#22 Adam Grant: Givers, Takers, and the Resilient Mind

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Farnham 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 bestselling books, Give and Take, Originals, and co-authored Option B with Sheryl Sandberg. We talk about the differences between givers and takers,

• 0:51Shane Parrish?

  what he learned about coming up with creative ideas, and how he fosters resilience in his kids. We also 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.

• 1:16Shane Parrish?

  Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:47Shane Parrish?

  How do you find time for all of that?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I think the, I mean, the cycling helps, right? So I don't get a lot done that's not teaching-related 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.

• 2:14Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  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, like, the little notes that are handwritten into a Word document. Super high tech.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  And then about once a month, I like to just review the notes and, you know, usually I do it when I'm, I've given myself like permission or freedom to work on something new and creative because I feel like I've actually finished something that was, you know, 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, 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, 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?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  And the more important it feels of, you know, all the ideas that I find personally interesting, the more likely I am to pursue it.

• 3:30Shane Parrish?

  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, of how we actually get to consume all of your, your amazing thoughts?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So often what happens is I feel like, you know, a chunk of my job is basically to read all the interesting new research that's coming out in the realm of work and psychology and figure out how it can be applied to, you know, to make our work lives less miserable and help organizations become less unproductive. And then, you know, oftentimes I'll be either in the classroom with students or I'll be out, you know, doing research and consulting in an organization or, you know, 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 uncaught in research. And so then, you know, I'll start doing a bunch of digging to figure out like, well, wait, is it, is it just that I've missed the data representing this?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  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 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 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.

• 5:05Shane Parrish?

  How long did it take you to write your first book?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:18Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  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 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,

• 6:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:09Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And so the ideas, you know, were developing. I was doing the studies and I guess it was a long time coming.

• 6:15Shane Parrish?

  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 you started all over again?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  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 of 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, I was just incredibly excited about the opportunity. I love the paradox of choice.

• 6:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  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, you know, important ideas and bring them out into the world, you know, 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 they basically refused to let me do it. They were like, look, like, we will drop out of your lab. We will disown you as a professor. And 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 not work on, you know,

• 7:29Speaker 01

  sort of a new topic with with somebody, you know, who you love collaborating with. You've like, you have a worldview and it's not out there where anybody can access it. 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 I started working on the proposal and accidentally wrote the book over a summer.

• 7:55Shane Parrish?

  Accidentally wrote a book. I sat down with, you know, a glass of wine and came out on the other side with a fully formed manuscript.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  It definitely didn't happen that way. Like, I woke up in the morning and I basically wrote until it was dinnertime. 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 I 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's 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, yeah, 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.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And so that was like the false start before the real book.

• 8:48Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Thank you. I wouldn't wish it on on anyone. I definitely don't plan to do it that way again, but. There was, 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 aha is, or, you know, why I care about it. And that's especially true for, for the areas that I know really well. Um, you know, like Steven Pinker would call it the curse of knowledge, where like for years, I didn't even teach my own research in the classroom. Uh, 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, 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 was sort of hard to translate out of

• 9:39Speaker 01

  academic language. And, you know, I, I've found that often when I read somebody else's work, I'm like, oh yeah, you know, there's, there's a kernel of this idea that can be, you know, sort of summarized in a, in a sentence or a paragraph. And then, you know, then we can start to bring in the interesting nuances. Uh, but with my own work especially, I found that I, 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.

• 10:07Speaker 02

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• 10:59Shane Parrish?

  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, can you walk me through the differences just so everybody starts on the same playing field here?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think about these as, 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, and help other people. And, you know, sometimes that means knowledge sharing, or mentoring, or, you know, just showing up early or staying late to support other 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

• 11:55Speaker 01

  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 gonna, I'm gonna trade favors evenly. If you do something for me, I'll do something for you. It's almost like they're, they're accountants in relationships and they're keeping track of credits and debits to make sure that everything is fair and square and even.

• 12:31Shane Parrish?

  So is the default of a matcher something like go positive, go first? Or is it wait and see? Or like, how does that?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So that can go either way. And I guess, you know, I, 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 when you look at core values, people tend to gravitate more a little bit in the taker-giver direction. And so I'm guessing that if somebody like deep down is more of a taker and believes that other people are selfish and I've got to put myself first, then they would probably wait to see what the other person contributes. Whereas 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, I'll start out being a giver and then shame if you screw me, then I'm going to realize

• 13:23Speaker 01

  that I need to be a matcher all the time, which is a smart habit in general, right? Like if you're a giver, don't be a giver with takers. But I think that oftentimes what happens is matchers overgeneralize that. And they're like, ah, I always have to have these like fair trades, which ends up feeling really transactional and short sighted.

• 13:44Shane Parrish?

  Right. And optimizing for the short term usually almost never optimizes for the long term, right?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Bingo.

• 13:51Shane Parrish?

  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, say, givers on one end and takers on the other, and say, matchers 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?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  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 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, where it's like, "Yeah, I'm going to try to beat you, but I'm really hoping that you push me to raise my game and afterward we'll go out for drinks and maybe the loser buys the winner dinner." And it's so interesting that trying to get to that same place, it doesn't work if you start out with more taking than giving norms.

• 15:08Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  And I think that a lot of what we see 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, we want people to be collaborative. We want them to help each other and problem solve 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 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

• 15:53Speaker 01

  and say, "I don't see any givers who are extremely successful here."

• 15:57Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  And that may not mean that I have to be a taker, but it sure means I have to be careful not to be generous.

• 16:04Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  And I guess to me, it's one of the great tragedies of organizations that we end up, even in organizations that have match or giver 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.

• 16:25Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, 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?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think the first thing that you do is you actually do have to think about your reward system. So it's tempting to say, look, this is all about culture, but culture is influenced by structure. And I don't want to incentivize any taker to become a better faker. Hence, they look like 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'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, 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

• 17:23Speaker 01

  tell you, you have to be more selfish if you want to make partner here. 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 had 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 the question is, how do you become a Corning Fellow? And one of the first criteria is, are you the first author on a patent that's worth at least 100 million US dollars? And a lot of companies would stop there, right? If you can drive 100 million US in revenue, then we're going to lock you up for life, throw

• 18:04Speaker 01

  away that key, right? But Corning says, we're worried the 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. But 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.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  And the key for Corning is they say, look, you gotta 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 the question that I love to work with leaders on is what is your equivalent of later patent authorship?

• 19:04Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  That's a real indicator of who the day in, day out givers are.

• 19:09Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  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 a taker 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 the givers often burned out

• 20:10Speaker 01

  and they were more likely to get exploited because they were too trusting and they ended up helping other people too much, or they sacrificed their own goals to be there for others. And, you know, finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that 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, 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, you did find pretty consistently that givers ended up either failing big or succeeding big.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And at first, I thought that was, you know, really just a question of ability. You know, like, givers who are extremely smart, or who are extra skilled or talented in an area would, 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 scale metrics, the you know, sort of 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 that actually is detrimental or beneficial to your own career.

• 21:33Shane Parrish?

  And how much of those are conscious, would you say, versus kind of like just the circumstances that were put in?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think for most people initially, it's not conscious, right? They have a default style and you know, to borrow some, some Bob Chaldini language, they're just kind of in click-wur mode. Where like they find themselves in a situation, it's like default habit comes up.

• 21:54Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  You could 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, you, it's hard to be generous consistently unless you believe that that's a safe way to operate in the world.

• 22:09Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  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 the, like, you have to watch out for, 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, for matchers, it's, 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.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And then I think over time, people get feedback and some givers get reinforced, right? They, they find that they're able to help others in ways that, that don't end up being self-sacrificing. Or, you know, they find that their, you know, that their, their 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 yeah, 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 they change their style when they should be changing their strategy. So, you know, I'm a giver. I, you know, I get exploited over and over again. Then I'm like, aha, like being a giver is dangerous as opposed to, well, there's

• 23:38Speaker 01

  nothing wrong with being a giver and I should just rethink the way that I do it.

• 23:42Shane Parrish?

  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, and, you know, there's probably some sort of threshold, but you you slowly over time, it just become more and more resentful. And like you said, you, instead of changing your strategy, you maybe change your default and then you become even more resentful because then you become that person who's constantly looking over their shoulder going like, everybody's going to screw me over, even though you're predisposed to help people.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  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 who read Give and Take and came to me and said, you know, it's really interesting how my 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 have 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, you know, when he, 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, you know, I want to be the kind of person who does that with no strings attached.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  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 givers. Because, you know, if everybody helps everybody, then, you know, you 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 if the whole system works that way, then, you know, we can all go to the the people who are best poised to help us. That's, that's the way that the world should work.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And you know, these takers are screwing us and they're forcing us to have more and more matchers in the system who, you know, will kind of wield the sword of justice and punish takers. And you know, that shouldn't have to be that way. And he said, you know, now, this is, you know, 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's 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 gotta be like, really unpleasant to live in this person's head. And it, it tracks with something that, that Bob Sutton is fond of pointing out, which

• 26:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:31Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. True enough. And you're probably not very happy, right? You, you, this is the people that I think went do-overs at the end of their life and they realize that they don't have a lot of meaningful friendships or relationships. The, the people who leave the organization and they seem to have a lot of friends, but then they all disappear the next day.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think there's a lot of truth to that, although I, I am curious about, you know, the time horizon that it takes for that, you know, that regret to kick in. Because Jennifer Acker has some data suggesting that, you know, sort of day to day, takers experience more pleasure than givers do.

• 27:06Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  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, 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, I actually love, I love this cost benefit calculus that I, 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?

• 27:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And you know, I think that that in the 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 will seem happier. But yeah, I mean, in terms of in the long run, building meaningful, lasting relationships, feeling like you contributed to something bigger than yourself, I feel like takers are at a major disadvantage there.

• 28:05Shane Parrish?

  I was gonna, 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, you know, 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 inside 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?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So I think you will, 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, I was going back and sort of rereading like what, you know, there's, 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 always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common

• 29:35Speaker 01

  good, they would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection. And 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 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's basically maximizing their own outcomes,

• 30:17Speaker 01

  which leads to all kinds of externalities and inefficiencies. Whereas if everybody's a giver, you sit down and you can say, all right, what does the group need to be successful? And then you sort of match people's roles to their unique expertise or skill set or contribution. And 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 all the behaviors that are not part of accomplishing the core task, but are still relevant to the functioning of the team or the organization. So it's speaking up with ideas and suggestions,

• 31:01Speaker 01

  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 a lot of organizations recognize this. We know, for example, that if you look at the meta-analyses that Podzakoff 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.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  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 you know 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

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I can make that advances the, you know, the team or the organization's mission? And then if you align your giving with those collective goals, the behavior obviously adds a lot more value.

• 32:35Shane Parrish?

  Did you do any work to see if those were the ones that became the positive outliers?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  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, there's some neat research by Rapp and colleagues, which, 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 or 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.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  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 Venn 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.

• 33:54Shane Parrish?

  I like that. That's a really good way to conceptualize it. So if you were composing a team, you would be looking for all givers and not having a taker in the group.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  I would definitely want to weed out takers, but I would want a mix of givers and matchers.

• 34:09Shane Parrish?

  But wouldn't matchers just turn into givers?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  They would, but if you have strong matchers who really believe in fairness and justice over compassion and generosity, then you have much, much more foolproof taker detection and defense mechanisms. Because, 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, it's a good safeguard to have some people who operate like extreme matchers in your group.

• 34:41Shane Parrish?

  I like that. Switching gears, so your second book you wrote was Originals, which is 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?

• 35:01Speaker 01

  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, 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 a special case of a broader question, which is, if I want to change my culture, how do I do that? And 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, I come into an organization and I'm 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?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  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, 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, 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? Yeah. How do you know if it's any good? How do you speak up effectively?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  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 ultimately, how do you build a culture 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, and it's comfortable being a non-conformist, must be 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,

• 37:23Speaker 01

  that 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. Right. And they do everything they can, once they have an idea, to derisk 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 bad to fail, but it's even worse to fail to try. And that's how a lot of them stay motivated. And then the first mover advantage was a total myth. So it turns out that if you look at the entrepreneurship realm, for example,

• 38:03Speaker 01

  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 it turned out like you want to be quick to start, but sometimes there's real value in being slow to finish. And then on the judgment point, I was really stunned

• 38:43Speaker 01

  that the most original thinkers had more bad ideas than their peers. And that was because they just had more ideas. And that, talk about Darwinian. Like, this is the easiest way to understand how to get better at idea selection, is to basically say, look, the more ideas you generate, the better your shot at stumbling on some truly great ones. And you have to tolerate a lot of dead ends and false starts in order to have a shot at doing something truly worthwhile.

• 39:17Shane Parrish?

  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, what's widely considered to be his worst work, during the same period of time when he just had this massive amount of output.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  It was so funny looking at the, I mean, we don't know for sure exactly when Shakespeare wrote each of his plays. But yeah, there are plenty of experts who have kind of traced the approximate windows when different plays were written. And I was stunned looking back to see that in the very same period that he was writing Macbeth or King Lear, he was also churning out Timon 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.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  And it's like, you know, you kind of imagine this this curve of expertise where the better you get, like the fewer of, you know, of those average or mediocre works, you churn 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, they may have cleared some objective bar of quality where like, you know, like Shakespeare, 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, you know, in highly artistic fields, of course.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  But you also, you can pick it up with inventors and entrepreneurs and scientists. And I think it's, you know, it's, it's just, it's part of, it goes back to the curse of knowledge that when you generate an idea, you, by definition, you're 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, of a crowd that didn't generate the idea.

• 41:15Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:33Shane Parrish?

  What would those be?

• 41:34Speaker 02

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• 42:05Speaker 03

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• 42:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  There are always times where you could take, like, you 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.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  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, 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, it's probably the

• 43:34Speaker 01

  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, but I think for the most part, what you need is, you know, is the clarity of focus from, 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, the difficulty of the problem that you're trying to solve. You know, which in, in the business world might be sort of the, like, how crowded is this market?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  You know, how many real experts have worked on this problem already? And 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 very frequently subconscious thought is more creative than conscious thought. You've probably tracked the Dijkstra housework 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 keeps the wheels turning in the back of your mind on the previous idea that you were working on.

• 44:55Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  And sometimes it works itself out for you, which is really convenient.

• 44:59Shane Parrish?

  I'm thinking, as you're saying that, that there's probably some sort of processing going on where we have this nature that we're predisposed to see success. Like, I mean, your book, you sat down, you wrote it, and we see the output of that. We see that it's like a New York Times bestseller. What we don't see is 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 people only have these incredibly successful ideas. And because we don't see the failures,

• 45:40Shane Parrish?

  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 a huge cemetery of projects that didn't make it.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  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, you're only going to have access if they've been careful about having pride in quality of work.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  They're only gonna put out their best work. And you're gonna 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.

• 46:33Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that's playing out right now in broader society to like sidetrack a little bit here? Because like, 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, these kind of overwhelmingly happy, positive. And we're not being exposed to the spectrum of life.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  So I think that's starting to change in the sense that, you know, Silicon Valley is well-known for celebrating failure. Although, you know, 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.

• 47:16Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  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, who are a little bit more self-expressive, who don't sort of live these airbrushed lives. But, you know, might even share negative information. And in particular, your friends like you more if, you know, 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 curvilinear. 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.

• 48:01Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  And that's a real disservice to anybody.

• 48:04Shane Parrish?

  And glorify, not only that, but you glorify your, your achievements, right?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, you know, which, which just ends up sort of creating a nice little funhouse 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 people, especially if they haven't achieved, you know, what they think are their major goals. I understand why people don't just want to come out there and say like, yeah, here are all the, you know, the, the bad ideas that I worked on and, you know, all the, the jobs that I applied to that I got rejected for. And that, you know, that, that requires some, 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.

• 48:49Shane Parrish?

  Right. One fascinating part of the book was you mentioned that, you know, some people are more able to avoid emotional painkillers, which is like justifying the status quo the way it is. Like, why are some people perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo? And, you know, maybe they have more drive. I mean, is this learned? Is it culture? Is it innate?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  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. And the higher your expectations are, the harder it is for reality to live up to them. And so you're going to be 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?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, you often hear engineers 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.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  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. But 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, you know, having this disposition to be unhappy, not unhappy in the "I hate my life" sense, but unhappy in the like, the way that the world is organized could be improved and I'm going to do something about it sense, then you're probably going

• 51:17Speaker 01

  to end up with increasing levels of satisfaction as you fix the things that are broken.

• 51:23Shane Parrish?

  So as a father, what do you do to nurture creativity in your kids?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  So I think that, you know, 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, not just this one.

• 52:04Shane Parrish?

  2.5 kids, yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  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 as 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 gonna have a rule about bedtime, you know, like, 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.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  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, you know, you'll get along with other people better, you know.

• 53:00Shane Parrish?

  My life is easier the next day.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  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 like 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

• 53:43Speaker 01

  out at, you know, at eight thirty, and I'm gonna, like, give you a choice. Do you 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, 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.

• 54:12Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have, 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?

• 54:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 54:56Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Because all you talk about is accomplishments.

• 54:59Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  You know, how did you do on a test? You know, let's, let's talk about how the soccer game went. And so, you know, we try to, 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. We, we definitely want our, our kids to, to value learning. And so, uh, one of the, one of the principles that we follow is anytime they're interested in learning about something, uh, we, you know, we'll, we'll find a book on it. And, you know, their, their challenge then is, is to learn about it and maybe to teach it to us, which is really fun.

• 55:38Shane Parrish?

  Yep.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  And we get to have a whole discussion about it. And, you know, beyond that, I think we have like lots, you know, lots of specific values, but those are two of the big ones that we care a lot about in our household.

• 55:49Shane Parrish?

  I like that. It sounds similar to what I do with my kids, which is like every day during dinner, I ask them something they did that was kind for somebody else today.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 55:57Shane Parrish?

  And yeah, the, the whole point of that is to reinforce that, uh, you know, there's no expectations when you're kind to people, but you can always be able to look at it to do something nice for other people.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  How old are yours?

• 56:08Shane Parrish?

  Uh, mine are seven and eight.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Impressive. I, you know, I often find that like, if you do that daily, there's, may, may not be enough opportunities.

• 56:16Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 56:23Shane Parrish?

  You know, I remember when we first started having these conversations, it'd be like, well, I didn't steal his, 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.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 56:39Shane Parrish?

  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 Sheryl 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?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  So I think one of the, one of the big takeaways for me is that I don't think we're very good at mental time travel. I think when, you know, 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, 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, the skills that we all need to develop

• 57:58Speaker 01

  is the ability to, to get in touch with our past selves. And it's something that, that Sheryl is exceptionally good at. It's something that, that I've read a lot of research on is, you know, to imagine, okay, like what, what, what would my past self have done in this situation? And when you do that, a lot of times you see that there, 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, what's an adversity that I, 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, you know, 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

• 58:43Speaker 01

  deployed earlier in your life and have just lost sight of. And I think that that kind of mental time travel is extremely valuable.

• 58:49Shane Parrish?

  Do you practice that now? Or do you?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 58:52Shane Parrish?

  Do you do that only when you're in kind of situations of adversity? Or is it something you do more regularly now?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  You know, it's something that I've, I've started doing also for, I guess for, for occasional accomplishments. So I 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 thirty books every week from the, the library. And, you know, I would like tear 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, 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.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  And then Originals came out and I 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, I'm not going to do that. But I will say, you know, like, I wrote Give and Take first because it's the set of ideas that I am most passionate about.

• 59:59Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  It's my most core set of values. I think Originals is a better written book. I think I, 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.

• 1:00:16Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  And yet I adapted to the idea of being an author. And, you know, it hardly even registered as something, you know, to mark and celebrate.

• 1:00:24Shane Parrish?

  It's not like a transition from non-author to author. It's like, this is what authors do.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Like, author again.

• 1:00:30Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  And now I'm not like a, a one-book wonder. Whatever that means. So I think that what, what I've done, what I've started doing to, to try to prevent that from happening, uh, which is, you know, something that, that writing with Cheryl really, really imprinted on me is Cheryl said, look, moments of joy are really important. You know, they're, they're part of what makes life worth living. They're, you know, part of what we have to look forward to. And it's, you know, it's part of being human is, 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, um, I rewind about five years and I ask myself, okay, if my five years ago self knew this was going to happen, how excited would I be?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  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, um, but it actually does get me most of the time back in touch with the emotions. Say, wow, like if you had told me five years ago that, you know, 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, for that many words and pages. And that, that to me has been something that transcends adversity, that, you know, kind of rewinding and saying, all right, how would I look at the situation I'm in now?

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  If, you know, if I could earlier in my life, uh, usually is a way to, I guess, sustain some, some appreciation and gratitude and even some satisfaction.

• 1:02:06Shane Parrish?

  What kind of conversations do you have with your kids about building resilience? And, you know, facing adversity?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I think most of the time what we do is, uh, we end up asking our kids to think about this through the eyes of others. So one of the things that's hard for anybody, but, but especially hard for kids is when you're in a difficult situation, it's, it's hard to gain perspective on it. And usually the emotions are overwhelming your ability to think, right? So you could, you could say in like, you know, in Kahneman terms that, uh, it's, 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, uh, 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.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  And the hope is that that helps them rehearse, you know, kind of thinking through different kinds of hardship that, you know, it, it gives them some go-to strategies to work with. And that also, you know, there's, there's this research on, on how one of the, as you know from reading Option B, one of the big ways to, to build kids' resilience is to show them that they matter.

• 1:03:18Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, 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, like, we also go out of our way to, like, 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, you know, that, that they're not helpless, that they, you know, they have the strength to do things for others. And so the hope is that, you know, whenever we ask them for advice on navigating a dilemma or a challenge, that, you know, that that makes them feel that they matter, because we are willing to rely on them.

• 1:03:59Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I think communities of practice are one of the most, I would say, undersighted and under-applied literatures in, mostly in kind of the, the microsociology world. So, you know, I remember first reading Levin 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.

• 1:04:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  It's too early, or it's just tacit knowledge, where, you know, people in a profession haven't yet even figured out how to 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.

• 1:05:09Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  I think it's brilliant, and I think that most organizations are not designed, you know, 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, 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, they learn together, which I think is incredibly cool.

• 1:05:33Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  I think the first thing I would do is I would, 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?

• 1:06:05Shane Parrish?

  Yes, we can learn together instead of...

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:07Shane Parrish?

  Yes.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  And then, you know, once, 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, that has real relevance to the future of the organization, you know, 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 Moldenhauer 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, 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?

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  And he was 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 you're passionate 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 him a chance to go on one of those missions?

• 1:07:22Shane Parrish?

  That'd be awesome. Speaking of managers, I mean, there's, there's a trend to like unmanaging or there seems to be any way invisible, kind of giving people space and freedom to be themselves rather than conformed to any predetermined structure, like maybe holocracy be an example of that. What do you make of all this?

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I saw 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

• 1:07:53Shane Parrish?

  I like it. It works.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  I know, but then that's really selfish of you, right?

• 1:07:57Shane Parrish?

  I'm a taker now.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  No, you're doing it on your terms instead of mine. 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.

• 1:08:09Shane Parrish?

  I don't know. Yeah. So I mean, like my, my answer to this would kind of be, I think it can work, but it's a very hard thing to implement backwards, 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 in some of these organizations tend to feel like it's a bit of a mess.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think holacracy 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 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 worse off your organization is 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 A/B tested to try to figure out how to improve them.

• 1:09:31Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  So what I would love to do is I would love to set up an organization where, you know, I don't know whether holacracy is the right 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, you know, 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, you know, that hierarchy has evolved and see whether a flat organization works under certain conditions or whether there are 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 Holacracy Hype, if I remember

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  correctly. 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 think it's, I agree with you that it can work, and I think we know far too little about how to make it work.

• 1:10:40Shane Parrish?

  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, how do you think about that?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, I guess 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, for the right data.

• 1:11:16Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  What, what, I think what we should do is we should start by asking questions, and then, you know, 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, you know, there was, there's a great quote from a sociologist, Gary Marx, 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."

• 1:11:47Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  And it's, 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, 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, like, nothing is an unmade to get a good in life. Yeah. 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, let's understand those. And in fact, you'd be a better fundamentalist if you're a scholar, because you will know how to maximize

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  the benefits and minimize the costs, or you'll at least have more clues about how to do that. And so, you know, that, that was my commitment going in. I remember actually I had a, an editor who, who read my book proposal for Give and Take and said, you know, I gotta be honest with you. I don't want to read this book. I said, why not? That's a bad sign. Yeah, I was like, yeah, this is, this is, maybe I'm going down the wrong path here. But, but I was like, why not? He said, well, I'm, 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 gotta be one at work, too? That sounds awful. And, you know, I, I reflected on that. And what I realized was I had the whole book organized in terms of like, the first half

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  was highlighting the, 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 givers 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 is successful versus failed?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Correlation and causation is a, is an interesting one. It, that, 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 longitudinal data so that we can look at reverse causality, or, you know, we have really good controls for endogenity, and we're able to, you know, sort of partial out all kinds of admitted variables, and,

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  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, you know, X is boosting Y a little bit, and then Y reinforces X, and they, you know, they start to, they start to fuel each other a little bit.

• 1:15:22Shane Parrish?

  It's interconnected, yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Totally. Like, Carl Weich 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.

• 1:15:57Shane Parrish?

  How does 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 things?

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  And you know, 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 like 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 showed 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.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  And then aha, we found in our replication that in fact X, a better X or a more carefully measured Y, 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?

• 1:17:33Shane Parrish?

  Under what circumstances?

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 1:18:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  And that's what we're doing, right? And then the, 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, 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 an effect in the other half the studies 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.

• 1:18:52Shane Parrish?

  And how do we do that? We have to arrange the way that we think about the problem to vary the conditions to find out when it replicates and when it doesn't and to what extent they impact that.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  I think that is the key. And, you know, I think that any responsible social or behavioral scientist 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, you know, 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.

• 1:19:42Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:03Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  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. And I leaned over to somebody and whispered, who is that? And the answer was, that's Charlie Munger.

• 1:20:29Shane Parrish?

  Nice.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 1:20:49Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  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 a 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, you know, I think it's quite remarkable that we can ever, you know, design studies where we get robust and consistent effects in different samples or different contexts because people are incredibly complicated.

• 1:21:28Shane Parrish?

  I'm super conscious of the 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?

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Oh, hello, pot. I am kettle.

• 1:21:47Shane Parrish?

  Tell me about this.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  I mean, you, I'm amazed by how much you publish every week. And, you know, like when I opened 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, I'll 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, 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

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  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 gonna wanna work on, you know, making them really clear and, and sort of compelling to other people. And so, yeah, like, of course, there's a ceiling. I think everybody, everybody has a different ceiling based on, you know, their motivation and their capability for the, the particular work that they're doing. But I, it bothers me a lot when people ask, well, how can I be more productive?

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Because I think the question they should really be asking is, you know, how can I accomplish more meaningful work?

• 1:23:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  And for some people, that may be more output, or, you know, there may be like, these ideas they have, or these products they wanna 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, how do I use my time and my skills effectively?

• 1:23:37Shane Parrish?

  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 avoidance framework. I love spending time with my kids. I wanna have dinner with them every night. I wanna do things that, you know,

• 1:24:21Shane Parrish?

  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 wanna do.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Well, I love that. And you know, I think the idea of harmony, Shane, really resonates. There's, I mean, there's a whole literature on work family. My colleague Nancy Rothbard has 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 detract from our lives. But there's also such a thing as enrichment, where work can improve our lives and vice versa, too. And I think harmony allows for those things to happen. I think also, I think that too many people are obsessed with, with sort of, when they think about balance, they think each day has to be balanced.

• 1:25:15Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  And if you are going to strive for balance, it's much easier to achieve at the week level or the month level.

• 1:25:21Shane Parrish?

  Yes.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Like, I have plenty of days that are out of balance.

• 1:25:24Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  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, you know, I'm spending a certain number of hours, you know, on each of the, sort of, each of the projects that I care about. And, you know, if that, like, if that's not met, I'll try to, you know, 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 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.

• 1:26:10Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Than it is to have, like, five days that are a mix of the two.

• 1:26:13Shane Parrish?

  I'm totally on board with that.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Are you?

• 1:26:16Shane Parrish?

  Listen, Adam, yeah, totally. I think that that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we should argue.

• 1:26:23Shane Parrish?

  Listen, thank you so much for your time. This has been fascinating and incredibly insightful.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was fun to chat with you. Next time we talk, I want to start just barraging you with questions.

• 1:26:36Shane Parrish?

  Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com/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 farnamstreetblog.com/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.

• 1:27:23Shane Parrish?

  This episode is brought to you by InkTel. Every business needs great customer service in order to stand out and gain a competitive advantage. Yet, many businesses struggle with how to provide their customers with world-class customer service. InkTel Contact Center Solutions is a turnkey solution for all of your customer care needs. InkTel trains their customer service reps to know your business almost as well as you do and help you build your brand. Managing a call center can be a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming task, and you still might not be able to do it well. So do what many leading companies do and outsource your customer service needs to a partner who specializes in taking care of your contact center needs. InkTel can provide your company with every touch point, including telephone, email, chat,

• 1:28:08Shane Parrish?

  and social media. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off if you go to inktel.com/shane. That's I-N-K-T-E-L dot com slash Shane.