I think you can make a, you can actually identify your worst self by just saying, okay, what's the opposite of my best self? Right, right. Yeah. What's the inverse of my best self? Because I think we all, at some level, we do secretly know, everyone right now is thinking, ooh, I hope people don't notice that this or, oh, I know what I'm going to hear. It's going to be about this and that. We all kind of know, at least those of us with even a modicum

of self-awareness, we're like, oh, yeah, people are going to write about my impatience. It's just, that's going to be the thing that shows up in the worst self. We secretly know this stuff because we've been chastised about it before, probably by significant others, close friends, parents, at some point throughout the course of our life. And- Yeah, you've got to be aware of some of it unless you're totally, I mean, that's not just a blind spot, right? That's being totally blind. Right. Yeah. That totally makes sense. So reflected best self, optional, reflected worse self. I think it's great that we have ways to figure out how to become a little bit more self-aware by utilizing the perceptions of those around us that work with us closely because most of us, almost every one of us has this. So we don't have to develop some keener sense of self-awareness or go do hundreds of hours of, what's it called, that? therapy where you go analysis we don't have to do that we can really just ask people around us to let loose on what how they perceive us which actually people are probably dying to do at some

level anyway right yeah i mean what's funny about it is one of the ways that you know you i also think about the other side of this which is okay so you know i i i want to get people to be honest with me but i also want to make it easier to be honest with them and, you know, sometimes people don't want to hear the negative feedback that you have for them or the constructive criticism that you've spent a lot of time figuring out how to deliver. And so one of the ways that I've dealt with that is I've started just occasionally letting people know, hey, you know, I noticed a couple things that I thought might be useful for feedback. Are you interested?

And no one ever says no. Because the idea that somebody is having thoughts about you, and you don't have access to those thoughts is very, very uncomfortable, right? Right. And so, you know, I think that sometimes opens the door because once people have opted in and said, yeah, you know what, I want that feedback, it makes it way easier to give it. Adam, thank you so much. Really interesting, as always, and it's always great to be able to have a better picture

or a clearer picture of who we are and how we can improve. And so thank you for your work, and thanks for coming on the show today. Thank you, Jordan. Delighted to be here. Appreciate it. Great show, as always with Adam. Really, really a pleasure talking with him. If you want to know how I managed to keep guys like Adam in my Rolodex on speed dial,

well, it's all about those systems, those tiny habits, the ones I'm teaching you in our Level One course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash Level 1. I actually just did a class for this for some military and law enforcement and intelligence agents. And so I'm teaching this to people who are already good at networking. So if you're one of those who's like, well, I'm already pretty good at this naturally. That's great. You'll have plenty to learn here. It's not like, put yourself out there.

I've got real info in here that I'm teaching to people keeping the world safe. So, or making it less safe, depending on your perspective. But go ahead and check it out. The drills take just a few minutes per day. It is free. That's the point. Jordan Harbinger.com slash level one. And speaking of relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Adam Grant.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason, Reflection of Mediocre Self to Philippo, and Jen Harbinger. Show notes by Robert Fogarty, worksheets by Caleb Bacon, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode.

So please share the show with those you love, and even those you don't. We've got a lot more in the pipeline, very excited to bring it to you. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans, gets so invested and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world

really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.