The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #22 Adam Grant: Givers, Takers, and the Resilient Mind

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

Are you a giver or a taker? Have you ever struggled to find work/life balance? How do you build resilience in yourself, your team, or your children? I tackle these topics and many more in this interview with my special guest, Adam Grant. In this interview, we cover a lot, including: How to tell if you are a giver or a taker (Spoiler: if you just told yourself you’re a giver, you might be in for a rude awakening) How Adam filters down hundreds of ideas and opportunities to the select few he focuses on How to tell if your business idea is a winner or a huge waste of time Why “quick to start and slow to finish” is great advice for budding entrepreneurs How to nurture creativity and resilience in your children (or team culture) How to create positive competitive environments that bring out the best in people Adam’s two core family values and how he instills them in his children “Mental time travel” and how it can make you resilient to any challenge or obstacle Why “how can I be more productive” is the wrong question to ask (and what to ask instead) How Adam and I each address the topic of work/life balance And so much more.   Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Fernham Street blog, which is an online community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. The Knowledge Project is a place where we look at interesting people and uncover the frameworks they use to make better decisions, live life, and make an impact. On this episode, I have one of my favorite people, Adam Grant. Adam has been Wharton's top-rated teacher for so many years. They should just name the award after him.

He's also one of the most influential management thinkers. Oh, and in his spare time, he's written New York Times best-selling books, Give and Take, Originals, and co-authored Option B with Cheryl Sandberg. We talk about the differences between givers and takers, what he learned about coming up with creative ideas, and how he fosters resilience in his kids. explore the replication crisis in psychology and how he manages his work-life balance. Adam's answers will change how you see yourself at work, how you parent, and how you live.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do? Oh, I guess I'm an organizational psychologist, and I split my time between a bunch of different roles. I'm a professor at Wharton. I teach an MBA class and undergrad class, leadership, teamwork, organizational behavior. That's all in the fall. And then in the winter, spring, summer,

I'm an author, speaker, consultant, and occasional recovering data geek. How's that? How do you find time for all of that? I think the, I mean, the cycling helps, right? So I don't get a lot done that's not too. in the fall. But a whole semester of intense engagement with students leaves me with a bunch of new questions that I'm really excited to explore in research projects and writing. And then, you know,

as I go and speak about new ideas, I get new ideas back and it feeds into changing my class each fall. So it's really nice to kind of juggle these different hats. How do you filter which problems you work on? Like so you walk away from students with, you know, probably hundreds of different ideas. How do you pick the ones that you're going to focus your attention on? So like you, I keep an idea journal, and it's a little notebook that I carry around in my pocket. And every week I transcribe the little notes that are handwritten into a word document, super high tech. And then about once a month, I like to just review the notes. And usually I do it when I'm, I've given myself permission or freedom to work on something new and creative because I feel like I've actually finished something that was sort of more in completion mode.

And then as I go through it, what I'll notice is if an idea has come up more than once, that's either a sign that it's really interesting or that I'm just depressingly consistent. And, you know, I'll sort of focus on the ideas that I've written about multiple times without even remembering having done it. And then I also try to filter a little bit on, you know, if we understood this problem better or if we had a way to tackle it, how much of a difference would it make for people's lives, especially their lives at work. And the more important it feels of all the ideas that I find personally interesting,

the more likely I am to pursue it. So are you doing research after you start pursuing those ideas and then like a book follows or walk me through that kind of process of how we actually get to consume all of your amazing thoughts? So often what happens is I feel like a chunk of my job is basically to read all the interesting new research that's coming out. out in the realm of work in psychology and figure out how it can be applied to make our work lives less miserable and help organizations become less unproductive. And then oftentimes I'll be

either in the classroom of students or I'll be out doing research and consulting in an organization or I'll be speaking on stage and I'll see something or hear something or experience something that directly contradicts what I've been reading in research or that's just totally uncaptured in research. And so then, you know, I'll start doing a bunch of digging to figure out like, well, wait, is it just that I've missed the data representing this or did the data not exist? And if it's the latter, then if I'm interested enough in it and I feel like I have something important to say about it, then I'll start a research project on it. And, you know, it could be months. It could be years before the project sees the light of day. And then I guess

over the period of, you know, several years, I start to notice patterns. Like, you know, I'm revolving around some similar questions or, you know, like developing a philosophy that's, you know, that's bigger than one study or one insight. And then, you know, that might suggest that there's an article to be written or a book to be written. And then, you know, eventually I decide to do it. How long did it take you to write your first book? So for give and take, there are two answers. One is that it took me about four months. And the other is that it took me about a dozen years. Okay. Yeah. The four months is like the actual intensive writing period. I do a lot of my writing in bursts. And so, you know, once I have the idea and an outline together, you know, I spent several months pulling together all the research that I wanted to cover, a lot of which was collecting dust in my head, but, you know, I need to go out and find some new studies that I wasn't familiar with yet. And then also playing journalists to find the people that I wanted to, you know, to interview and, you know, observe to really bring their stories to life and try to make the data sing.

And, you know, that was several months of prep. And then, you know, I sat down and it was like about four months, you know, writing the first draft of the whole thing. And then several months after that, editing it. And so from, you know, from idea to like a finished product, it was about a year. But with give and take especially, it was, you know, like I'd spent a dozen years doing research on the topic. Right. And so the ideas, you know, we're developing. I was doing the studies.

And I guess it was a long time coming. Is that the one that you, correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote a book. It was like 105,000 words, and then he started all over again. Oh, thanks for reminding me of that, Shane. I was really looking forward to reliving that experience. But yes, I did write over 100,000 words. So what happened was this was, let's see, spring of 2011, I got tenure. And a couple weeks later, a friend and colleague, Barry Schwartz, reached out and asked

if I wanted to work on a book with him. And I was just incredibly excited about the opportunity. I love the paradox of choice, which I know you're a fan of. And I'd hosted Barry for a few talks. We then wrote a paper together, and he was one of my favorite collaborators. I just thought it would be so much fun to try to take important ideas and bring them out into the world more than just in the classroom with a few hundred students per year. And I was getting ready to say yes. And I happened to mention it in a lab meeting with a group of my undergraduates.

And they basically refused to let me do it. They were like, look, we will drop out of your lab. We will disown you as a professor. I'm like, can you even do that? What does that mean? But they just said, look, if, you know, if you're going to write a book, you should start with your own ideas, you know, not work on, you know, sort of a new topic with, with somebody, you know, who you love collaborating with. You have a worldview. And it's not out there where anybody can access it. And so I eventually decided that they were right. And I toyed around with a bunch of different ideas,

finally decided that the give and take was the idea that I was most passionate about. And once I had a vision for it, I just started working on the proposal and accidentally wrote the book over a summer. Accidentally heard a book. I sat down with, you know, a glass of wine and came out on the other side with a fully formed manuscript. It definitely didn't happen that way. Like I woke up in the morning and I basically wrote until it was dinner time.

And then, you know, like I would start the next, like sometimes I'd have more ideas later at night. And then, you know, I, like, repeat the next day. And I just had so much, I guess I had a lot that I wanted to say. I had a lot of studies that I wanted to cover and I finished it and I sent it to my literary agent. It was like, yeah, no, no one would want to read this who's not an academic. You need to start over and you need to write like you teach, not like you write research papers. I was like, oh, yeah, that, forgot about that. That was when I started actually, you know, organizing all the different things that I wanted. to say and going out and finding stories. So that was like the false start before the real book.

Well, whatever the process was, I mean, givers and takers turned out amazing. So maybe you should do that for all your books. I don't know. Thank you. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I definitely don't plan to do it that way again. But there was something useful about that process, which was, you know, I often find I have to write a longer summary of a study before, like, before I really start to distill what the core ha is or, you know, why I care about it. And then, that's especially true for the areas that I know really well. You know, like Stephen Pinker would call it the curse of knowledge where like for years, I didn't even teach my own research in the classroom. I spent, I think I spent a good six or seven years, literally not saying a word about

givers and takers when I taught because I just didn't know what was interesting about it to other people and I didn't have a concise way of articulating. What I felt was a deep insight, but you know, like it was sort of hard to translate out of academic language. And, you know, I've found that often when I read somebody else's work, I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, there's a kernel of this idea that can be, you know, sort of summarized in a sentence or a paragraph, and then, you know, then we can start to bring in the interesting nuances. But with my own work especially, I found that I sometimes had to write the longer summary and then, like, buried toward the end of it was, oh, that sentence is what I was just trying to say in four pages. Here we go.

The conjuring last rites on September. shift. I come down here. I'm going to you in your house. Array! Let's dive into Giverment. Let's dive into Givers and Takers a little bit, because I think there was actually three types of people, right?

Givers, takers, matchers. Can you walk me? through the differences just so everybody starts on the same playing field here? Yeah, I think about these as styles of interaction. And they're kind of grounded in the motives that we bring to the table every time we talk to another person. So givers are people who are constantly asking, what can I do for you? They're excited to add value and help other people. And sometimes that means knowledge sharing or mentoring or just showing up earlier, staying late to support other people. people. The opposite of a giver is a taker, and that's somebody who's constantly trying to figure

out, what can you do for me? Come out ahead in every interaction, and takers are really great at volunteering for the projects that are interesting, visible, and important, and then dumping the grunt work on everybody else. But of course, they love to walk away with the lion's share of credit for every collective achievement, which is why I know we all adore working with takers. Maybe not. And then, you know, most, what I found was most people are, they kind of hover in the middle of this spectrum as, as matchers. I found that over half of people identify this as their primary interaction style at work where they say, look, I don't want to be too selfish. I don't want to be too generous. So, you know, I'm going to trade favors evenly. If you do something for me, I'll do something for you. It's almost like they're, their accountants in relationships and they're keeping track of credits and debits to make sure that everything is fair and square and even. So is the default of a matcher, something like go positive, go first, or is it wait and see? Or like, how does that? So that can go either way.

And I guess, you know, I would love to see some more data on this, but my intuition is that, you know, a lot of people adopt matching as like the way to sort of play it safe. And, you know, when you look at core values, people tend to gravitate more a little bit in the take or give or direction. And so I'm guessing that, you know, if somebody like deep down is a little bit, you know, more of a taker and believes that other people are selfish and, you know, I've got to put myself first, then, you know, they would probably wait to see what the other person, you know, contributes. Whereas, you know, if you have somebody who would prefer to be a giver but is afraid of becoming a doormat, that person would say, all right, look, you know, like, I'll start out being a giver. And then, Shane, if you screw me, then I'm going to, like, I'm going to realize that I need

to be a matcher all the time, which is, you know, a smart habit in general, right? Like, if you're a giver, don't be a giver with takers. But, you know, I think that oftentimes what happens is matchers overgeneralize that. And they're like, ah, like I always have to, you know, have to have to have these like fair trades, which ends up feeling really transactional and short-sighted. Right. And optimizing for the short term, usually almost never optimizes for the long term, right? Bingo. Actually, to like, what extent does organizational culture play a role in I mean, even if we're predisposed to have some sort of war on the spectrum between, you know, say givers on one end and takers on the other and say matches are in the middle, we're all

predisposed to probably somewhere in there. But then we have an environmental impact, which would be culture or organizational norms. To what extent do you think that that impacts our ability to receive feedback and change styles or switch our defaults? It's, I mean, culture is huge. We know that. We know that, for example, if you start out in a really competitive team and then you try to shift the norms to become more cooperative, it doesn't work. And you end up with this pattern of cutthroat cooperation where I'm pretending to help you, but I'm really looking for ways to stab you in the back. Whereas, you know, if you go the reverse, if you start out cooperative and then you say, all right, we're going to move

more competitive, people naturally fall into this pattern of friendly competition. Right. It's like, yeah, you know, we're going to, like, I'm going to try to beat you, but I'm really hoping that you push me to raise my game and, you know, afterward we'll go out for drinks and, you know, maybe the loser buys the winter dinner. And it's so interesting that, you know, trying to get to that same place, it doesn't work if you start out with more taking than giving norms. Right. And I think that, you know, a lot of what we see with, with the impact of culture is around the theories that people have about what it takes to be successful. And I guess the tragedy that I've seen in a lot of organizations across sectors is you have these leaders who say,

look, you know, we want people to be collaborative. We want them to help each other and, you know, problem solved together. And then we're only going to measure and reward individual performance. And so you end up basically disincentivizing people to act like givers. And so a lot of people then check their values at the office door and they say, look, this is, you know, this is not a safe way to operate here. And if you see that happen systematically over time, you'll build a culture where every new person who walks in the organization will look up the hierarchy. and say, I don't see any givers who are extremely successful here. And that may not mean that I have to be a taker,

but it sure means I have to be, you know, I have to be careful not to be generous. Right. And, you know, I think the, I guess it's, you know, to me it's one of the great, it's one of the great tragedies of organizations that we end up, even in organizations that have matcher or give our cultures, oftentimes if they're not strong,

if those cultures aren't strong, you end up with successful takers still being, the most visible people. I can kind of see that happening. I mean, I've worked in organizations that definitely feel along those lines. Do you think there's a way to change that? How do you go about changing a culture where it might be negatively competitive? Well, I think the first thing that you do is you actually do have to think about your reward

system. So, you know, it's tempting to say, look, this is, you know, this is all about culture, but culture is influenced by structure. And I don't want to incentivize any, you know, any taker to become a better faker and say, look, like now, you know, now we're going to measure all your helping behaviors in the hopes that now you will get better at fooling people into thinking that, you know, that you're really passionate about making other people successful. What I want to see organizations do is take away the disincentives to being a giver and say,

look, you know, of course we value this behavior and it's not going to be punished. It's not going to hurt your career. It's not going to, as I saw at one elite consulting. firm, result in a situation where people tell you you have to be more selfish if you want to make partner here. You know, and I think there are lots of interesting examples. The most fascinating one I've seen is at Corning, where they made the Gorilla Glass for the iPhone and the iPad. And they have this whole Corning Fellows program where they say, look, if you're a scientist or an engineer and you're a great innovator, we want to motivate you to stay by giving

you a job for life and a lab for life. And then, you know, the question is how do you become a Corning Fellow, and one of the first criteria is, are you the first author and a patent that's worth at least $100 million U.S. dollars? And a lot of companies would stop there, right? If you can drive 100 million U.S. in revenue, then we're going to lock you up for life, throw away that key, right? But Corning says we're worried that competent takers will pollute the culture, and we also recognize that their contributions will dwindle over time, especially when they have lifetime job security. So we're going to say there are other criteria, too, which include, are you a supporting author on other people's patents?

And I think this is genius because it often takes about a decade to get a patent in the world of glass. And there aren't a lot of takers who are willing to have the patience to say, you know what, Shane, I'm going to pretend to help you for the next nine years in the hopes that you will reward my generosity by making me the 43rd author on your patent. It's the people who day in and day out are helping each other and solving problems for each other and sharing their knowledge who support each other's innovation. And the key for Corning is they say, look, you've got to do both. You have to show that you can drive your own success, but you have to also show that you can elevate the success of other people. And, you know, the question that I love to work with leaders on is what is your equivalent of later patent authorship? That's, you know, that's a real indicator of who the day in, day out givers are. When I read the book, one of the most surprising things that came across to me originally was kind of that if you think of a Gaussian almost distribution of outcomes, the givers tend to move towards.

the tails for more extremes kind of success or failure. Am I remembering that, right? Yeah, it was a big surprise for me, actually. I had all this evidence that the givers in most of the organizations I happen to be studying were more successful than takers or matchers. And I think it was because at the time, I had been studying jobs where teamwork and service were huge. And so, you know, like, nobody wants to take her on their team.

And over time, you figure out how to make sure that takers don't succeed. And, you know, I don't know about you, but, like, I don't want my doctor or lawyer or real estate agent or insurance agent to be a taker either. So, you know, it was clear that in teamwork and service jobs, there was a real giver advantage. But there was this other body of evidence showing that, you know, that givers often burned out and they were more likely to get exploited because they, you know, they were too trusting. And, you know, they ended up helping other people too much or they sacrificed. their own goals to, you know, to be there for others. And, you know, I finally, as I took a

closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers and even medical professionals, the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum. They made up a disproportionate number of the worst performers and of the best performers, you know, which just pure probabilistically, you would expect matchers to be overrepresented on both of those extremes because more people are matchers than givers or takers. And yet, you know, the, you did find pretty consistently that givers ended up either failing big or succeeding big. And at first, I thought that was really just a question of ability, you know, like givers who are extremely smart or who are, you know, extra skilled or talented in an area, you know,

would obviously, quote unquote, like they would get away with it. And, you know, there is a piece of the story that's explained by ability. But even after controlling for cognitive ability tests, for various kinds of skill metrics, the polarization of giver performance held up. And it turned out to be much more a question of strategy. So, you know, the choices you make every day about who you help, when you help, how you help, really matter in shaping whether, you know,

that actually is detrimental or beneficial to your own career. And how much of those are conscious, would you say, versus kind of like just the circumstances that were put in? Well, I think for most people initially, it's not conscious, right? They have a default style, and to borrow some Bob Chaldini language, they're just kind of in click where they find themselves in a situation. It's like, default habit comes out. You can think about this in terms of heuristics and biases, right? So givers have a, you know,

like trust first, ask questions later heuristic, often when they start out. You know, it's hard to be generous consistently unless you believe that that's a safe way to operate in the world. Right. You know, takers have a heuristic that's sort of the opposite. which says, like, you know, other people are always out to get you. Or, you know, I guess Oliver Williamson, if you're a transaction cost economics person, which I am definitely not, he would say, like, you know, there's, like, you have to watch out for opportunism tinged with guile and that anybody at any moment might be out to, you know, to screw you over.

And, you know, I think for matchers, it starts out often as a more conscious strategy. You know, like, ah, okay, like, I want to make sure that I, you know, I'm kind of fair to other people and, you know, I don't get more than I deserve, but I also don't get less than I deserve. And then I think over time, people get feedback. And some givers get reinforced, right? They find that they're able to help others in ways that don't end up being self-sacrificing. Or, you know, they find that they're giving behaviors are just really valued and valuable to others. And then, you know, other people just end up burning out or they get taken advantage of one too many times. And that means you either adjust your style or you adjust

your strategy. And I've never really thought about this out loud before. I've also never thought about it in my head before. So you're only getting the out loud thoughts. But basically, I think what happens to a lot of people is they change their style when they should be changing their strategy. So I'm a giver. I get exploited over and over again. And then I'm like, aha, like being a giver is dangerous as opposed to, well, there's nothing wrong with being a giver. And I should just rethink the way that I do it. I was just thinking, like, it sounds like everybody, the seeds of resentment are planted in everybody but takers. And so that eventually, like, if you work with enough takers and, you know, there's probably some sort of threshold, but you slowly over time, it just

become more and more resentful. And like you said, instead of changing your strategy, you'd maybe change your default and then you become even more resentful because then you become that person he's constantly looking over their shoulder going like everybody's going to screw me over even though you're predisposed to help people. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And, you know, as I think about this idea of resentment, there was a partner at a professional services firm who read Give and Take and came to me and said, you know, it's really interesting how my views of takers have changed over my career. He said, so, you know, like I, you know, I think of myself as a giver, which is a good qualifier because if he had just said, I'm a giver, I would

been like, nope, dude, you're a taker. A little too quick to claim the generosity label as opposed to trying to earn it. But when he said, I think of myself as a giver. It was clear, okay, you know, he's saying, like, I value helping others. I enjoy it. I want to be the kind of person who does that with no strings attached. And he said, early in my career, you know, I really resented takers because, you know, I felt like they were like they were trying to cheat the system. And, you know, like a sustainable system is one where, you know, it's all all givers because, you know, if everybody helps everybody, then, you know, you don't have to worry about trusting anybody. So your relationships and, you know, even your work, they just become way

more efficient. And you also then, that means if everybody's a giver, you can go to anybody. You, you know, you might want to, even if, you know, you don't have a close relationship with them. And that means you have a better shot at, you know, reaching the most connected person or the best expert. And, you know, if the whole system works that way, then, you know, we can all go to the people who are best poised to help us. That's the way that the world should work. And these takers are screwing us, and they're forcing us to have more and more matchers in the system

who will kind of wield the sort of justice and punish takers. And that shouldn't have to be that way. And he said, now this is sort of reflecting on about a 30-year transition. He said, now when I meet a taker, I just feel sorry for them. Like what kind of life do you have to have lived

to believe that everybody is out to get you and that every single interaction you have if you don't come out ahead then you know somehow you're going to fall way behind and he said like it you know it's it's just got to be like really unpleasant to live in this person's head and it tracks with something that Bob Sutton is fond of pointing out which is like look if you're you know if you're a taker you know professionally and you manage to achieve success you're still a loser in life yeah true enough and you're probably not very happy right you these are the people that I think want doovers at the end of their life and they realize that they don't have a lot of meaningful

friendships or relationships, the people who leave the organization and they seem to have a lot of friends, but then they all disappear the next day. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that, although I am curious about, you know, the time horizon that it takes for that, you know, that regret to kick in because Jennifer Ocker has some data suggesting that, you know, sort of day-to-day takers experience more pleasure than givers do. Oh, that's interesting. Because, you know, they They get to make, like, every choice is exactly what they want, whereas, you know, givers end up taking on more of the burden of responsibility and duty and saying, you know, look, like, maybe it wasn't that fun to do this thing for another person, but, you know,

it's really important to me to live those values or I care about this person or, you know, yeah, it'll cost me a little bit of time, but, you know, it'll benefit them a lot more. And so, like, I actually love, I love this cost benefit calculus that I found that a lot of givers use viscerally, which is like, it's not like, do the benefits to me outweigh the cost to me? It's do the benefits to others outweigh the cost to me? Right. And, you know, I think that that in the short term, that can be unpleasant. And if you spend every hour of your day doing that for a few weeks, it's not surprising that takers will seem happier. But yeah, I mean, in terms of in the long run, building meaningful, lasting relationships, feeling like, you know, you contributed

to something bigger than yourself, I feel like takers are at a major disadvantage there. As you were saying that, one thing that I was thinking was kind of, if you're going through that and you're doing something that is maybe a high personal cost, but beneficial to everybody else, and you're kind of like sucking it up and doing it because it's the right thing to do, you would kind of internally search and find meaning in that and then you would connect to maybe the broader picture or the meaning of the organization or what you're trying to accomplish and you would attach yourself to something outside of yourself. But, I mean, I'm just thinking out loud.

I had a question I wanted to dive into, which is, is there empirical evidence that a team of all givers will outperform like a team of a mixed team? Or like, how do you think about that? So I think you will appreciate this as a fellow Charles Darwin fan. So Darwin wrote about this. He didn't have any data for it. But, you know, I was going back and sort of rereading, like, what, you know, there's this sort of, like, when we use the word Darwinian, it almost suggests that everybody's a taker, right, where there's this survival of the fittest mentality. And, you know, that means, like, if I don't, if I don't defeat you in some way, then you, you know, you might end up defeating me. And yet, Darwin himself wrote that, I think the direct quote was that if you had a tribe where they were, you know,

always ready to aid one another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, they would be victorious over most other tribes and this would be natural selection. And that, you know, that was Darwin basically hinting at the idea of group selection, which has been incredibly controversial in evolutionary psychology and biology over the last half century or so. I think David Sloan Wilson has made a very compelling case that group selection, at least under certain conditions, is real. And, you know, it's not hard to figure out why this might be, because if you have a group of all takers, it's basically every man or woman for themselves. And you end up with these constantly suboptimal decisions and allocations of effort where instead of figuring out what's going to be

best for the tribe, everybody is basically maximizing their own outcomes, which leads to all kinds of externalities and inefficiencies. Whereas if everybody's a giver, you sit down and you can say, all right, like, what does the group need to be successful? And then, you know, you sort of match people's roles to their unique expertise or skill set or, you know, or contribution. And that, you know, that's basically a foreshadowing of what we now have about now 35 years of evidence for, which the main way this gets studied in my field of management and organizational psychology is organizational citizenship behavior, which are, you know, all the behaviors that are are not part of accomplishing the core task, but are still relevant to the functioning of the team

or the organization. So it's, you know, speaking up with ideas and suggestions, going the extra mile with your effort. It's sportsmanship. It's showing loyalty to other people. It's helping out day to day. And if you look at the aggregate of those behaviors, they are critical to team and organizational effectiveness. And, you know, a lot of organizations recognize this. We know, for example, that if you look at the meta-analyses that Podzikoff and colleagues have published, that the amount of time you spend helping others is as critical to your job performance as how well you do your actual tasks. They carry about equal weight in the average performance evaluation, and this is data from over 51,000 employees accumulated. They also carry about equal weight in

promotion decisions. And so many organizations have evolved norms or heuristics over time that say, look, even if we're not good at rewarding individual giving behaviors and valuing those, in the aggregate, we don't want to promote people who are takers as successful because we know that the organization depends on giving behaviors. And where I think this gets a little more nuanced is breaking down what kind of giving behavior does the organization really need. And this is also where a lot of givers sort of shoot themselves in the foot because they end up in reactive mode saying, all right, I'm going to help with whatever requests I get. As opposed to starting with you know, proactively, like, what is the organization trying to accomplish? Exactly. What's the

mission? And then what's, you know, what's the most valuable, you know, most irreplaceable contribution I can make that advances the, you know, the team or the organization's mission? And then if you align you're giving with, with those collective goals, the behavior obviously adds a lot more value. Did you do any work to see if those were the, the ones that became the positive outliers? Not yet. I think I'd like to see somebody to do it. I think that, It seems likely that, I mean, it fits into some things we do know empirically. So we know, for example, there's some neat research by RAP and colleagues, which basically shows that if you spend a lot of time helping other people, if you have poor time management skills, that's really bad for your performance and your productivity. But if you have good time management skills, it actually seems to contribute positively to your performance and productivity.

You know, and what that suggests is that people who are more thoughtful about how they spend their time end up, you know, either they end up just getting more done, period, and they have more time to be helpful. But also, you know, they end up helping in ways that are clearly more valued by others. And I think there's, you know, you could extrapolate from that, okay, you know, there are multiple ways of being thoughtful, you know, if you care about being generous. And, you know, one of those is to say, look, you know, I've got to sort of draw the vent. diagram of what the organization needs most. And then, you know, what are my most distinctive skills? And the overlap between those two is where I should be doing most of my giving, if not all of it. I like that. That's a really good way to kind of conceptualize it. So if you were composing a team, you would be looking for all givers and not having a taker in the group. I would definitely

want to weed out takers, but I would want a mix of givers and matchers. But wouldn't matchers just turn into givers? They would. But if you have strong matchers who really believe in fairness and justice over compassion and generosity, then you have much more foolproof sort of taker detection and defense mechanisms. Because, you know, again, givers tend to be too trusting. Matchers tend to be, they fight fire with fire. So they're tough on takers and they're generous with givers. And it's just, you know, it's a good safeguard to have some people who operate like extreme matchers in your great. I like that. Switching gears, so your second book you wrote was originals, which is kind of what we can learn from great creators. So what's a high level that you got out of that

in terms of what we can learn about great original creators? So I noticed after I wrote give and take that a lot of the questions I was getting from executives and emails from readers were around, like if I have a culture of takers, how do I change it into a culture of givers? And as I worked with this question more, I realized it was sort of a special case of a broader question, which is, you know, if I want to change my culture, how do I do that? And, you know, I sort of had that, I guess, in the back of my mind. And I also started getting a lot of questions from my students about, you know, like I come into, you know, to an organization and I'm kind of at the bottom of the hierarchy.

but I have an idea or suggestion that I think is really important. How do I get heard when I don't yet have the authority to drive real change? And then on the flip side of that, I had a lot of leaders asking, well, how do I fight groupthink and get people to challenge their own assumptions and think creatively? And I'd been doing this body of research on proactivity, which was all about being the kind of person who takes initiative and champions change and says, look, like, I'm not going to be a conformist. I'm not going to follow other people just for the sake of it. I'm going to advocate for the ideas that I believe in. And I guess all of this was sort of brewing. And I eventually decided

that what we needed was we needed a book that was sort of a sequel to creativity. Because there, I mean, there are tons of books out there based on volumes of evidence about how to generate more creative ideas. And I felt like those books basically kind of left off at, well, like, what do you do once you have an idea. How do you know if it's any good? How do you speak up effectively? How do you build a coalition of advocates and allies? And then, you know, some related questions around like timing. How do you know when to act? And, you know, ultimately, how do you build a, you know, a culture that, you know, that allows people to bring ideas forward effectively? And so, you know, that was kind of where I started. And I walked in thinking that, you know, like anybody who's

a highly original thinker, you know, and it's comfortable being a nonconformist, must be, you know, somebody who loves taking risks and who always acts in advance, you know, sort of first mover before everybody else, and who has really good judgment about ideas. And I found that I was wrong on all three of those fronts that, you know, the most original people among us pretty consistently are extremely risk-averse. So they really like sort of real clarity and maybe even certainty about success. And they do everything they can once they have an idea to de-risk it and make it something that's not going to expose them to the possibility of failure.

But they also remind themselves that, you know, it's like, yeah, it's bad to fail, but it's even worse to fail to try. And, you know, that's how a lot of them stay motivated. And then the first mover advantage was a total myth. So it turns out that, you know, if you look at the entrepreneurship realm, example, or companies launching new products, on average the sort of the settlers as opposed to the pioneers, the second and third movers are about seven times less likely to fail than the first movers because it's really like it's a huge amount of work to create a market from

scratch. And you end up making all these specific investments in your product or service or technology that are hard to change. It's much easier to watch somebody else create a market and then improve upon their solution. And so, you know, it turned out, like, you want to be quick to start, but sometimes there's real value in being slow to finish. And then, you know, on the judgment point, I was really stunned that the most original thinkers had more bad ideas than their peers. And that was because they just had more ideas.

And, you know, that talk about Darwinian. You know, like, this is the easiest way to understand how to get better at ideas. selection is to basically say, look, the more ideas you generate, the better you're shot at stumbling on some truly great ones. And you have to tolerate a lot of sort of dead ends and false starts in order to have a shot at doing something truly worthwhile. I remember reading that in your book. I think the example that comes to mind was William Shakespeare, who wrote some of his most profound work and also some of his, you know, what's widely considered to be his worst work during the same period of time when you just had this massive amount of output.

It was so funny looking at the, I mean, we don't know for sure exactly when Shakespeare wrote each of his plays, but, you know, there are plenty of experts who have kind of traced like the approximate windows when, you know, different plays were written. And I was done looking back to see that like in the very same period that he was writing Macbeth or King Lear, he was also churning out Timoan of Athens, which is, I mean, if you ask critics, it's so much worse that they have a hard time even admitting that Shakespeare wrote it. And it's like, you know, you kind of imagine this curve of expertise where the better you get, like the fewer of, you know, of those average or mediocre works you turn out. And that's not what you see. You do see, of course,

there's a learning curve. But once people achieve expertise, they're still, like, they're still going on lots of random walks. And, you know, They may have cleared some objective bar of quality where like Shakespeare's worst play would still be better than my best one. But there's still a tremendous amount of variance in how much their work resonates with their audience. And that turns out to be true across fields. It's really easy to see in highly artistic fields, of course. But you also, you can pick it up with inventors and entrepreneurs and scientists. And I think it's just, it's part of, it goes back to the curse of knowledge that when you generate an idea, by definition, you are too close

to it to understand how other people are going to perceive it and experience it. And you can improve your taste over time. You can develop all kinds of mechanisms for gaining distance from your work. And those can help you judge it a little bit more accurately, but it's never going to be nearly as accurate as the wisdom of a crowd that didn't generate the idea. Do you think that always holds true? Like, I kind of want to geek out about this a little bit. Do you think that there's, are there circumstances where the quality, quantity relationship kind of divides from that, where it's better to do more quality and maybe less quantity? Yes.

What would those be? I say that largely because I don't believe there are any conditions for anything in human behavior or social science where the opposite isn't true. There are always times where you could take the most robust relationship that you know of in behavioral science. And if you can't find conditions that reverse it, then you're not a behavioral scientist. So, you know, like the default answer is yes. When would that be?

I think so I think maybe it depends on whether we're talking about sort of the number of ideas that you generate versus the number of ideas that you develop. I think that it's always better to generate lots of ideas. Because at the outset of deciding what you're going to work on, the more the broader the raw possibility, set, the more likely it is that you know, that you're going to have carefully considered what you should invest your time in and, you know, sort of made, I guess, some good bets about what's going to be both new and valuable. I think when it comes to developing your ideas further than, it's probably the case that, you know, there's some kind of curvilinear relationship between quantity and quality where, you know, if you're trying to work on 19 ideas at once,

there's, you know, there's going to be, you're going to end up with divided attention. You'll have residue from, you know, from one idea, sort of clouding your ability to think on another idea. If you're lucky, somehow those ideas turn out to be interconnected and, you know, there's some positive spillover from one to another. But I think for the most part, what you need is, you know, is the clarity of focus from working on a relatively small number of things, especially if you're working on something that's hard. And so I think that's probably another contingency is, you know, the difficulty of the problem that you're trying to solve, you know, which in the business world might be sort of the, like, how crowded is this

market, you know, how many real experts have worked on this problem already? And, you know, I think the higher the difficulty or the complexity level, the harder it is to do lots of things at once. The one caveat I want to put on that, though, is we also know that, you know, very frequently sort of subconscious thought is more creative than conscious thought. You've probably tracked the Dykester House work on this at some point. And I think that one of the reasons that working on at least a few ideas as opposed to just one can be useful is that it sort of keeps the wheels turning in the back of your mind on the previous idea that you were working on. And sometimes it sort of works itself out for you, which is really convenient. I'm thinking, like, as you're saying that, there's probably some sort of processing going on where we have this nature that we're like predisposed to see success.

Like, I mean, your book, you sat down, you wrote it and, you know, we see the output of that. We see that it's like a New York Times bestseller. What we don't see is like all the failures that go into it, all the other ideas that you had, all of the, like, the visibility of that is either low or so far from what we see that it doesn't consciously kind of produce it. So we think that like people only have these incredibly successful ideas. And, you know, because we don't see the failures, I think that it gets lost, that there's a process to creating anything that's probably meaningful in terms of art or literature or inventions that includes, you know, a huge cemetery of kind of projects that didn't make it. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that one of the most dangerous things you can do is you can compare yourself to anybody who you don't know. because, like, you know, you're only going to have access if, you know, if they've been careful about having pride and quality of work, they're only going to put out their best

work. And you're going to end up just having completely unrealistic expectations of what's possible and how, like, I guess in particular, what's possible as far as consistent greatness is concerned. Do you think that's playing out right now in broader society to, like, side track a little bit here because we see Twitter and we see Instagram and we only see the very best of people's lives. Nobody's taking pictures of them crying because somebody broke up with them. I mean, we only see these kind of overwhelmingly happy, positive and we're not being exposed to the spectrum of life. So I think that's starting to change in the sense that Silicon Valley is well known for celebrating failure, although people are usually only

comfortable celebrating failure after they've achieved success, which is sort of a paradox, because then you don't get to see any ordinary people failing or people who seem to be ordinary failing. There's some really interesting new data on Facebook, actually, showing that we like people more on Facebook who are a little bit more self-expressive, who don't sort of live these airbrushed lives, but might even share negative information. In particular, your friends like you more if every once in a while you, you know, you share kind of like a, like, yeah, I had a really bad day or here's what's going on in my life that's truly depressing. Again, I think it's carvelineer. We don't like people who complain every hour of every day. But, you know, I think

this is, this is a problem in the narratives that we tell about success more broadly that, you know, like you're expected to write a bio and a resume where you scrub out all of your failures. Right. And that's a real disservice to anybody. Not only that, but you glorify your achievements, right? Yeah, which, you know, which just ends up sort of creating a nice little fun house mirror for other people to look at you in, which is totally distorted. I think that, you know, at the same time, I understand that, you know, people, especially if they haven't achieved, you know, what they think are their major goals, I understand why do people

don't just want to come out there and say like, yeah, here are all the, you know, the bad ideas that I worked on and, you know, all the jobs that I applied to that I got it rejected for. And that requires some real courage to put it out there. But I think there ought to be some middle ground where we can say, like, hey, here are the kinds of things that I'm toying with right now. And I don't know which ones are going to work out. Right. One fascinating part of the book was you mentioned that some people are more able to avoid emotional painkillers, which is like justifying the status quo the way it is. Why are some people perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo and maybe they have more drive?

I mean, is this learned? Is it culture? Is it innate? I think like everything else in psychology, it turns out to be a mix of the above. You know, when people who are perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo, it usually stems from having extremely high expectations. You know, like Tim Urban is fond of saying on wait, but why, that happiness is reality minus expectations. expectations. And the higher your expectations are, the harder it is for reality to live up to them. And so you're going to, like, if your expectations are just extremely high, you're going to

walk around pissed off all the time. And, you know, then the question is, how do you channel that? Do you channel that into, you know, constant complaining or do you channel that into trying to fix the things that you believe are broken? And I think that, you know, the, you often hear engineer stereotyped as sort of perpetually dissatisfied in a good way. I remember Larry Page telling me once that he felt like the definition of an engineer is somebody who immediately has to optimize everything that he or she sees. And, you know, that can be a really good quality to have, except sometimes you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And, you know, you introduce changes that are perceived as optimizing, but they're really improving the focal problem while

making others worse. And, you know, of course, systems thinking is supposed to be the general solution to that. And I think that's where, you know, you start to see, okay, if you're perpetually dissatisfied and you're looking at the world through a microscope, then it's really hard to end up solving problems in a way that's useful. Whereas, you know, if you're good at, I guess it's hard to do that if you just have a telescope too, because you don't see them with enough detail. What you need is the ability to zoom in and zoom out to look at things through a microscope

and a telescope simultaneously or at least toggle between the two. And I think if you do that, having this disposition to be unhappy, not unhappy in the I hate my life sense, but unhappy in the way that the world is organized could be improved and I'm going to do something about it since, then you're probably going to end up with increasing levels of satisfaction as you fix the things that are broken. So as a father, what do you do to nurture creativity in your kids? So I think that most of the time, nurturing creativity is mostly about getting out of the way. I think, you know, it's really hard to raise a creative child.

It's really easy to thwart a child's creativity. So, you know, the data show that having too many rules is one way to do that. If you look at highly creative high schoolers, for example, on average, they had about half a rule in their household, whereas they're sort of, I don't know how that works, but averages are misleading in many ways. 2.5 kids, yeah. There you go. But, you know, on average, like a lot of the families didn't even have rules. And if they did, like they just had one or two that were core. Whereas, you know, kids who are rated by their teachers is more conventional in their thinking tended to

grow up in households with about six core rules. And so, you know, it's not that we don't have rules, but what the data shows is that if you are going to create rules, they shouldn't be about the rules themselves. They should be about the underlying values that they represent. So, you know, like if you're going to have a rule about bedtime, you know, like we, we like to put our kids to bed and have them, you know, like when it's bedtime, we basically say, look, it's reading time and then, you know, we'll tell you a lights out time. And so it's not this draconian, okay, you know, here is your bedtime.

time. It's this, hey, we really value being well rested. And it's important to us that you get a good night's sleep. You'll feel better. You'll get along with other people better. You know, my life is easier the next day. There you go. Yeah. I mean, it benefits us too. If all goes as planned. But, you know, so we try to be really clear when we do set rules about the values behind them. We try to not have arbitrary rules. We try to give our kids a lot of responsibility. So, you know, like one example is I'll say to our daughters, this is coming right out of the research I've read, and I do try to be one of those psychologists who doesn't screw up our kids, but sometimes the research is too useful not to apply.

So, you know, in this case, like, okay, so let's say you're having a, like, you're having a dilemma around, like, how do you manage bedtime? I will say to our nine-year-old or our six-year-old, all right, like, you know, lights will go out at, you know, at 830, and I'm going to, like, give you a choice. want to be responsible and turn them out yourself, or do you want me to come in and turn them out? And then, you know, if they choose responsibility, I'll give them a little bit extra time, but if they don't deliver on the responsibility, then they lose the privilege temporarily. And that way, you know, they get to make all these choices and feel like they're in charge of

their own destiny and they get to think for themselves a little bit about how they want to manage their time, which I think is useful. So what are your core kind of family values then that you center around or gravitate towards or try to instill in your children? You have three kids, right? Yeah, we have three, two girls and a boy. And I think when it comes to core family values, we care, obviously, a lot about generosity and kindness. One of the things that we discuss at the dinner table every week is, you know, the conversation

about, like, what did, you know, what, like, what did you do at school today is not that helpful? What's much more helpful is what's something you did for someone else this week. Right. And, you know, we try to talk about that, knowing that, again, this is really scary, but In the data, you know, parents say that the concern for others is their most important value, but kids think that achievement is their most important value. Right.

Because all you talk about is accomplishments. Right. You know, how did you do on a test? You know, let's talk about how the soccer game went. And so, you know, we try to bring these values to life through discussions. And we know that the questions we ask will, you know, will really influence what our kids think is important. So I think generosity, kindness is a big one. And we definitely want our kids to value learning.

And so one of the principles that we follow is anytime they're interested in learning about something, we'll find a book on it. And their challenge then is to learn about it and maybe to teach it to us, which is really fun. And we get to have a whole discussion about it. And beyond that, I think we have like lots of specific values. Those are two of the big ones that we care a lot about in our household. I like that.

It sounds similar to what I do with my kids, which is like every day I drink dinner. I asked them something they did that was kind for somebody else today. There you go. And, yeah, the whole point of that is to reinforce that, you know, there's no expectations when you're kind of people, but you can always be on a look at it to do something nice for other people. How old are yours? Mine are seven and eight.

Impressive. I often find that, like, if you do that daily, there may not be enough opportunity. Yeah. Well, I mean, the conversation isn't at like an adult level either. It's kind of like some days are better than others. That's fair. You know, I remember when we first started having these conversations, it'd be like, well, I didn't steal his pencil kind of thing. And that was the nice thing. And I'm like, I think we need to have a broader conversation about what nice means. I love it. So moving on to option B, which kind of just came out, which is about kind of facing adversity and building. resilience, which you co-authored with Cheryl Sandberg. I love that book. I mean, at times, I was happy and sad and, you know, the emotion that it evoked in me. And then the realization that I was doing things, trying to help other people through things that were just completely tone-deaf to their reality was incredible. What did you learn writing that book about kind of facing

adversity and building resilience. So I think one of the big takeaways for me is that I don't think we're very good at mental time travel. I think when something goes wrong in our lives, whether it's professional or personal, when we face hardship, what we do is we basically, you know, like we amplify it and we catastrophize it. And it starts to feel like this is the worst thing, you know, that's ever happened to me. And, you know, in rare cases it is.

But that's pretty stiff competition, right? For something to be the worst thing that ever happened to you, like, of all the bad things that have ever occurred in your life, this has to be worse. And, you know, the odds are that most of the time when something bad happens, it's not the worst thing. And I think that one of the skills that we all need to develop is the ability to get in touch with our past selves. And it's something that Cheryl is exceptionally good at.

It's something that I've read a lot of research on is, you know, to imagine. okay, what would my past self have done in this situation? And when you do that, a lot of times you see that there are skills that you're equipped with now that you didn't have before. And when that's not the feeling, the next thing is to say, all right, you know, what's an adversity that I went through that was similarly difficult or even worse? And how did I overcome it? And remembering that you have faced difficulties in the past that you've gotten through them, one, it sort of boosts your self-efficacy and gives you confidence that you can do it again. And two, sometimes it even gives you strategies that you forgot about that you might have

deployed earlier in your life and have just lost sight of. And I think that that kind of mental time travel is extremely valuable. Do you practice that now? Or do you do that only when you're in kind of situations of adversity? Or is it something you do more regularly now? You know, it's something that I've started doing also for, I guess for occasional accomplishments So, like, I remember, I remember publishing give and take. It was, it was a really amazing feeling to write a book. Like, I have loved books since the day that I could read. And, you know, I remember growing up, my mom would take out 30 books every week from the library. And, you know, I would, like, tear it through them. And, like, a lot of my, my happiest moments in life have been either the direct result of reading or happened while I was reading a book. And also, a lot of the thoughts that have most, I guess, shaped my worldview. have come from books. And so the idea of actually becoming an author was such a meaningful,

I guess, life transition. And then originals came out and it was like, yeah, I wrote another book. And the funny thing is, you know, if I had to choose, Dan Pink once told me that choosing a favorite book is a little bit like choosing a favorite child. So I'm not going to do that. But I will say, you know, I wrote give and take first because it's the set of ideas that I am most passionate about. It's my most four set of values. I think originals is a better written book. I think I became a better writer, you know, over the few years in between. And so, you know, it's like, it's not like I should have been, you know, less excited or proud when, you know, when book two came out than book one. Right. And yet I totally adapted to the idea of being an author. And, you know,

it hardly even registered as something, you know, to mark and celebrate. It's not like a transition from non-author to author. It's like, this is what authors do. Like, author again. Yeah. And now I'm not like a one book wonder, like whatever that means. So I think that what I've done, what I've started doing to try to prevent that from happening, which is, you know, something that the writing with Cheryl really, really imprinted on me is Cheryl said, look, moments of joy are really important. You know, they're part of what makes life worth living. They're part of what we have to look forward to. And it's, you know, it's part of being human, is being able to, you know, enjoy life and you know you don't want to deprive yourself of that and so you know when when these

milestone moments do occur what I do now is I rewind about five years and I asked myself okay if my five years ago self knew this was going to happen how excited would I be and then you know it's like my responsibility to be that excited now and then I have this annoying internal monologue about like well I'm not as excited why am I not as excited and then like it's you know it's just not fun anymore but But it actually does get me most of the time back in touch with the emotions to say, wow, like if you had told me five years ago that I would have written a second book, I would have freaked out that anybody read my first book and that there was an audience for a second one. And that also, you know, I had an idea that I thought was worth devoting a whole book to

or a question that was worth, you know, writing about for that many words and pages. And that, that to me has been something that transcends adversity that, you know, kind of rewining and saying, all right, how would I look at the situation I'm in now if I could earlier in my life usually is a way to, I guess, sustain some appreciation and gratitude and even some satisfaction. What kind of conversations do you have with your kids about building resilience and, you know, facing adversity? Oh, well, I think most of the time what we do is we end up asking our kids to think about this through the eyes of other. So one of the things that's hard for anybody, but especially hard for kids, is when you're in a

difficult situation, it's hard to gain perspective on it. And usually the emotions are overwhelming your ability to think, right? So you could say in like, you know, in common terms that it's all system one and not enough system two. And so the way that we try to prepare our kids for that is we ask them whenever we're facing difficulty or whenever, you know, they come home and tell us about a friend at school who ran into a difficult. situation. We ask, well, you know, what should I do or what should your friend do? And we actually ask our kids for advice. And the hope is that that helps them rehearse, you know, kind of thinking through different kinds of hardship that, you know, it gives them some go-to strategies to work

with. And that also, you know, there's this research on how one of the, as you know, from Reading Option B, one of the big ways to build kids' resilience is to show them that they matter. And mattering is just the belief that other people notice you, care about you and rely on you. And I think most parents are exceptionally good at the first two. Like, we know we're supposed to notice our kids. That's why we have lots of rules about no smartphones at dinner. And we also go out of our way to do tons of things that show how much we care about them. But we forget that relying on kids is also a way to build their resilience because it shows them that they're not helpless.

That they have the strength to do things for others. And so the hope is that whenever we ask them for advice on navigating a dilemma or a chat, challenge, that that makes them feel that they matter because we are willing to rely on them. I like that a lot. I want to switch gears a little bit here. As an organizational psychologist, what do you think of the educational theory of communities of practice internal to organizations? I think communities of practice are one of the most, I would say, undersided and underapplied literatures, mostly in kind of the microsociology worlds. So, you know, I remember first reading Lavin Wenger, I guess probably, I don't know, almost 15 years ago now. And I thought the

core insight was really powerful that you don't develop expertise just by, you know, by reading a book. Because a lot of the expertise you need isn't written down anywhere yet. It's too early or it's just tacit knowledge where, you know, people in a profession haven't yet even figured out articulate what they know. They just do it. And so the way that you build expertise actually is by joining a community of people who, you know, who share your interests, who may, you know, have the skills that you want to acquire. And you talk to them, you watch them in action, you hang out with them. And then there's this, you know, the hope is there's a group level elevation in capability. I think it's brilliant. And I think that most organizations are not designed,

most workplaces are not designed to build these. And I think it's one of the, frankly, it's one of the things that's so valuable about Farnham Street is you've gathered this group of people who share an interest in improving their decision making and maybe even being reasonable, rational human beings and they learn together, which I think is incredibly cool. And you think that that's like an underutilized kind of tool organizationally. What would you do to kind of foster that or bring more awareness to it? I think the first thing I would do is I would create a mechanism where people could build their own communities of practice. So, you know, a lot of organizations now have expert databases where you can search for people who are knowledgeable about the thing that you want to learn or

apply. And I think that's useful, but it's kind of backward. What you should have are mechanisms for people to say, look, I want to learn more about this. Who else wants to learn about it? Yes, we can learn together instead of. Yes. And then, you know, once you have a critical mass around a topic, either because it's just something a lot of your employees care about or, you know, It's something that has real relevance to the future of the organization. Then you can start to think about bringing experts in or putting organizational resources behind it. One of the coolest examples that I've seen of this is Jay Molden Tower Salazar.

He's an HR leader who at the time he was at Old Navy. Now he's at Riot Games. What he did was he took on a new HR role. He had, I think, about 100 people reporting to him all of a sudden. And he sat down with every one of them and he said, look, I want you to start a secret mission. And you know he's a gamer when he says secret mission, right? And he's like, all right, people are going to be either totally excited by this or totally weirded out. And either way, it's a good introduction to who I am. And he said, your secret mission is to find something

your passion about that doesn't exist at this organization yet and create a group around it or an initiative around it, except it can't just be for you. It has to be of interest to at least one other person. And he said, I'm going to meet with you about it. And I'm going to ask you, you know, 90 days, like, what's your mission and how can I support it? How cool would it be if every manager gave every person who worked with them a chance to go on one of those missions? That'd be awesome. Speaking of managers, I mean, there's a trend to like unmanaging or there seems to be any way of visible kind of giving people space and freedom to be themselves rather than conform to any predetermined structure, like maybe holocracy be an example of that. What do you make of all this?

Oh, well, I saw it on Twitter this morning. One of your fans wanted to ask about that. So I'm curious to hear your take on this too, Shane. And I'm bothered by the fact that this interview is so one-sided and I don't get to ask you all my questions. But I like it about it. It works. I know, but then that's really selfish of you. Oh, I'm a taker now. No, you're doing it on your terms. Instead of my, no, I realize it's, you know, one of us will leave this conversation feeling like we didn't get to ask enough questions. I've resigned myself to being that person today. I don't know. Yeah. So I mean, And like my answer to this would kind of be, I think it can work, but it's a very hard thing

to implement backwards, so going into an existing culture and changing it. I think it can kind of work from the ground up. But there's not a lot of base cases of it being incredibly successful. So I don't know enough about it to say, like, I would be a fan of it or not. I mean, as a entrepreneur, I think that would give me more freedom inside of an organization to kind of identify problems and solve them. But then I think it would also be a bit of a mess. And people that I talk to you in some of these organizations

tend to feel like it's a bit of a mess. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think holocry is a really interesting idea. I think that, you know, I'm torn because on the one hand, there was a book actually that Hal Levitt wrote. He spent his whole career studying organizations. And the final book of his career was called Top Down. and it was about how a hierarchy is inevitable for social organization and it's basically here to stay and the more you fight it as opposed to figuring out how to work with it, the worst off your organization's

going to be. But then on the flip side, I don't think we've tried that many alternatives. And the ones that have been tried probably haven't been studied. They certainly haven't been AB tested to try to figure out how to improve them. Oh, yeah, definitely. So what I would love to do is I would love to set up an organization where, you know, I don't know whether holocracy is the type of system or whether you want a self-management system more like the tomato paste producer Morningstar has, where they have what they call a fluid dynamic hierarchy and different people are in charge in different meetings, in different projects. But whatever the model, what we should be doing is we should be running constant experiments to try to change the way that hierarchy

is evolved and see whether a flat organization works under certain conditions or whether there's certain circumstances you need hierarchy and then how do we best toggle between the two. I think you know, as I think about the research on this so far, there was a great HBR last year by Ethan Bernstein. I think it was called Beyond the Holocracy Hype, if I remember correctly. And it was the best evidence-based article I've seen so far on it that basically said, look, here are some benefits, here are some challenges, here's what we've learned from studying Zappos. And I think that's the kind of dialogue we need more of. And I would say the jury is still out. I agree with you that it can work. And I think we know far too.

little about how to make it work. Like Malcolm Gladwell, you use a lot of incredibly compelling stories to supplement your interpretation of social sciences. To what extent are you afraid of creating false narratives and how do you guard against mistaking correlation and causation? How do you think about that? Well, I think that the first thing I would say is that you have to let the data drive the narrative rather than vice versa.

So you're in danger if you have a story you want to tell or an idea that you want to promote and then you go out confirmation bias searching for the right data. I think what we should do is we should start by asking questions and then search for data that inform the question. And if you can't find any data to contradict your point of view, you haven't looked hard enough. I think that there's a great quote from a sociologist, Gary Marks, I don't think he's related to Carl. But he said that he was talking about the difference between a fundamentalist and a scholar. And he said, the difference is that a fundamentalist gives answers and a scholar

asks questions. And it's been actually interesting to think about this. I think it's, you know, we should all be scholars. And, you know, if I were to imagine, okay, there are different ways that I could have written give and take. The pure fundamentalist would have only talked about the benefits of giving and said, look, you should help other people because it will make you more successful in your career and it will make you happier. And a scholar's responsibility is to say, well, you know, but wait a minute, general, like nothing is an unmade to get good in life. And certainly at work. And so there have to be circumstances where, you know, where we're helping others is not beneficial and even harmful. Let's understand those. In fact,

you'll be a better fundamentalist if you're a scholar because you will know how to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs. Or you, you'll be a better fundamentalist. You'll be a better fundamentalist. at least to have more clues about how to do that. And so, you know, that was my commitment going in. I remember actually I had an editor who read my book proposal for give and take and said, you know, I've got to be honest with you. I don't want to read this book. And I said, why not?

That's a bad sign. Yeah, I was like, yeah, this is maybe I'm going down the wrong path here. But I was like, why not? He said, well, because I already, like, I go to church and I'm told I have to be a giver, you know, in my community and family life and at home. And now you're telling me I got to be one at work too? This sounds awful. And, you know, I reflect on that.

And what I realized was I had the whole book organized in terms of like the first half was highlighting the benefits of being a giver. And then the second half was looking at the costs and how to reduce them. And it felt totally one-sided. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that I actually rewrote the intro chapter after that to say, look, actually the fundamental question of this book is, you know, why are some giver successful and why are some

unsuccessful and you know how can we how can we both achieve our own success and enhance the success of others and you know once once that was the the orienting question it was you know it was then pretty difficult to you know to have sort of narrative take me in the wrong direction because my goal was to to capture all the evidence and try to sort out when you know what do we really know about when a giver successful versus failed correlation and causation is a is an interesting interesting one. It, I guess, is an issue. It bothers me a lot less than it bothers a lot of people. And I'm going to give you, let me give you three reasons for that. And you can tell me if, if you agree or not. So the first one is, you know, like most of the studies I cover are either

randomized controlled trials where we can make really strong causal inferences or, you know, careful field studies where we're looking at, there's either, you know, longitudinal data so that we can look at reverse causality or, you know, we have really good controls for endogeneity and we're able to, you know, sort of partial out all kinds of omitted variables and, you know, begin to estimate the effect of a variable on another variable. And so, you know, I think the research methods take care of a lot of that. It's hard to randomly assign people to some of the things that I study. So, you know, that's where we do need really good econometric studies. But the second thing that makes me less concerned about this is I think that for the most part, when we have causal

effects in the social sciences, they tend to be feedback loops. It's not that in real life, X is just causing Y. It's more that X is boosting Y a little bit, and then Y reinforces X, and they, you know, they start to fuel each other a little bit. It's interconnected, yeah. Totally. Like Carl White would call these deviation amplifying spirals. But, you know, like the easy one, is success confidence, right? Where like you, you know, you lack confidence at something, you try it, you develop your skills a little bit more. And then as you have success, your confidence goes up and that leads you to try more things and that prepares you for bigger success. And at some point, you run the risk of becoming overconfident and it all falls apart. But until that point, like,

you know, the chicken and the egg question is sort of irrelevant. Like, do you need confidence to be successful? Well, kind of. Do you need success to be confident? Well, kind of. How does the replication, like, I wouldn't call it a crisis, but the replication fit into, you know, everything right now seems to be undergoing this, doesn't replicate, like, how much time do you think we, or how many, you know, outside of one study, how many times does it have to replicate over how many years before we can have a significant amount of confidence that it is, how does this affect kind of how you think about it? Yeah. So this is actually a great segue to the third point that I would make, which is I think that oftentimes people have a knee-jerk reaction that like, well, correlation isn't causation. And they're trained that that's how you should always look at social science data with skepticism, which you should. Only sometimes they overreact that way. Because if you have a relationship between two variables, there are only three explanations for it, only three. One is that X causes Y. Two is that Y causes X, or three is that there's some other variable Z that causes both Y and X, and the relationship is spurious. And what's interesting about that is that in the replication crisis, there's this idea that, well, you know, you have a study where you show that X caused Y, but your manipulation of X is funky. And so, you know, we can't trust it, and we're going to go and replicate it.

And then, aha, we found in our replication that, in fact, X, a better X or a more carefully measured why, we didn't get a causal effect. And, you know, I think they're asking the wrong question there. The question is not does X cause Y. The question is when does X cause Y? Under what circumstances? Yeah. You didn't, I mean, circumstances, but also people. So, you know, if you want to enter any of the debates in the replication crisis, you didn't have the same participants with the exact same personality traits and preferences and tendencies in your replication than you did with the original one. And so the odds that you're going to find the exact same effect with a different group of people who don't have an identical distribution of traits are pretty close

to zero, in my opinion. And there's a great quote from Bill McGuire, who is a social psychologist who said that an experiment in the lab doesn't test whether hypothesis is true. It tests whether the experimenter is a sufficiently ingenious stage manager to produce the conditions under which the effect is true. And that's what we're doing, right? And then the challenge for us is anytime we get an effect to vary those conditions and see, well, when is it strong, when is it weak, when is it positive, when is it negative? And I think the replication crisis has kind of missed that larger point that, you know, like there are all these, I'm now seeing meta-analyses with P-curves saying, well, the average effect is zero. Well, great, I know how to get

an average effect of zero. Let's have an effect in half the studies of negative point seven. And the effect is the other half the study is positive point seven. That doesn't mean the effect isn't real. That means the effect is complicated and we need to understand it better. And how do we do that? We have to arrange the way that we think of it, the problem to vary the conditions to find out when it replicates and when it doesn't and to what extent they impact that. I think that is the key. And I think that any responsible social or behavioral sciences should sit down whenever they test an effect and say, here are the boundary conditions for the effect where it should hold.

And here are also the moderators that can reverse the effect. And now I'm going to go investigate all of those. And that just means a richer understanding of the phenomenon, right? Like, let's take the power pose debate, for example. Do I believe that power poses can cause psychological and behavioral changes in people? Sure. Do I know when those changes occur and for whom? Not a clue yet.

Yeah, yeah. I like that. I like that way of thinking about it. I think that that's a helpful framework to kind of as we walk through this and kind of walk through anything in life about, you know, whether it's taking Google 20% time and implementing it at your organization, any idea that we're trying to take out of one ecosystem, if you will, and put it into another ecosystem. Yes.

You have to think under what conditions does that survive or thrive in that ecosystem and what are the important components of that? And then do we have that at play here? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I remember I was at a conference last year, and I was doing a little session on my research, and an elderly gentleman walked into the room, and I didn't recognize him. I leaned over to somebody and whispered, who is that? And the answer was, that's Charlie Munger.

Nice. And I tried to punt the speaker role so that we could all listen to him, but he just, you know, he wanted to ask some questions and have a conversation. And, you know, at one point, somebody brought up his line of, you know, him wanting to know where he was going to die so he could never go there. And I thought that was like, it's the clearest way of explaining like how much in life is conditional. Yeah. And it's not like, okay, you know, he's assuming he's going, you know, he's going to experience an event, right? The question is like, what are the sequences of choices that I make that will lead me to experience that event?

And, you know, especially when we study human behavior, like, we're, we can affect like maybe the first move in those, those sequences of choices. but there's this thing called free will that gets in the way and affects the rest of them. And, yeah, I think it's quite remarkable that we can ever design studies where we get robust and consistent effects in different samples or different contexts because people are incredibly complicated. I'm super conscious of time here. I got one question left for you. A personal question more so, I guess, is like, you're prolific, right?

You do so much. Is there a ceiling, do you think, to what we can accomplish and, live a balanced or harmonious life? Oh, hello, pot. I am kettle. Tell me about this. I mean, I'm amazed by how much you publish every week. And, you know, like when I open your newsletter, I'm like, okay, this is going to be the week where Shane's newsletter is only going to be other people's writing. Because with all the reading that he does, there's no way that he's also writing. So I'm going to fire this question back at you. I will give you my answer, which is, you know, I think that having kids has made me much, I work a lot less than I used to.

You know, like I used to work basically with all of my free time. And now I get almost all my work done when our kids are at school or camp or asleep. And, you know, I think that it's made me more efficient with some of the things that I do. But it's also caused me to choose to do less and do less well is the hope. And I think that, yeah, of course there's an upper bound. right? Like you can only work so many hours in the day. You can only, like, even if you have a million thoughts, you can only say them or type them so fast at this point. And then you're going to want to work on, you know, making them really clear and sort of compelling to other people. And so, yeah, like, of course there's a ceiling. I think everybody has a different ceiling based on, you know, their motivation and their capability for the particular work that they're doing. But it bothers me a lot when people ask, well, how can I be more productive? Because I think the question they should really be asking is, you know, how can I accomplish more meaningful work?

Right. And for some people, that may be more output or, you know, there may be like these ideas they have or these products they want to build that just aren't out there yet. But I think for most people, productivity is not necessarily the answer. And it's about, it's more about asking how do I use my time and my skills effectively. One thing that I've kind of changed my mind on, I would say in the last three or four, years is thinking in terms of balance because balance implies like that you have one third one third one third or whatever that is and I think more in terms of harmony now between work and life and

intermixing them I mean I'm fortunate that I can intermix them to the extent possible and I can travel with my kids and then meet people and do all of these things kind of together but the flip side of that is, you know, making time for what's important and kind of using a regret avoidant framework. I love spending time with my kids. I want to have dinner with them every night. I want to do things that, you know, I'm willing to sacrifice other things to do that. And I think before I was more apt to just try and do everything. And the other thing I'm kind of changing my mind about personally is, you know, before I was trying to do everything myself and now I'm trying to build a team to accomplish all the stuff I wanted to do.

Well, I love that. And, you know, I think the idea of harmony, Shane, really resonates. I mean, there's a whole literature on work family. My colleague Nancy Rothbard's done some of the most interesting work in this area, saying, look, you know, we always think about work family conflict and, you know, how work can deplete and, you know, detract from our lives. But there's also such a thing is enrichment where work can improve our lives and vice versa, too.

And I think harmony, you know, allows for those things to happen. I think also, I think that too many people are obsessed with sort of, when they think about balance, they think each day has to be balanced. Yeah, yeah. And if you are going to strive for balance, it's much easier to achieve at the week level or the month level. Yes. Like, I have plenty of days that are out of balance. Yeah.

You know, like, I try not to work on the weekends. And so, like, those are really not balanced at all. I have, like, days when I travel where, you know, I don't get a lot of time with my family. but the goal is over the course of a week and then as I aggregate that up to the month level that I'm spending a certain number of hours on each of the sort of each of the projects that I care about and you know if that's not met

I'll try to make more work time but you know ultimately like my goal is to feel like I get a lot of quality of time with my family and that comes first and so I guess you know I think that to me it's better to have like in a week, you know, two days that are work heavy and then like some days that are all family than it is to have like five days that are a mix of the two. I'm totally on board with that.

Are you? Yeah, totally. I think that that makes a lot of sense. That was too easy. Yeah. We should argue. Listen, thank you so much for your time. This has been fascinating and incredibly insightful.

Well, it was fun to chat with you. Next time we talk, I want to start just barraging you with questions. Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at FarnhamstreetBlog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food,

go to Farnhamstreetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening. This episode is brought to you by InkTel. Every business needs great customer service in order to stand out and gain a competitive

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