Pod Insights Something You Should Know The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought About this episode Most refrigerators come with a light inside. It goes on when you open the door. It’s very helpful. So why doesn’t the freezer have a light too? This episode begins with the interesting explanation. https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/07/why-is-there-a-light-in-the-refrigerator-and-not-the-freezer/
Have you ever heard someone say they have no regrets? They’re lying. We all have regrets and the pain they cause is all too real. However, the pain of regret can be extremely helpful in making course correction as you move forward. If you have some lingering regrets, listen to my guest - bestselling author Daniel Pink. He has explored the world of regret, and he joins me to explain the different kinds of regrets we all feel and what those regrets are telling you. Daniel is author of the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (https://amzn.to/33HJhfY).
When someone comes up with an amazingly brilliant idea, chances are that person came up with a lot of little ideas first. That’s just one of the interesting insights you'll hear from my guest Anthony Fredricks, a nationally recognized educator and author of the book, From Fizzle to Sizzle: The Hidden Forces Crushing Your Creativity and How You Can Overcome Them (https://amzn.to/3u0AMY8). Listen as he explains how great ideas originate and how we are all a lot more creative than we probably think.
On the topic of poultry (chicken or turkey), if you randomly ask people – “White meat or dark meat?” – most people prefer white meat. At least that is true in the U. S. Listen as I explain the reason why and reveal why you might want to give dark meat another try. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2011/01/the_dark_side_of_the_bird.html
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:32 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, why does your refrigerator have a light inside but not your freezer? Then, we all have regrets, often painful regrets, and regrets can teach us a lot.
0:46 Speaker 02 One of the biggest categories of regrets are these boldness regrets, where people say, "If only I'd taken the chance. If only I'd asked that person out. If only I'd spoken up. If only I'd taken that trip." Over and over again, people regret playing it safe.
1:01 Mike Carruthers? Also, when it comes to chicken, you probably like white meat best. Why is that? And what makes some people creative and some people not? There have been studies.
1:13 Speaker 03 They concluded that one factor clearly separated the two groups. The creative people thought they were creative, and the less creative people didn't think they were.
1:26 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know.
1:31 Mike Carruthers? I imagine most of us shop for clothes online, at least some of the time, and there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures, but when they arrived... Not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good and the prices are surprisingly reasonable.
2:11 Mike Carruthers? I've bought their cashmere sweaters, which are gorgeous, and they start at just $60 for cashmere. My wife buys tons of stuff from Quince and we keep coming back. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, offering prices 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And with the holidays coming, that's a pretty compelling combination. Beautiful clothes and gifts without spending a fortune or wondering what's really going to show up at the door. I really do recommend Quince. It's one of those companies that has earned our trust. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com.
2:56 Mike Carruthers? Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support the show.
3:14 Speaker 04 Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
3:26 Mike Carruthers? Hi. Welcome to what I think is a really interesting episode of Something You Should Know, because I know what's in it. But you listen and you be the judge. We start today with your refrigerator and freezer. Chances are, when you open the refrigerator, a light comes on so you can see what you're doing. But open the freezer and no light comes on. So why is there a light in the fridge and not the freezer? According to a website called todayifoundout.com, it saves the manufacturer money to not have to put a light in the freezer. And studies show that people don't open the freezer nearly as much as they open the fridge. And certainly, people don't browse in the freezer the way they browse in the fridge.
4:11 Mike Carruthers? Generally, people go to the freezer to get something out that's going to take some further preparation. And the kitchen light is probably on anyway. However, the refrigerator often gets raided at night where a light is really handy while you're looking around for something to eat. There are other theories. One is that it used to be impractical to have a light in the freezer in the old models that built up frost on the inside. The frost would have built up on the light too, making it pretty useless. Then when frost-free freezers came along, they simply carried on the tradition. Whatever the reason, in most cases, most people don't have a light in their freezer. And that is something you should know.
4:55 Mike Carruthers? I'm sure you've heard people say that they have no regrets in their life. Is that possible? Is that even a realistic goal to live a regret-free life? Regret is an emotion everyone feels, even those people who claim to have no regrets. Bestselling author Daniel Pink has thoroughly explored the topic and emotion of regret and found that your regrets can serve a valuable purpose in your life. And he is about to explain regret and break regrets down in a way that you've likely never heard before and will find fascinating. His latest book is called The Power of Regret: How Looking Backwards Moves Us Forward.
5:40 Mike Carruthers? Hi, Daniel. Welcome. Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know.
5:44 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me. It's good to be with you.
5:46 Mike Carruthers? So I am always skeptical when I hear someone say, "I have no regrets in life." I think to myself... Really? Come on. You've done nothing in your life that you wish you had done differently, or hadn't done at all, or taken another path, or, you know, asked that person out that you never did and always wish you had. Doesn't everybody have regret?
6:12 Speaker 02 Well, that's a great insight. And the truth is, is that everybody does have regrets. It's part of the human condition. In fact, the only people without regrets are five-year-olds whose brains haven't developed, people with certain kinds of brain damage and neurodegenerative disorders, and sociopaths. And the reason for that is that regrets are part of our cognitive machinery. They exist for a reason. And if we treat them right, rather than ignoring them, we can use them as a force for forward progress.
6:43 Mike Carruthers? Right. Well, that seems to be the point, right? That you feel regretful for something as a course correction. It's a way to course correct because you did something wrong, or something went wrong, and you regret that.
6:56 Speaker 02 Absolutely right. Regret is one of our most common emotions. Everybody has it, as we were talking about just a moment ago. But it's also our most instructive and transformative emotion. And the problem is, is that if we say, "I never look backward. I don't have any regrets," we're not going to learn anything. Now, at the same time, if we say, "Oh, my God, I have regrets. I'm completely debilitated." And you try to exonerate yourself from any responsibility to do anything, that's also bad. What we need to do is we need to take a systematic approach to our regrets. And none of us have really been taught to do that.
7:33 Mike Carruthers? So what does that mean? A systematic approach to regret? I mean, regret seems to come, and there it is, and there it is. But what's the systematic approach to handling it?
7:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, that's it. You got it exactly right. So what we need to do is we need to use regrets as a signal, as the universe telling us something. And if we think about our regrets, if we recognize that these feelings are for thinking, we can use them to... I mean, the evidence is overwhelming in 50 years of research. We can use them to make better decisions. We can use them to become better negotiators. We can use them to become better problem solvers, better strategists, find greater meaning in our lives. And in looking at this 50 years of science, I do think there is a relatively simple three-step process that we can all enlist to use our regrets not to hobble us and not to, for us to ignore them,
8:28 Speaker 02 but to actually enlist them to lead a better life.
8:31 Mike Carruthers? And that three-step process briefly explained is...
8:35 Speaker 02 It is. First of all, we've got to reframe the regret. We've got to, number one, reframe your view of yourself in our regrets. A lot of times, we beat up on ourselves for making mistakes or having regrets. Instead, what you should do is show yourself what's called self-compassion, which is to treat yourself with the same kindness you would treat everybody else, and to show and to realize that your regrets are part of the human condition. Step two, you want to disclose your regret. This is a huge thing. When we... disclosing our regrets relieves the burden, but even more than that, when we take this amorphous negative feeling and convert it into words, those words are less fearsome. We begin to make sense of it. So you want to reframe it, you want to disclose it,
9:20 Speaker 02 and then you want to extract a lesson from it. And a good way to do that is to take a step back, think about how you're going to feel about this situation in 10 years. Or even better, you know, ask yourself, what would you tell your best friend to do with this regret? And so this systematic process of reframing it through self-compassion, disclosing it, because we know the benefits of disclosure and sense-making are vast, and then also taking a step back and extracting a lesson from it, gives us a way to take this spear of negativity and turn it into something positive.
9:58 Mike Carruthers? So I have a couple of thoughts about regret that I'd like to get you to comment on. And that is, I sort of distinguish, and maybe you do or don't, but between regret over something that happened and regret that you got caught because of something that happened.
10:17 Speaker 02 Oh, interesting. That's very interesting. Okay, so there are distinctions here. And I'll tell you how I got some insight into this, is that I went out and collected about 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. This incredible trove of human longing and aspiration. And one of the things that people regret, it turns out around the world, people regret the same four things over and over again. And one of those categories was sort of what you're hinting at, which is moral regrets, where you're at a juncture, you could do the right thing, you could do the wrong thing, and you do the wrong thing and you regret it.
10:58 Speaker 02 Now, what I found is that while there's some people who kind of sort of regret getting caught, there are more people who regret the act itself. I have literally hundreds of people in my database who regret bullying kids when they were young, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. I have one that really sticks in my head is a 71-year-old woman in New Jersey who regretted stealing candy from a store when she was a kid 60 years ago. I have huge numbers of regrets about infidelity. And in many cases, these are people who actually didn't get caught. What they really regret is the act itself.
11:40 Speaker 02 And I find that this category of moral regrets is powerful and revealing, because it suggests to me that most people actually want to be good. And that's the other thing about regret that I find so fascinating in looking at this incredible trove of regrets, that is, we understand what people regret the most, we actually understand what they value the most. And so this negative emotion actually points the way to what people think makes life worth living. And one of the things that people want out of life, not every single person, but what a lot of people want out of life is actually to be good.
12:19 Mike Carruthers? I buy that, yeah. And that's a very optimistic message and nice to hold on to, that people want to be good for the most part.
12:28 Speaker 02 It's a really, really important and interesting question, because there's a difference between regret and disappointment. With regret, you have agency over it, okay? So in this case, for these moral regrets, people had agency over the act. You don't necessarily have control over whether you get caught or not. It could be that you're disappointed that you got caught, rather than you're regretful. The best example of the difference between disappointment and regret comes from Janet Landman at the University of Michigan, who has this brilliant, I think brilliant, example, where she says, "Imagine a scenario where a three-year-old girl loses her tooth, and she goes to sleep, and she puts the tooth under her pillow, hoping the tooth fairy,
13:13 Speaker 02 waiting for the tooth fairy to give her a buck. And she wakes up in the morning, lifts up her pillow, and the tooth is still there. She's disappointed, but her parents regret not replacing the tooth with a dollar." And so regret depends on our control over things. I mean, just like, I'm a basketball fan, I live in Washington DC. I'm disappointed that the Washington Wizards haven't won an NBA championship for 40 years, but I can't regret it, because I don't have any control over it.
13:43 Mike Carruthers? Is part of the definition of regret that it's over, it's done? Something's wrong, something happened, it's over, and you can't undo it, and that's why it feels so bad, because you can't fix it?
13:56 Speaker 02 Some of our regrets, we can undo. So for instance, there's a guy who I write about, who got a no regrets tattoo, and then he regretted it, and he had his tattoo removed, okay? So you can undo your regrets. Another thing that you can do for regrets that are harder to undo, is that you can find the silver lining in them. That's a much more common adaptation that people have. So once again, in this collection of 16,000 regrets, I have hundreds, I think they're all from women, that go basically like this. "Oh, I regret marrying that idiot, but..."
14:35 Speaker 02 At least I have these two great kids. So you find a silver lining in it. It doesn't, that, that, finding the silver lining in a regret makes it hurt a little bit less. It doesn't really help you draw a lesson from it necessarily.
14:48 Mike Carruthers? So far, we've been discussing these moral regrets, but, but I know there's a lot of other kinds of regrets. So let's talk about them. For example, what are the other big regrets that people have?
15:00 Speaker 02 Over and over again in the world, we, we see these same four regrets. One of them is what I call boldness regrets. And so I'll give you an example of it. So among Americans who went to college, huge numbers of people regret, I was surprised, not studying abroad. At the same time, I have hundreds of people around the world who have a regret like this. X years ago, there was a man or woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him/her out on a date, but I was too chicken to it and I never got around to it and I've regretted it ever since. Okay, that's a romance regret. We've got an education regret, a romance regret. And then, again, around the world, people say, oh, I wish I had started a business rather than stayed in this lackluster job. Career regret.
15:44 Speaker 02 But all of those regrets, to me, are the same core regret. It's a regret that says, if only I'd taken the chance. And a lot of these regrets come at a juncture of decision-making in our lives. In this particular case, you can play it safe, or you can take the risk. And over again, over and over again, people regret playing it safe. Some people regret taking a risk, but not nearly as many people as you expect, even if it doesn't work out. What people regret is not taking the chance. And to me, what that reveals is that you and I and the folks listening to your podcast, we want, like, a good life involves doing something and learning and growing and trying
16:29 Speaker 02 and leading a psychologically rich life. And so one of the biggest categories of regrets are these boldness regrets, where people say, if only I'd taken the chance, if only I'd asked that person out, if only I'd spoken up, if only I'd taken that trip, if only I'd started that business.
16:45 Mike Carruthers? I'm speaking with bestselling author Daniel Pink, and his latest book is called The Power of Regret: How Looking Backwards Moves Us Forward.
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19:56 Mike Carruthers? That's G-E-T betterbones.com/sysk. So Daniel, the type of regrets that you're talking about, those road-not-taken regrets, don't you think they get wrapped up into a fantasy of what might have happened, which is probably way off anyway?
20:16 Speaker 02 Possibly, but I think the bigger issue is that people don't know. Let's take, let's take, let's take starting a business, all right? I have people who regret starting a business and having it fail, but very few. In fact, I have people who, who say, "I started a business, it failed, but I don't regret doing it because I wanted to take the chance and I know how that particular thing turned out." And, and so I do think that, of course, that, that we don't, you know, there, there are gazillion counterfactuals to any decision that we make. But when the regrets that people express keep coming back to the same thing, to me, it suggests what we actually want out of life. That is, I really believe that if we understand what people regret the most, we actually understand what they value the most.
20:59 Speaker 02 And what people value is, you know, they, they realize they're not here on this planet forever. They want to do something. And, and when they, and when they feel, when they feel timid and when they don't take that chance, they often regret it much more so than taking a chance and failing.
21:16 Mike Carruthers? I would imagine that because it seems like that regret has often shame attached to it, that things didn't work out, that people keep their regrets to themselves. Is, is that a good idea?
21:30 Speaker 02 There's ample research showing that disclosing our regrets helps us make sense of them. What's more is that when we're skittish about disclosing our regrets or negative things about ourselves, we're skittish in part because we think that people will like us less. When in fact, the preponderance of evidence says, "People like us more for doing that." So you want to reframe it, you want to disclose it, but the most important thing is not to stay mired in it, but to draw a lesson from it. So the lesson from saying not asking somebody out on a date is, "Next time, I have a chance to speak up, I have a chance to take a risk, whether it's at a meeting at work, whether it is maybe starting a side hustle along with my regular job, or whether I'm back on the
22:11 Speaker 02 dating market and I see someone I'm interested in, then actually using that lesson to apply it next time." And when people act, they are less likely to regret it than when people don't act. And this comes up again and again in the research. Regrets of inaction easily outnumber regrets of action, particularly as people get older.
22:33 Mike Carruthers? I wonder why it is, if regret is so universal, that people try to take some pride in the fact that they have none, when...
22:45 Speaker 02 Because it hurts. They want to avoid it. Here's the thing, regret hurts, and it's instructive, but you can't have one without the other. And so what happens is when people try to avoid regret because it hurts, regret stinks, all right? Regret is not fun. It's an awful feeling. It makes our stomach churn. But the reason it makes our stomach churn is because it instructs and clarifies us about how to make subsequent decisions. But you're not going to get that instruction unless you get a little bit of that pain. The question is, how do you deal with that pain? And so by denying the pain, by sort of brushing it away, you lose all of the instruction.
23:23 Mike Carruthers? I imagine that a big source of regret for a lot of people is family members and friends.
23:30 Speaker 02 Which are regrets about having a relationship that should have been intact, that was intact or should have been intact, that ends up drifting apart. And people want to reach out, but they feel awkward about reaching out. They think it's not going to be well received. And so they drift further apart. So, you know, one of the huge regrets that people have are these connection regrets with family and friends and colleagues that say, "If only I'd reached out." And to me, one of the big lessons from this research on regret is that if you're at a juncture in your life and you're wondering, "Should I reach out or should I not reach out?" You've answered the question. To me personally, the big takeaway from this huge amount of research is that one should always reach out.
24:13 Mike Carruthers? What's a foundation regret?
24:15 Speaker 02 Foundation regret is a regret about not building a stable platform for your life. So, "If only I hadn't smoked. If only I'd saved more money. If only I'd worked harder in school. If only I'd taken care of my health." And again, these four core regrets tell us what makes a good life. And one of the things that makes a good life is some amount of stability. It's hard to have a good life without some amount of stability. Stability gives us a chance to explore. Stability gives us a chance to be a good person. Stability gives us a chance to connect with others.
24:47 Mike Carruthers? There is kind of this, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently." But based on the research, based on your research, young people can take a lesson from this is, these are the things you're likely going to regret later in life. So you might want to try to do something about them now. And just to reiterate, those things are what?
25:12 Speaker 02 Did I build a stable platform for my life? Did I take a smart risk? Did I do the right thing? Did I connect with people who I care about and who care about me? Those are the things, those are the kinds of regrets that we should anticipate. But what color sweater we're going to wear, what we're going to have for dinner, what kind of car we're going to buy, ultimately doesn't matter. And so I think that what's interesting about regret, this negative emotion, is how clarifying it is. It instructs us for what makes a good life.
25:42 Mike Carruthers? Well, there really is comfort in hearing how it is so universal and that people are basically riddled with regret.
25:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, you don't want to be riddled, you want to be poked a little bit. You don't want it to be a heavy blanket. But here's the thing, I mean, truly, there's a famous study from 40 years ago where a social scientist named Susan Shimanoff looked at recorded conversations with lots and lots of people. So she recorded all these conversations that people were having organically in their world. So college students and married couples. And then she got transcripts of all these conversations and then she started counting the emotions that people expressed in these everyday, ordinary conversations. The most common negative emotion that people expressed was regret. It was the second most common emotion of any kind.
26:36 Speaker 02 The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love. And so, why do we experience love? Because it helps us survive and get through the day. Why do we experience regret? Because it instructs and it clarifies. And if we get past this stupid idea that I should have no regrets, we can actually use this transformative emotion to find the path to a life well-lived.
27:00 Mike Carruthers? So as somebody who has really examined regret and found that there is a usefulness to it, when you talk to somebody who says, "Oh, I have no regrets," what do you say to them?
27:13 Speaker 02 Well, it's a great question. So, okay, so in this data, I'll give you two examples of this. So in this database where I collected all these regrets, I had people who would fill out this thing called the World Regret Survey and then say, "I don't have any regrets," and then proceed to tell me some regret that they had. Okay? So, okay. What's more, I did a piece of quantitative research here where we surveyed 4,489 Americans in this big public opinion poll where I asked people the question without using the R-word, and this is the key. We asked 4,489 Americans, a representative sample of the US population, "How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done something differently?" Okay? So we don't say the regret word. 1% said never.
27:58 Speaker 02 12% said rarely, 83% said they do it occasionally. So sometimes, you know, this word regret for some people is so charged that they have this instinctive view that, "Oh, I don't have any regrets." But when you actually peel it back and ask them to file, so to answer your question more directly, it's like, "Oh, really? You don't have any regrets? So do you ever look back on anything and wish you hadn't done it? Oh, yeah, I wish I hadn't majored in blobbity-blond college. Oh, I wish I hadn't dated that person. Oh, well, that's a regret. Well, no, it's not. Well, yeah, it is."
28:34 Mike Carruthers? By definition.
28:36 Speaker 02 Yes.
28:38 Mike Carruthers? Well, isn't it? I wonder why people feel that need to put on that fake badge of honor that they have no regrets when, I mean, what's the point of that? What are they trying to say?
28:50 Speaker 02 I don't know. I mean, I think part of it is, is that they're trying to put forward a life performance that seems to be flawless to other people, even though none of our lives are flawless. I think part of it is, is that they have been indoctrinated to think that we should have only positive thoughts and positive emotions. And the truth of the matter is, is that we should have lots of positive thoughts and lots of positive emotions, but our portfolio of emotions has to be at least somewhat diversified. So if you have only positive emotions, you're not going to do very well. You have to have some negative emotions because not that many of them and not an overwhelming number of them, but negative emotions are instructive. Imagine somebody who couldn't experience fear, right?
29:33 Speaker 02 That person's not going to escape a burning building. And so negative emotions serve a function. And so we've been seduced into thinking the only emotions that we should have are positive emotions. And while it's true that we should have a lot of positive emotions, that is not a diversified emotional portfolio. We would never have all of our stocks in our financial portfolio in one industry or in one sector. We would want a little bit of diversification, and that's what we want with our emotions. And the blue chip emotional stock for negative emotions is regret.
30:06 Mike Carruthers? And I think, as you said, there's such an emphasis on positive emotions. I've never heard anybody talk about regret this way. Most of the talk about regret is to how to avoid it. But clearly, you have a different and I think more interesting take on the topic. My guest has been Daniel Pink, and the book is called The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. You'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Daniel. I really enjoyed this. Thanks a lot.
30:36 Speaker 02 Rock and roll. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
30:39 Mike Carruthers? If you listen to Something You Should Know regularly, you know we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. It contains ingredients like reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, epigenin, and melatonin. They have lots of great flavors. I tried the cinnamon cocoa flavor, and I love the idea of having something warm and delicious as part of winding down at night.
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33:45 Mike Carruthers? It's interesting to think that every man-made product, object, invention, business, piece of art, everything started as an idea that popped into somebody's head somehow. How does that happen? What is the process that allows people to generate great ideas? We sometimes call that process creativity, but creativity tends to have a kind of a magical, who knows where it came from, who knows when it will strike again, kind of quality. Yet if you look at great ideas and then reverse engineer them and how they came to be, there must be something we can learn from that process so that we can all apply it and
34:29 Mike Carruthers? have more great ideas. That's what Anthony Fredericks is here to discuss. Anthony is a nationally recognized educator and an award-winning and bestselling author of more than 150 books. His latest is titled "From Fizzle to Sizzle: The Hidden Forces Crushing Your Creativity and How You Can Overcome Them." Hey Anthony, welcome to Something You Should Know.
34:54 Speaker 03 Thank you, Mike. Looking forward to it.
34:57 Mike Carruthers? I think a lot of times when people hear a discussion that has to do with creativity, they think, "Oh, well, that's just a discussion for creative types, you know, artists and writers and musicians." But you have a more practical view of this topic. So what is creativity to you?
35:16 Speaker 03 Let me use a quote by Albert Einstein. "Creativity is intelligence having fun." Throughout our school lives, we have been trained, if you will, to look for right answers. If you consider the fact that most students between kindergarten and 12th grade have been asked, have taken about 2,500 test quizzes and exams, and they've been asked over one and a half million questions. What the research is showing is that about 80% of those questions on the test and 80% of the verbal questions tend to be factual questions. In other words,
35:56 Speaker 03 we have been trained throughout our education career to look for the right answer. Creativity moves beyond that right answer. It plays with that knowledge. It experiments with that knowledge. It has fun with that knowledge, as Einstein was alluding to. Creativity is letting our minds roam with no barriers, no restrictions whatsoever.
36:20 Mike Carruthers? And I would want to do that. Why? I mean, I can understand if you're a creative type or you're a child, but in the grown-up world, why is this important?
36:32 Speaker 03 Because there are many times in our daily schedules when we need something new, mentally speaking that is, when we need a different way of doing things, or times when we would benefit from a new idea. We all need creative approaches that not only increase our productivity, but also give us an opportunity to search for new answers, give us a new way of seeing the world. And what we've discovered is that creative acts, done every day, keeps us mentally agile and professionally competent, able to deal with some of the challenges that we may face in both our personal and professional lives.
37:15 Mike Carruthers? And so, when you say "creative acts," what does that mean? Give me some examples of daily creative activities.
37:22 Speaker 03 I'm gonna step back a little bit and say, one of the big myths that we have in the area of creativity is that creativity is something that we only use about three or four times during the year, when our boss says we need a new marketing plan, or our supervisor says we need to develop a new product, and we think creativity is big events. Creativity is actually small events, little things that we do every day. The myth that creativity is a big event sort of holds us in check, if you will. It prevents us from taking a look at creativity as small things. Here are some examples of some small things.
38:06 Speaker 03 Going to a Peruvian restaurant, because you've never been to a Peruvian restaurant. Driving on a new route home, instead of taking the freeway, taking a rural road to get home. Talking with your child about some ways of building structures with wooden blocks. It's the little things that we do every day that makes us creative. Creativity is not the big events, it's how we prepare for those big events with a series of daily events in our lives. Trying a new recipe, for example. These are the things that sort of prepare the mind for the big events, and also lets us know internally that we are all creative creatures.
38:51 Mike Carruthers? Do you think, though, that there are some people who are more creative than others? Or are we all equally creative if we apply it?
39:01 Speaker 03 We are all equally creative. One of the things that tends to hold a lot of people back in terms of their creativity is that we tend to compare ourselves with so-called creative giants. If we're an artist, we might compare ourselves to Picasso and say, "Well, you know what? I'll never be a Picasso." If we're a writer, we may compare ourselves to Stephen King and say, "Well, I'll never measure up to Stephen King." Those comparisons are very, very dangerous because we tend to think of creativity as big events and big people, and that's a mistake. We all have creative possibilities.
39:40 Speaker 03 We all have the intelligence and the capabilities of becoming more creative in our daily life, no matter what our age may be.
39:50 Mike Carruthers? Do you think that creative people, people who practice creativity, think of themselves as creative? In other words, are the creative people aware that they are and the not-so-creative people aware that they are?
40:05 Speaker 03 Let me answer that with a little bit of... Most compelling book, back in 2006, Carol Dweck, who is a researcher at Stanford, wrote a very compelling book called Mindsets. And in it, she says, "We either accept one of two mindsets. Either we're in a fixed mindset, that is, we've determined that we are not creative and so we're not going to work to change that. And the other mindset is the growth mindset. That's those of us who say, 'You know what? Creativity is doing something, a little bit of something every day. I can grow, I can improve, I can achieve, I can do things that I have not done before, and I can think things that I have not thought of before.'"
40:50 Speaker 03 So depending on what mindset we accept, that will determine how creative we believe ourselves to be.
41:01 Mike Carruthers? I think there's a tendency to believe, and I've thought this from time to time too, that creativity is great, but creativity means coming up with new ideas. New ideas aren't necessarily good ideas, they're just new ideas. And that you waste a lot of time, or maybe waste is the wrong word, but you can spend a lot of time being creative and not getting anywhere. You're just being creative.
41:27 Speaker 03 Exactly, and another one of the things that tends to hold us back in terms of creativity is a fear of failure. I'll use an example. A number of years ago, there was an Englishman who had come up with, had tried and tried and tried to create a new invention, something that every housewife uses.
41:50 Speaker 03 And he failed 5,762 times. On the 5,763rd time, he succeeded. His name, James Dyson, who invented the tornado vacuum cleaner. He failed over 5,700 times in creating that, but he was of the growth mindset and said, "You know what? Let's give it another try." And the latest figures that I have are from 2019. In 2019, his company had profits in excess of $6 billion, that's with a B, dollars. This is from somebody who had 5,700 failures on his resume. So, yes, we create a lot of ideas.
42:35 Speaker 03 Not every one of those ideas is going to be a world-shaking or earth-shattering event, and that's okay. The creation of the ideas, whether they're good or bad, is what is important, not determining ahead of time, "Well, this is not going to be a very..." "These aren't going to be very good ideas." We need to have the belief in ourselves that if we can generate sufficient ideas and are comfortable with that generative process, then we can make creativity a regular, normal part of our lives.
43:11 Mike Carruthers? Sometimes it seems that the word creativity, or "that's very creative," is another word for, "This really sucks and I don't get it."
43:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, we tend to, I guess, downplay it, and you know, a little sucking here and there is good for the soul. I'm reminded of another anecdote. Thomas Edison, when he was trying to improve on the light bulb, he kept trying and trying for months and months. A reporter from a local newspaper was sent to interview him, and he said, "Mr. Edison, it seems like you're trying and trying and you keep failing." And Thomas Edison looked the reporter in the eye and said, "You know what? I haven't failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work." So it's our concept of failure. Failure is a normal part of the creative
44:05 Speaker 03 process. If we're willing to understand and accept the fact that there will be lots and lots of failures, in Thomas Edison's case, 10,000 failures, then we give ourselves permission to be more creative, to think outside the box, to use a very hackneyed phrase.
44:23 Mike Carruthers? It also seems that creativity is also like an excuse. Like, well, you know, you take an art class, let's say, and everybody in the class is doing well except Bob. Bob's picture really is not up to par. It's very creative, but it sucks. It's terrible. It's nowhere close to what the other students are doing. And people have a tendency, I think, that being an example, of saying, "Oh, he's so creative." You know, it's like kids' finger paint things. I mean, yeah, I guess they're creative, but they're just fingers in paint. I mean, there's nothing really spectacular about it, other than it's different. It's not crayons. It's finger paint. But it's nothing great.
45:04 Speaker 03 Yeah. And you used a key word. It's different. You know, we may think that Bob's painting sucks, but it's Bob's expression. It's his way of looking at the world. If we apply arbitrary criteria, assessment tools to it, everyone says, "Bob's painting sucks." Bob may say, you know... I'm okay with this. I've expressed myself on a piece of paper. I've done what I've set out to do, and I'm okay with that. And he gives himself permission to venture out and try things.
45:44 Speaker 03 There is another wonderful study where a presenter, and I think it was part of a TED Talk, invited an audience to each take a sheet of paper and a pencil. Turn to the person next to you, and in the next 30 seconds, draw a portrait of that individual. The people were working and very hard, diligent, 30 seconds. He said, "How many of you, when you were sharing that portrait with your partner, said, 'Oh, I'm not a very good artist,' or 'I can't paint very well,' or 'I'm sorry for all of this,' and every hand in the audience went up?" He did that with a group of kindergarten kids and asked that question, and no hands went up.
46:26 Speaker 03 What's interesting is kids have this very imaginative view of the world. And as we grow older and we get into paying income taxes and mortgages and job responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, we narrow our focus. And then we become more critical of our own creativity and a little bit more critical of the creativity of others.
46:52 Mike Carruthers? Well, there also seems to be, as I listen to you tell that story, I've never thought of myself as much of an artist. I don't, you know, if you ask me to draw a picture of somebody, it's gonna be more stick figure, it's not gonna be very good. Consequently, art is not a direction I've ever gone in. I don't have much interest in becoming an artist because I kind of have convinced myself I'm not very good at it. And that kind of feeds on itself. It's a cycle of if you're not interested, you don't do it. If you don't do it, you're not very good. If you're not very good, you're not interested, and there it goes.
47:30 Speaker 03 Art is simply a creative expression. Art is simply, you know, a way of allowing the pictures in our mind to be expressed, say, for example, on a sheet of paper. And that's okay. Your art may be different from my art, from, you know, from Picasso's art, but it's art nonetheless. Is it going to be great art? I don't know. I can't, I'm not in a position to evaluate it. But what I can say is, let's give everyone an opportunity, or let's give ourselves an opportunity to be creatively expressive. And that may be through art, that may be through music, that may be through sports, that may be through writing, whatever. We need those opportunities.
48:15 Speaker 03 And we can give ourselves those opportunities as adults in our daily lives, as I mentioned before, by doing one little creative thing every day. New recipe, new way home, new kind of food, a new coat in a color that you've never worn before. A little bit of expression each day turns us into creative individuals.
48:37 Mike Carruthers? Let's go back, because you said at the beginning, you know, one example of being creative is to go to a Peruvian restaurant because you've never been to one. Well, how is that creative? What is that? That's just your idea of creativity? But how does eating Peruvian food make me more creative?
48:56 Speaker 03 Well, if all we do is eat steak and potatoes, we have no idea of what else is out there. If we don't, aren't willing to do a little bit of imagining, then we sort of do ourselves a disservice. Let me take a side road off of that. Oftentimes, when I was a classroom teacher, parents would ask, what are some things I can do to help my child become more creative? And I said, one of the things that you don't want to do is you don't want to go to a toy store and buy a product that says "educational" on the, on the package, because that's just a marketing technique to sell more toys.
49:37 Speaker 03 I told them the three best creative things that parents can give their kids is an old sheet. A box of crayons and some cardboard boxes. And let them create their own universes, their own, their own castles, their own spaceships, their own pirate ships, whatever it may be. When kids have realized that there are unlimited ways of thinking. We are not looking for the right answer, as might be the case in a computer game. We're looking for a multiplicity of answers.
50:14 Mike Carruthers? But don't you think that when you're playing a computer game, because I watch my boys play computer games, and I'm not particularly good at it, that, that trying to find that right way out or up the wall or into the castle or to get to the bad guy, it seems like it's a pretty creative way because, because there aren't a lot of, you know, there aren't a lot of signs that say this way. You've got to figure it out.
50:39 Speaker 03 I'm going to disagree with you slightly there, Mike, because what we're trying to figure out is what the game creators have determined to be the right way. Sure, there's some, some mental gymnastics in there, but ultimately to win the game or to score the most points, we have to find the answer, so to speak, that somebody else develop. Give kids a, an old sheet and some cardboard boxes, there's no right way to put those together. If we step back and watch the kids turn that sheet and those boxes into a spaceship or pirate ship, there's no right way or actually no wrong way to do that.
51:24 Speaker 03 They are letting their imaginations go. And as Albert Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge.
51:33 Mike Carruthers? I suspect that one of the things that kind of beats the creativity out of us is I imagine almost everybody can remember sometime when they had an idea that was criticized. Oh, that, that's, that's not very good. Bobby, that's, yeah, no, that's like, and, and those, you take those punches and, and they hurt and you think, oh, well, better not do that again.
51:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. And that carries forward into our work environments as well. I recall one study that found that the average worker in this country gets something like 300 negative comments in the course of a week. Now imagine, you know, you know, trying to get around, working through 300 negative comments in a week. Kids get even more than that. There's times that kids hear the word no, don't go there, don't do that, don't touch that, those kinds of things. Those have a significant psychological effect on the development of our creativity.
52:39 Speaker 03 Whether we are children or whether we are adults, those negative comments significantly affect our, our personal creativity.
52:48 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, well, but if, if little Johnny's about to set his sister on fire, he's gonna, he's gonna need to hear no. Yeah, I'm sorry, but I hate to interrupt your creativity here, but you can't do that.
53:00 Speaker 03 No, no, I, point well taken, Mike. There are times when we do need to say no for safety reasons, obviously. But to say no, you know, you can't, you can't walk in a puddle, for example, or you can't, you know, play in the mud. Those are very creative kinds of activities for kids. There's no, there's very little safety involved in those activities. And kids tend to hear a lot of that, the no in the, in the potential creative activities that they participate in.
53:32 Mike Carruthers? What are some of the, some of the other research about creativity? Cause you seem to have quite a bit of that knowledge that people might be surprised to hear about how it works or how it doesn't work or whatever.
53:44 Speaker 03 Here's one of the things, one of the creative studies that really stood out for me. And it was a couple of years ago, and they were, they were taking a look at a, a major corporation, taking a look at the creative productivity of, of engineers. And this was happened to be at a major oil company. And the executives of the company were concerned about the lack of creativity. On the part of some of their employees and they decided to bring in a team of psychologists to see if they could determine any significant differences between, you know, those who were deemed to be creative and those who were essentially categorized as non-creative.
54:27 Speaker 03 And over the course of three months, the team of psychologists asked tons and tons of questions focused on childhood experiences, family influences, academic performance, and even favorite colors. And after they analyzed all the data, they concluded that one factor clearly separated the two groups. And here's that factor. The creative people thought they were creative and the less creative people didn't think they were.
54:59 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, I believe that. And I think everybody, even people who don't consider themselves creative types, have had moments several times in their life where things have clicked, where ideas have come. So this idea that some people aren't creative just doesn't ring true. And clearly you've pointed out that it doesn't. My guest has been Anthony Fredericks. He is a nationally recognized educator and author of the book From Fizzle to Sizzle: The Hidden Forces Crushing Your Creativity and How You Can Overcome Them. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Hey, thanks, Anthony. Thanks for coming on.
55:37 Speaker 03 Okay. Thank you so much, Mike. Appreciate the opportunity.
55:43 Mike Carruthers? Do you like white meat? Most of us do. In fact, the American chicken industry ends up with a big surplus of dark meat because Americans prefer white meat. And it's not just the taste. It seems that a lot of us are a little squeamish about dark meat because, well, when you're faced with a chicken leg, there's no hiding the fact that that's the leg of an animal. Up until 50 years ago, chickens were sold almost exclusively as whole chickens. But now we prefer the nondescript neatly packaged products that don't really resemble what it used to be, standing, running, or swimming around.
56:24 Mike Carruthers? It turns out that other countries aren't quite so squeamish as we are. Most Europeans actually prefer the taste of the gamier dark meat, which is nutrient-rich with higher levels of iron and zinc. And that is something you should know. I love getting those emails that start out with something to the effect of, "My friend listens to your podcast all the time and suggested I give it a try, and I really like it. If you know someone who might enjoy this podcast, please share it with them." I'm Micah Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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