Overconfidence and the Art of Knowing Yourself

What happens when your confidence outruns your competence? Brené and Adam start with freestyle skiing champ Eileen Gu’s extraordinary Olympic press conference and use it to explore metacognition—how to notice your thinking, question it, and change it on purpose. They dig into the Dunning–Kruger effect, calibration, journaling, and feedback, discuss why we’re so bad at estimating timelines, and consider how “I’ve got this” energy can quietly wreck projects, relationships, and learning. From pickleball and ping pong to therapy and team meetings, this episode is about building the inner game of better thinking without losing your nerve along the way. You can find the Curiosity Shop on YouTube⁠ and Instagram⁠ (@thecuriosityshop). Chapters: 0:00 - Introductions 3:45 - Eileen Gu’s Metacognition 12:22 - What is Metacognition? 25:10 - What is Dunning-Kruger? 38:14 - Time Estimation and The Planning Fallacy 44:36 - Metacognition and Dunning-Kruger Final Thoughts 58:17 - Wrap up Shownotes: I hate minimalism - Hank Green, TikTok Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit - Brené Brown, 2025, Book Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring: A New Area of Cognitive-Developmental Inquiry - Flavell, 1979 Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning - Adam Grant, 2024, Worklife with Adam Grant Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - Adam Grant, 2021, Book Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures - Kahneman & Tversky, 1979, Office of Naval Research Daniel Kahneman Doesn't Trust Your Intuition - Adam Grant, 2023, Re:Thinking with Adam Grant The Story Rumble Process: A Guide for Groups and Teams - Brené Brown, Dare to Lead, 2018 The learning benefits of teaching: A retrieval practice hypothesis - Koh, 2018 Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things - Adam Grant, 2023, Book Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments - Kruger & Dunning, 1999, Cornell University The Inner Game of Tennis - The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance - Timothy Gallwey, 1974, Book Charlotte Harpur and Eileen Gu, Final Press Conference, 2026 Winter Olympics, Milano, Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:44Brené Brown?

  Welcome to The Curiosity Shop.

• 0:46Adam Grant?

  A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network.

• 0:54Brené Brown?

  Hi, everyone. I'm Brené Brown.

• 0:55Adam Grant?

  And I'm Adam. Brene, episode four.

• 0:59Brené Brown?

  Okay, so in this episode, we are going to talk about one of our favorite Olympic moments from Milan from this year. We'll spend the first half of the episode talking about Eileen Gu. We'll talk about her incredible display of metacognition during a press conference. And we'll also talk about in the first half, how that level of thinking about your thinking really helps you defend against one of our least and most favorite biases, which is Dunning Kruger. And second half, we're going to take some questions.

• 1:42Brené Brown?

  My social media has gone off the rails with questions for us, so I know yours has too, so we'll take a couple of those. Before we get started, I want to share something really funny with you. You ready?

• 1:54Adam Grant?

  Uh-oh. I'm ready.

• 1:57Brené Brown?

  So you know how, what episode were we talking about the fact that you're a minimalist and I'm a maximalist?

• 2:02Adam Grant?

  Two.

• 2:03Brené Brown?

  Episode two. So I think when we were talking, I said something like, "Hey, you know that meme on Instagram with like, 'I hate minimalism'?" I get a note from Hank Green, who's like, one of my favorite people.

• 2:16Adam Grant?

  I love Hank Green.

• 2:17Brené Brown?

  I do too. And he said, "Hey, by the way, that meme is me talking." I did not know that. Did you know that?

• 2:24Adam Grant?

  I had no idea.

• 2:25Brené Brown?

  Okay, let me just play it. It's so funny, especially when you think about it being Hank. Okay.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I hate minimalism. That's not my vibe. I want to feel like a wizard who is surrounded by the collections of his many adventures. I hate.

• 2:47Brené Brown?

  I am Hank.

• 2:48Adam Grant?

  But when you say it like that, I don't want to be a minimalist either.

• 2:51Brené Brown?

  I want to be surrounded, like I'm a wizard, surrounded by the collections from my many adventures. I just, and I do see your go blue Michigan thing right behind you. So you have, you are a wizard and you have collected something from your adventures.

• 3:08Adam Grant?

  It's true, but only a few things.

• 3:10Brené Brown?

  Okay, before we start, do you want to ask me about my sweatshirt?

• 3:14Adam Grant?

  I do now.

• 3:15Brené Brown?

  Okay. I need you to, I need you to feign, I need you to feign interest.

• 3:20Adam Grant?

  Renee, I'm supposed to ask you a question about your sweatshirt.

• 3:23Brené Brown?

  Okay. This is my University of Texas Longhorn sweatshirt. Let's go. Texas walks off Oklahoma in the 10th. Women's and men's basketball, killing it in March Madness. Men's swimming, per usual. We win the whole thing, natty. Tower goes bright orange. I just want to start there. And if you can see behind the camera, we've got hook 'em signs going up all over the place because I've got two Longhorns in the room with me.

• 3:50Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I cannot compete with that, but we are in the final four. Although by the time this plays, I think we're going to have a winner on the men's side.

• 3:59Brené Brown?

  We will. And the women's side, right? Hmm. I'm not sure about the dates, but, okay, Adam, did you catch the clip of Eileen Gu's Olympic press conference where the reporter from The Athletic, Charlotte Harper, asked her the big question? She said, this isn't, this isn't meant to be rude, but do you think before you speak because your answers are so quick and so comprehensive?

• 4:22Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I loved this, this moment. And it, my favorite part of it actually was it didn't, it didn't happen on a slope. It was just, it was a seemingly innocuous interview.

• 4:32Brené Brown?

  Yes. And just to let you know. That Eileen Gu, if you don't know, specializes in freestyle skiing, competing across all three of those disciplines, half-pipe, big air and slope style. She's the only freestyle skier ever to medal in all three at the Olympics. And she holds the Olympic record.

• 4:51Adam Grant?

  Oh, yeah, I mean, she's a superstar. She's also extremely smart. And this question from a reporter, well, I didn't know who the reporter was when I first saw this clip. It sounded a little obnoxious, but it's not.

• 5:05Brené Brown?

  No, and I just want to give props to Charlotte Harper, the reporter from The Athletic, because it is, at first, when I heard it, I was like, kind of pissed off. And then you listen to the warmth and loveliness through which she asked the question. I want to break it down. So we both immediately go, and I've seen a lot of kind of analyses of this moment where people are missing the mark about what it is. I think it's metacognition. Do you think it's metacognition?

• 5:39Adam Grant?

  I do, but I've, I need to spend more time thinking about that thought, figuring out if that's an accurate analysis or not.

• 5:46Brené Brown?

  So let's go back, let's define it for everybody. It's the metacognition, I think, again, I'm going back to this chapter in Strong Ground where I tried to grab all the kind of the skill sets and mindsets to ready ourselves for the future that's already upon us. Metacognition is in the top five. It is the ability to notice what your mind is doing, evaluate it and deliberately change it. Two pieces to metacognition. Awareness and regulation. Awareness is what am I thinking, assuming? Regulation, given that, how do I want to respond or adjust? I mean, this has to be metacognition that we're seeing from her.

• 6:31Adam Grant?

  I think so. I mean, I've, I've always thought about metacognition as the ability to think about your own thinking and then, and then evolve it accordingly. And she's not only doing that, she's describing how she does it, which might be meta, metacognition.

• 6:45Brené Brown?

  So. One of the things that I think is interesting when we think about metacognition, let me tell, I'm gonna tell you a story that was also interesting. A month ago, I was with the CEO of a hospital here in Houston. I'm actually not in Houston, I'm in Austin, but in Houston. And she said, "I was listening to Strong Ground on my phone while I was walking. And when you got to metacognition, I was like, I don't, I don't think I get it. I'm gonna have to read that, not listen to it." So then I got home and I read it and I'm like, okay, I need to reread it. And I made some notes and I highlighted the parts that made sense to me. And then I finally got it. "Can you explain to us what it is?" I was like, "You just did."

• 7:30Brené Brown?

  And she said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "You came across something that you didn't quite understand and you knew what it would take to get there." Would you agree that that's how it works?

• 7:43Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I think the, I mean, the first part is she had the intellectual humility to know that she didn't understand it.

• 7:50Brené Brown?

  Yes, huge.

• 7:51Adam Grant?

  As opposed to just assuming, okay, I, I get it. And then, to your point, she went and actually, it was like, okay. I, I don't know if she'd read the, the whole body of research on how we, we're better at critical thinking when we read than listen, but clearly understood that intuitively and said, "Okay, I've gotta, I've gotta really scrutinize this material to process it."

• 8:16Brené Brown?

  How clear and persuasive, in your opinion, is the evidence, reading versus listening?

• 8:25Adam Grant?

  It's pretty consistent for critical thinking and depth of processing.

• 8:30Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 8:31Adam Grant?

  And I, I think that's in part because when we're listening, we don't pause and replay nearly as much as we pause and reread. We don't highlight as much, we don't summarize as much, we don't synthesize as much. We're more absorbed in the experience as opposed to stepping out of it to analyze.

• 8:52Brené Brown?

  God, that is really interesting because one of the things I, some of the feedback that I get when I read my audiobooks, because I listen to, I read, I only read nonfiction and I listen to fiction. And, which is interesting. And I'm very clear about how I learn because if you survive a PhD program, you, you have, you either don't make it through. I mean, I think we started with 14 in my cohort and we ended with three. You either don't make it through, or, or you don't make it through. So you have to understand how you learn because it's, they assign to you more than what you, is humanly possible. So you have to learn

• 9:32Brené Brown?

  how to do that. I think that when I'm reading my audiobooks, I will actually say, you know what? That was a big definition. I'm going to reread it for you in case you're doing the laundry or walking or driving, because I would have to go back and reread that if I was reading the actual book. So I'm going to reread this to you right now. And I get a lot of good feedback about that, but I never, I just thought it was, I thought it was just me.

• 9:57Adam Grant?

  It's not. And I love, I love that you actually paused to do that, which never occurred to me.

• 10:03Brené Brown?

  You know, I'm a pauser.

• 10:04Adam Grant?

  Yes. So I've heard.

• 10:06Brené Brown?

  Yes, I'm a pauser. Okay. The other part of metacognition that I think is interesting is, because metacognition has four or five different parts to it. One of them is calibration. And I'm really interested in your take on this because I see you doing it in real time sometimes. It's weird. You have, and you have a certain face that you make when you're doing it, I think. So calibration in metacognition is how closely your confidence matches reality. Good calibration is on things I know well, I'm confident. On things I don't, I'm curious

• 10:44Brené Brown?

  and cautious. Poor calibration is chronic overconfidence. Or Dunning Kruger. What do you make of calibration as a part of metacognition?

• 10:58Adam Grant?

  In some ways, it's the most important skill because if you get that wrong, everything else fails afterward, right? If you are confident where you should doubt yourself, and also you doubt yourself where you should be confident, then no matter how much time you spend thinking about your own reasoning, you're going to end up adjusting in the wrong places.

• 11:22Speaker 04

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• 11:46Speaker 05

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• 11:50Speaker 04

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• 11:53Brené Brown?

  Okay, I've learned a lot about, because I want to get into this because, so metacognition, thinking about our thinking. Let's, before we go into the kind of a dive on Dunning Kruger, I want to walk through kind of a breakdown of what Eileen Gu said and tie it to specific tools that I think we can be deploying in our own lives. Okay, so she said, "I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking, and I kind of modify it.

• 12:25Brené Brown?

  So I apply an analytical lens to my own thinking and then I modify my thinking." So I think this is an example of metacognitive monitoring and regulation. Yep. Which would be kind of the core, is it Flavell? Or Flavell, do you know the main researcher that put kind of this construct on the map? I think it's Flavell. He kind of, his core definition, actively observing and adjusting one's own thought processes. So you hear that she does this. The second thing that I think is so interesting, I've got 542 questions for you about this.

• 13:00Brené Brown?

  I jour-, she says, I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. So I think this might be metacognitive knowledge development, which is like building an awareness of how your own mind works. What do you think about journaling as a way

• 13:18Brené Brown?

  to getting explicit about how your mind works?

• 13:22Adam Grant?

  Well, I think, oh, there's so many things that are interesting about this.

• 13:25Brené Brown?

  I know, right?

• 13:26Adam Grant?

  The first thing that, I mean, I hardly know where to take this. I think the first thing that I'm really struck by is we actually, we all intuitively know that metacognition is an important skill. Anybody who's ever gone to therapy is trying to use metacognition.

• 13:44Brené Brown?

  Wait, stop, no, no, I can't let that go. What does that mean? What do you mean, everyone that got me, someone is like, therapy consumer par excellence?

• 13:53Brené Brown?

  Is that what we're doing in there?

• 13:55Adam Grant?

  Well, I mean, some of it is also emotion, understanding and regulation.

• 14:00Brené Brown?

  Right.

• 14:00Adam Grant?

  And behavior, you know, I guess there's a cognitive and emotional and a behavioral component. But I think about cognitive behavioral therapy, for example. And that entire approach to trying to improve your life starts with the idea that you have some dysfunctional thought patterns and you need to monitor them, notice them, and then adjust them.

• 14:24Adam Grant?

  And if that's not metacognition, what is?

• 14:26Brené Brown?

  That's true. Yeah, you know, this is the first time ever I've thought about

• 14:32Brené Brown?

  addressing faulty thinking under a metacognition lens. Okay, so, and then tie it to journaling.

• 14:39Adam Grant?

  And that's for me, well, so that's for me, why journaling is such a powerful tool for metacognition is, you know, journaling, according to some psychologists, is essentially self-guided therapy. It's a way of reflecting on your thoughts and forming a story. And then self distancing, so that your thoughts are staring at you from a page as opposed to inside your head. And then you can see them more neutrally. I don't quite want to say more objectively, but because you're separated from your thoughts, it's easier for you to evaluate them and figure out where are they accurate? Where are they leading you astray? What do you think?

• 15:14Brené Brown?

  Now, this is where I need help, because then I write down in my journal what I'm thinking. And then I bring my journal to therapy. I'm like, what do you make of this shit?

• 15:23Brené Brown?

  That's my, that's my approach. And you know, and then I get some great feedback about, uh, great that you captured it. And then of course, the dreaded, what do you think about this shit?

• 15:35Brené Brown?

  You know, and then I'm like, oh my God, okay.

• 15:39Brené Brown?

  Yeah, it's for me priceless. Okay, let's go to the next one.

• 15:42Adam Grant?

  Do you ever journal about your journaling?

• 15:45Brené Brown?

  No, I just watch reruns of Bridgerton.

• 15:49Brené Brown?

  No, I don't do that. No, or listen to like, uh, honky tonk country music on vinyl. That's what I do instead of thinking of journaling about my journaling. No, but you know, oh my God, maybe I do because I do journal. And then I do go back and do art over my journaling that reflects what I'm learning from it. So I'll include a little picture of one of my pages. If we can blur out the actual words because my journaling, my journaling is my space where I'm like, and then I punched him in the throat. And then, so yeah, so I think, but I guess I do, because I do do an artful recap.

• 16:31Brené Brown?

  And I choose, I watercolor over my journal and I also use a lot of art and collage.

• 16:39Adam Grant?

  Wow. Of course, this is coming together in 3D and multi-color.

• 16:45Brené Brown?

  For me, yes.

• 16:46Adam Grant?

  Yeah. Yeah, and my, you know, my journal just has words.

• 16:51Brené Brown?

  I have to tell you one page that I thought was, I wrote down, I was trying to excavate, the team was trying to excavate the mental models that were driving some, some not impactful behavior at work. And I just wrote two or three things down in the journal that I thought were mental models getting in the way. One of them was grind equals playing to win versus groundedness equals playing to win. And I have a huge John Darian, he's an artist who I love, giant four inch by four inch eyeball that I put on that page. Cause that was like a third eye. Open moment. Okay, let's go, let's go, let's finish this. Okay, back to Eileen. She says, "You can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are."

• 17:36Brené Brown?

  And to me, this is an example of kind of metacognitive regulation. The ability to not just calibrate and develop knowledge, but to regulate yourself and your thinking. And then the last one is huge. And I want to talk about it because I think it's something missing that you're seeing in some of the new research that's looking at Dunning Kruger through a different lens. So I think it's really big. Eileen Gu says, "How can I approach my own brain the way I approach my craft of free skiing?" Which I think is recognizing that thinking is a skill

• 18:20Brené Brown?

  that can be deliberately practiced and improved. Whoa. What do you make of that?

• 18:30Adam Grant?

  I mean, this is supposed to be what happens in school, right? We're supposed to get better at thinking. But I think, I think most education systems confine us to, "Okay, here's how you get better at thinking about algebra, so you can get more problems right. Here's how you get better at thinking about an essay." And there's very little, "Let's think about how to think more effectively regardless of what the problem is." "How do you think effectively about your own biases? How do you think effectively about your, your interactions with other people?" The fact that Eileen Gu recognizes all of that as a skill to develop and work on. I mean, to me, it, it challenges just something really fundamental that, that many people do that prevents that,

• 19:15Adam Grant?

  which is they take their own thoughts as gospel.

• 19:19Adam Grant?

  They have a thought and therefore it must be true. And she has this great distance between her identity and her thought processes. You hear her saying, I want to think about and figure out how my own brain works so I can make it better and become someone different as opposed to saying, I need to believe everything I think. I need to internalize every view that I hold, every assumption, every opinion, every belief. And I would love to better understand how we get more people to that point. Brene, do you have thoughts on how we can do that?

• 19:54Brené Brown?

  I mean, I just think it explains what's happening in this country. That if I were a despote, if I were a dangerous leader, the first two things that I would go, the first two things that I would vilify are skills that increase metacognition and empathy. And that is exactly what's happening from the far right today. I mean, really, I think the first two things I would do is I need to make sure that people

• 20:33Brené Brown?

  don't get too good at thinking, are too good at compassion or empathy, especially for vulnerable populations. If I can vilify any type of critical thinking, if I can vilify the process of deeper thought and then make sure people don't care for other people, I could rob you blind. That's, I mean, really, that's the first place I go. I gotta be honest.

• 21:00Adam Grant?

  That's the playbook. And I think you're right. I think the far right may have started it, but I think the far left is doing the same thing.

• 21:09Brené Brown?

  Say more.

• 21:10Adam Grant?

  I think cancel culture. Cancel culture is a refusal to empathize with somebody who did something you find objectionable.

• 21:15Brené Brown?

  No, I think, yeah, I agree. I agree. I also, I think what the two have in common is...

• 21:33Brené Brown?

  The inextricable connection of thought to moral indignation.

• 21:40Adam Grant?

  Say that again.

• 21:42Brené Brown?

  I think what extremism on either side have in common is fueled by self righteousness and thought is inextricably tied to moral indignation.

• 21:57Brené Brown?

  I think both of those things don't get us out of the peril we face right now.

• 22:04Brené Brown?

  But I only see one side of them. I only see one side of the far. I mean, I'm not, I don't identify with either side of those ideologically or politically. But yeah, I don't even think it, I don't even think it is helpful to rank which one's more dangerous, but I do come from a social work perspective where we're the vulnerable people getting hurt and at whose hands. And so I do have a bias there for sure. And maybe it's a bias and maybe I'm just right.

• 22:35Brené Brown?

  I need to Iling you a little bit. Okay, let's get into how metacognition, and this is really speaking of an interesting

• 22:49Brené Brown?

  kind of political connection and also social connection. Let's talk about what Dunning Kruger is. I've learned a lot about Dunning Kruger, actually from you, from your podcast and from your books. So why don't you walk us through what it is and what it isn't?

• 23:06Adam Grant?

  Okay, so the original finding is that the people who are least knowledgeable or least skilled at a task are the most likely to overestimate their knowledge and skill. So the people with the worst senses of humor are the most likely to overestimate how funny they are. The people who struggle the most in emotional intelligence are the most likely to exaggerate how great they are at reading and managing emotions. The people who do poorly on a trivia test are the most overconfident about their expertise. And the list goes on and on and on. And this has been documented in so many different domains. But I think it's really important to caveat that this actually doesn't happen to complete novices.

• 23:49Adam Grant?

  If you're a total beginner, you know you don't know anything. It's when you gain a little knowledge or a little skill that you start to get dangerous because your confidence rises faster than your competence. And then you can start to get trapped on what is sometimes called Mount Stupid, where you're at this point of very high confidence that is not matched by your own capability level. And then you're basically ignorant, but arrogant. And I think what scares me about that a lot is at that point, you've lost metacognition. You believe you know things you don't, and you cannot see the errors in your thinking. I think flat-earthers are sort of classic Dunning-Kruger victims.

• 24:35Adam Grant?

  How'd I do? What'd I miss?

• 24:38Brené Brown?

  I think it's really interesting. One of the things that I remember when I first came across the research and kind of did a deep dive on it is this idea of dual burden in Dunning-Kruger. Like, you don't know, and you don't even know that you don't know.

• 24:57Brené Brown?

  I gotta tell you from like, so this is one of the hardest things, I think, to lead. If you're leading or managing someone who's got some Dunning-Kruger bias around their own ability, it's a very hard thing because they don't know that they don't know, literally. And so I find it to be very frustrating for people, but I am going to tell a quick story about how I had Dunning-Kruger. Like, so when I first started pickleball, I played tennis for 40 years. And so the first time I went to go play, you know, everything's ranked by beginning,

• 25:40Brené Brown?

  intermediate, advanced. And so I, you know, schlepped over to the beginner thing and was kicked out of the beginner group almost immediately. Not because I could play pickleball, but because this was not my first racket sport. You know, I understand how a ball hits the face of the paddle. I understand, you know, I can hit balls, you know, I've done that for many decades. So then I was like, oh, God, I'm really good at this. I'm actually going to be excellent at this. So I went over to advanced and signed up for open play in advanced and lost every game. And then someone actually told me.

• 26:19Brené Brown?

  I thought I was just having a bad day, but someone actually said, and listen, if you're playing pickleball, I'm not saying that 95% of white men over 50 are going to coach you without being asked, but I'm going to say if someone's coaching you, when you haven't been asked, 95% of the time, it's going to be a white dude over 50. And one of these came up to me and said, listen, it's not fun for us when you're playing up like this. You don't, you shouldn't be in an advanced group. And I, well, first of all, I was really embarrassed, a little, with a little bit of shame rising, because I hated that I overestimated my ability. But what was interesting is I went to the intermediate group, and I kind of, that's where I should have been, but I immediately

• 27:04Brené Brown?

  paid for an hour for a coach to watch me play. And there was, this was kind of when dupe scores, like your score ranking, like UTSA, if you're from tennis or whatever, like your score ranking, but you know what games you can be in, and it's your tournament stuff. And so I said, I really want to be, and I think of myself right now, in this beginning phase, as a 3.75. And he said, you're a 3.2 on your best day, if I compiled all of your best moves into one game.

• 27:40Adam Grant?

  Are we on a one to five scale?

• 27:41Brené Brown?

  We're on a, well, it goes up, but like for someone like me, you know, I'm going to probably max out at 4.5, you know? And so I thought, oh my God, why? And he said, it was interesting, because he gave me some information, and he said, you're going to do this to the ball. If you want to be a 4.0, they're going to do this to the ball. You're hitting baseline drives and staying back at the baseline, because you're a baseline tennis player, the game pickleball's won and lost at the kitchen. You're not coming up. You are slamming the ball into your opponents from midcourt, and they're slamming it back on your tennis shoe string, because you don't know how to reset and drop a ball.

• 28:19Brené Brown?

  And at that moment, the Dunning Kruger was gone because I had the skill to predict accurately what my level was. Does that, does this make this, make this story make sense?

• 28:34Adam Grant?

  Oh, this is, this is so good. David Dunning says that when you lack the skills to produce excellence, you usually also lack the skills to judge excellence. And so what you were doing was you were building that second set of skills so that you could figure out where you stood on the first.

• 28:52Brené Brown?

  Okay, you got, you have to slow down. This is going to be really important for people. So say it again and get explicit about the story.

• 29:02Adam Grant?

  Okay, so David Dunning says, when you lack the skills to produce excellence, you often also lack the skills to judge excellence. So your pickleball skill level was not at excellent.

• 29:15Brené Brown?

  No.

• 29:16Adam Grant?

  But also your knowledge was really low.

• 29:18Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 29:18Adam Grant?

  And you couldn't even gauge what excellence looked like. You didn't know enough about the game to figure out where on that spectrum you were. And what you were asking the coach for is a bunch of information. You were gathering data points about what excellence looks like. So you could then put yourself on the map. And I'm assuming after you put yourself on the map, you then had a navigation plan for how you were going to move forward.

• 29:40Brené Brown?

  Oh, my God, I did. There were like eight skills I had to improve. So I took two every six months. And it's interesting because, and I'm just going to make this aside, I love pickleball. It is not going to ever have the viewership of tennis for this reason. You have to be a very good player to understand and appreciate what you're seeing on a pickleball court if you're watching professionals. You can just walk out of the womb and go to Wimbledon and watch center court and understand, Jesus, these are athletes like beyond belief. You don't understand what it takes to do what people, the professionals are doing on a court in pickleball unless you play pickleball. So everyone who watches it thinks, oh, I can

• 30:25Brené Brown?

  do that. It's like ping pong. It's like giant ping pong, you know? So this is really interesting.

• 30:32Adam Grant?

  Well, I think part of what's interesting about this is it makes me think about the fact that it's harder to gauge your own knowledge or skill level in tasks that are more complex or more subjective.

• 30:46Brené Brown?

  Say that one more time, say that sentence one more time.

• 30:49Adam Grant?

  If you're doing something complex, or if there's not an objective way to score it, it's easier to fall victim to Dunning Kruger. It's easier to be overconfident when you don't really know anything, or you're not very good. So let me, let me give an example that, that stands out as we talk about this. I think, nobody thinks that they could win, nobody thinks they could outrun Usain Bolt or Alison Felix as a sprinter.

• 31:15Brené Brown?

  No.

• 31:15Adam Grant?

  Nobody thinks they could do a sub-two-hour marathon without being a world-class runner, because the times are really objective. And I can sit there, just going all out on my treadmill, and realize I can't even sustain for a mile what the winners do for 26.2 in a marathon.

• 31:34Brené Brown?

  Super clear.

• 31:34Adam Grant?

  Calibrated.

• 31:37Brené Brown?

  You're calibrated. Oh, yeah. Wait, wait, meta, so right now, meta cognition calibration. Okay.

• 31:44Adam Grant?

  Easy, when there's an objective standard that you can benchmark yourself against.

• 31:49Adam Grant?

  I made the same mistake that you did in pickleball, in ping pong. I, I have, I have good reflexes, I've always had good hand-eye coordination. I grew up being one of the better ping pong players of anybody I played, and I always thought, gee, my, my athletic limitations that have plagued me in every other domain, ping pong is probably something I could get really good at if I ever focused on it. And last year, I went to a charity tournament.

• 32:16Brené Brown?

  No, you did not.

• 32:17Adam Grant?

  Okay. I did. It was, it was, it was in Philly, and they said, bring the family. So I went with a couple of our kids, and it was a ton of fun. And I went in very confident. And I got crushed, 11-0, by a semi-serious player who trains with pros. And then, there was a world champion there. And I said, okay, I've got to try my hand. Let me, let me see how far off I am.

• 32:46Adam Grant?

  It took me three tries just to get my paddle on their serve. And not only did I suddenly realize how far I was from being any good at ping pong, just the amount of work that it would take to get there. I don't think I could physically pull it off. I don't think I could transform my mind and body into that skill level. I'm like, okay, this is way harder than I thought. And I think that ping pong is simpler than pickleball in a lot of ways. But it's still complex and subjective enough that I couldn't tell where I stood. And I didn't know all the things I would need to know and get good at in order to actually be decent at it.

• 33:27Brené Brown?

  This is so interesting because we have such a competitive ping pong family. So we have ping pong tables. We have a ping pong table in, I guess, what's theoretically a formal dining room in our house. Because like, first of all, no, I don't want to have anybody over. And two, if I have someone over, we're not doing anything formal. So we just said, fuck it, I'm putting a ping pong table there. And so we're very, we're very competitive. But it's interesting when I play people, we have to, first of all, we have to play, it's on. Like, we gotta play some ping pong.

• 33:59Adam Grant?

  That we can do.

• 34:00Brené Brown?

  Yeah, that we can do. But I play a very flat game. And so when you get to really good people, it's all speed, spin and angle. And it's like, I can't answer a serve either. I can whip up on some people in my family. Not my 20 year old son at this point, but because he's a spinny guy, you know? But it's, this is so interesting. So let's, okay, so let's take this out of paddle sports. And I'm going to tell you another, another Dunning Kruger place for, no, it's not a Dunning Kruger anymore. What do you call it if you thought you were good at it? You learned you sucked and it's true that you suck and you're never going to be good at it. This is one of these areas for me.

• 34:45Brené Brown?

  Time estimation, which really matters at work. This is not a ping pong, pickleball, you know, recreational fun thing. Like, I am terrible at time estimation.

• 34:57Adam Grant?

  Oh, you're talking about the planning fallacy?

• 35:00Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 35:01Adam Grant?

  Where in the original studies, it took people on average three to four times longer to finish a task than they estimated.

• 35:09Brené Brown?

  But I have a Dunning Kruger with a planning fallacy rising.

• 35:15Brené Brown?

  Like, I, no, it's, it's, I was, I've been trying to apply the same kind of calibration techniques where you write down how accurate you think you're gonna be, you do it, and you see how off you are on your prediction. Like, that's one of the skills that, you know, helps you develop metacognition and get over Dunning Kruger, right? Prediction Performance Debrief. Prediction Performance Debrief. My prediction is always wrong on time estimation. My performance sucks. And the debrief, I'm not interested in even journaling.

• 35:55Adam Grant?

  Which, are you, are you wrong in the standard planning fallacy direction, though, that you, you think you can do things faster than you really can?

• 36:01Brené Brown?

  Yes, like, yes, and I get frustrated with, I mostly think other people should be doing things faster.

• 36:10Brené Brown?

  Like, for example, like, for example-

• 36:12Adam Grant?

  That's a different conversation.

• 36:14Brené Brown?

  No, but for example, like, we were gonna have some, when Charlie was in high school, some of the water polo team parents over for something informal, because again, my ping pong table's in the formal dining room. But we were gonna have them over, and about an hour before they got there, I told Steve, I don't think there's enough color in the yard. I need you to run to Home Depot and get some flowers and plant them before people come over. And, listen to this, let's, wait, no, think this through with me for a second.

• 36:41Adam Grant?

  Flowers, why aren't you growing faster?

• 36:43Brené Brown?

  No, listen, and he said-

• 36:45Adam Grant?

  I'm on the clock.

• 36:46Brené Brown?

  He said, listen, I'm not doing that. They're gonna be here in an hour. And I said, it'll take you 10 minutes to get to Home Depot, 15 minutes to pick out the flowers, 10 minutes to go back. That's like 35 minutes, and you can plant them in 20 minutes. I don't get the problem.

• 37:06Brené Brown?

  Go ahead.

• 37:07Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I can't, I can't help you there.

• 37:09Brené Brown?

  Yeah, we didn't get the flowers, I'm just gonna say.

• 37:12Adam Grant?

  I, obviously.

• 37:14Brené Brown?

  And he said, "I'm so happy to add color to the yard. I'll need one or two days in advance. Are you gonna grow them?

• 37:24Brené Brown?

  What do you think this is, impatience?

• 37:27Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I was, I was gonna say, I don't, I don't think either of us is patient at all. But what's, what's interesting to me is that this is a, a repeated challenge in the same direction. Right, so you, you know that you underestimate how long something's gonna take. It happens, you've held yourself accountable by scoring yourself. And then what? Doesn't, doesn't it bother you to repeat the same error over and over?

• 37:51Brené Brown?

  No, I'm just trying to find faster people.

• 37:57Brené Brown?

  Okay, you know what?

• 37:58Adam Grant?

  You sound like half the managers I've ever worked with.

• 38:01Brené Brown?

  Okay, let me tell you what I do do. I mean, and then we'll, we'll, we'll have to come back because we do want to do the questions. Here's what we have done. This is a Scrum, this is a tool from Scrum, our agile processes that I love. I'm obsessed with a lot of Scrum tools. We call it at B-Berg, Brené Brown Education Research Group, that's our organization. We call it the turn and learn. So in a meeting, we will say, okay, here's the project. Everyone understands the parameters and what we're doing. Everybody write down on a post-it, how many months we think this is going to take, or weeks, or whatever. And we'll do it in weeks because I already get anxious if we use months as the time increment. I like to use hours, but they've got me down to weeks. So weeks. And then a count of three, we'll turn them over.

• 38:46Brené Brown?

  And we do that to avoid like, you know, halo effect. Because people will see mine first and be like, oh my God, she's the boss and she thinks we can do it. So when we turn it over really quick, everybody's got the number of weeks, including like the engineers and the operations people. And mine will say two weeks and theirs will say eight months. So, but, but I lose. So, so

• 39:10Adam Grant?

  Well, do you?

• 39:10Brené Brown?

  I don't, I do. Oh, yeah, I do, of course. Yeah, I do. I, I respect the process and I respect the fact that, that I'm not good at it. But I'm not able to change it because if I wrote eight months down on my post-it, I would just be bullshitting to show how much I've grown.

• 39:29Adam Grant?

  So why, so the underlying belief hasn't changed. The way that you form your expectations is flawed in the same way that it was before.

• 39:37Brené Brown?

  Maybe the anxiety disorder is still in place. I don't know. Like, maybe it's just, I can't stand it. Like, let's go, let's go. But I have learned to, I have learned to defer to the judgment of people I respect and trust, who both hold a sense of urgency and a practical, excellent operational mind.

• 39:59Adam Grant?

  So I like what you're doing for calibration, which is you're not just anchoring on your own judgment. You're bringing in the wisdom of crowds, but you've also recognized that crowds vary in their wisdom. You've found people who, who are good at this specific skill with the kinds of tasks you're doing.

• 40:15Brené Brown?

  Yes. Yes. Well, in the segment here-

• 40:18Adam Grant?

  Which makes a lot of sense.

• 40:19Brené Brown?

  Yeah, because I look great. Look at me, look at me, Brené Gu. Using my own mind to help.

• 40:30Brené Brown?

  Okay, I want to go to some questions for the second half. We only have about 20 minutes left, maybe. Let's go to some questions.

• 40:38Adam Grant?

  I do, too.

• 40:39Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 40:41Adam Grant?

  I had one, one other thing I wanted to

• 40:43Brené Brown?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:44Adam Grant?

  bring up here before we leave this.

• 40:45Brené Brown?

  Yeah, that's great. Before we leave, our friends Dunning Kruger and the idea of metacognition and thinking about our own thinking, any final thoughts on that before we go to questions from our first episodes?

• 40:59Adam Grant?

  Okay, two quick things on this. The, the first one is, when we were talking about Dunning Kruger earlier, I kept thinking about Elon Musk.

• 41:09Adam Grant?

  And how the people who love him and the people who hate him are both missing part of the story. Like, when I see Elon, I see Dunning Kruger. I see somebody who is brilliant at hardware, which makes him really effective at electric cars and rockets, but does not know that he is ignorant when it comes to software, which is one of the reasons why Twitter or X, or whatever it's called now, has run into so many problems. And I see his detractors saying Elon's a moron. No, this is domain specific. I hear his supporters saying Elon's a genius. And I say, no, that too is domain specific.

• 41:52Adam Grant?

  And if I were, if I were in his orbit, the thing I would try to help him do is calibrate. How would you, how would you tackle that, Brene? And I would love to just hear, how do you think about getting someone in a position like that who's not calibrated to look in the mirror?

• 42:10Brené Brown?

  I, I'm torn between like unleashing right now, or being more thoughtful and saying, I don't know him. I've never met him. I couldn't assess. But if we took someone like that, I actually think the problem that we're talking about now is maybe a first cousin of metacognition, especially when it comes to Elon, which is self-awareness and emotional regulation and emotional awareness. So I don't think this is a, I don't know. I don't

• 42:51Brené Brown?

  know him. So I don't know if this is a cognitive battle where, boy, how do we get someone to understand that their expertise is domain specific? And if we could get them to understand that, they might be able to apply some of the same things that are maybe more intuitive about their domain expertise to things where they want to learn and be better. But I think I would have to say. That your lack of self-awareness and your lack of emotional awareness is so great that not only are you not able to engage in smart metacognition, you're making decisions that hurt other people. And unless that's intentional, we got bigger fish to fry. What's your second one?

• 43:37Adam Grant?

  Okay, second one is, I think there's a, there's a, just a bit of a cautionary note as people work on metacognition, which is, on the one hand, there are real upsides of analyzing your knowledge and explaining what you know. We, we know from a, a long history of research on the, the teacher effect or the tutor effect, that when you explain things you know to someone else, you actually understand them better.

• 44:02Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 44:03Adam Grant?

  And you also get better at remembering them, which is great.

• 44:07Adam Grant?

  We also know from research on the illusion of explanatory depth, that when you try to explain something that you think you know, you will find out really quickly when you don't. And the, the studies on this are hilarious. You ask people, you can do it right after you ride a bike or flush a toilet. How do the gears on the bike work? How does that toilet flush? And you will hear people start to stumble and stammer and realize they don't have a clue how the basic machinery they've been operating their whole lives actually works, unless they've really carefully studied it. And that, that task, right, of saying, well, let me actually try to explain what I know, is, to me, the ultimate way to calibrate.

• 44:47Brené Brown?

  Wow.

• 44:50Adam Grant?

  So maybe, wait, we should just pause there for a second and say, if you don't have that wisdom of crowds, if you don't have that wise crowd available to you, like you do, Brene, or like you've put together, or you're not sure who to ask, right, just the, the, the practice of explaining will help you figure out what you understand and what you don't. And I, I think that's probably something we could all do regularly.

• 45:10Brené Brown?

  I love this. Okay, I'm gonna add a third cautionary tale before we move on.

• 45:15Adam Grant?

  Sorry, I, I have one other cautionary note on this part.

• 45:18Brené Brown?

  Perfect.

• 45:18Adam Grant?

  You go first.

• 45:19Brené Brown?

  Okay. Mine would be to say that you cannot meta-cognition your way out of a Dunning-Kruger bias alone. There's no, there's no amount of studying your own mind.

• 45:36Brené Brown?

  Around a topic that will increase your competence in that topic. It has to go hand in hand, metacognition plus actual skills building. So in pickleball, I couldn't just understand, oh, this is why I'm overestimating myself. And then all of a sudden, oh, I'm better at pickleball. No, I have to do the metacognition work of, oh, this is why I'm overestimating myself. Now I need to learn how to reset from midcourt. I need to learn how to get up to the kitchen faster from the baseline. I need to learn how to do a better drop. So overcoming overestimation is not just about understanding your thinking,

• 46:21Brené Brown?

  but building skill in that domain. And I think that's very important.

• 46:30Brené Brown?

  I think that's really important because there's been some interesting research out of the University of Edinburgh where they had people that had real kind of measurable Dunning Kruger around a topic. They really thought they were much better at it than they were. They skilled them up in metacognition, but did not give them any skills in what they thought they were really good at. And the metacognition alone didn't pull them up and out. You gotta do the skills building too, in that area. Agree or disagree?

• 47:05Adam Grant?

  Hard agree.

• 47:07Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 47:07Adam Grant?

  I think that is, that is spot on. And it actually sets up the one other thing that I think needs to be just put on the table as a caveat, which is, in the short run, getting better at metacognition can make you worse at the skill you're trying to build.

• 47:20Brené Brown?

  Yeah, oh, God. Wait.

• 47:23Adam Grant?

  Which, I mean, just so frustrating.

• 47:26Brené Brown?

  You cannot open this door. We cannot change topics yet. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Why is that? I hate this.

• 47:36Adam Grant?

  It drives me crazy. So the, my favorite demonstrations were with golfers, where if you ask a golfer to explain their stroke, they actually perform worse afterward.

• 47:50Adam Grant?

  And I think this is easier to unpack with our racket sport example. So if you ask a tennis player, like, walk me through the mechanics of your serve, then their serve will get less accurate. And what seems to be happening there is you've taken a skill that was mostly automated, and you've all of a sudden made it conscious. And trying to think through the steps actually interferes with your ability to effortlessly execute those steps on autopilot. And I think this is a version of what happened to Simone Biles in Tokyo in the 2021 Olympics. When she got the twisties, there's a lot of research showing that when you have performance anxiety, it makes you more self-conscious.

• 48:34Adam Grant?

  And it starts to take what might be a routine that you normally do on autopilot and make it more salient. So you're actually thinking through, what am I supposed to do now? And that makes it more likely, if you're a gymnast or a diver, for example, you get lost in midair. If you are a baseball player or a golfer, you might get, instead of the twisties, they would call it the yips.

• 48:55Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Adam Grant?

  But it's the same basic thing, which is all of a sudden, I'm feeling anxious and I start to pay attention to, well, what is my arm supposed to be doing here? What is my leg supposed to be doing? And that interferes with my ability to smoothly just go through the motions. And I don't think this is just true for sports. I don't think it's just true for for physical challenges. I think that anytime you do something well automatically, as you start to analyze it and describe it, you may take a step backward before you can take two steps forward. What do you think?

• 49:26Brené Brown?

  Oh, my God. So we are in, we are inside now. Look, this is a really important conversation, and it's a conversation that I think I'm learning from and hopefully our listeners and people who are watching on YouTube will learn from. I say we pause the questions for the next episode and just finish up on this because you've opened the door into what I think should probably be a full episode, but I have to say that.

• 49:53Brené Brown?

  You use the word twice, you use the word interfering twice, that you're, that when you start taking, when you stop playing from habit and you start working on something to improve, you get interference. And now you're inside of my favorite, a book that came out 50 years ago, I read every year, every sports team that I work with, I use, every leadership team.

• 50:21Adam Grant?

  Can I guess?

• 50:22Brené Brown?

  Guess.

• 50:23Adam Grant?

  Is it The Inner Game of Tennis?

• 50:24Brené Brown?

  With Timothy Gallwey, yes. So the formula there, and we just, we actually just did this with a group of 200 senior leaders. The formula that I think about all the time from that book, which is just, if you haven't read, it's a classic, I mean, it's just so good, but I, I read it every year. The thing that I always think about with that is performance equals potential minus interference. And one of the big, we'll, we'll save that whole book for another conversation, but one of the things I think about all the time is, you know, performance equals potential minus interference. When you are working on skill development in a new area, that is absolutely interference.

• 51:05Brené Brown?

  When I'm working on, you know, not staying on the baseline, but getting to the net very quickly in pickleball, I will get to the net and then I'll get slammed with a ball that I can't even answer because all, I'm not in flow. I'm not in flow. And, and when we see athletes who are winning and the, at the highest level of performance, they are in flow. They are not thinking about the mechanics of a shot. They are, they are relying on their training and what they've done, and they're trying to eliminate interference. They are not trying to break down every shot. They are not looking at their footing before the serve. They are not thinking about how they're taking a corner in F1.

• 51:49Brené Brown?

  They are not thinking about who's down the pitch and where are they in relationship to the goalie. They are not doing that. And so helping people who are listening right now understand you are going to go backward.

• 52:03Brené Brown?

  Before you go forward in metacognition and skills building is is we would be remiss without saying it because even if what you're working on is having more connecting conversations with your partner, staying curious with your children, it is not going to feel good when you're trying it and learning it.

• 52:28Adam Grant?

  Not at all. And I mean, I I ran into this when I was as a shy introvert trying to get better at public speaking. I was working with a speaking coach who said, you don't have to shout every sentence. You're overcompensating for your fear that you're, you know, you're going to be too withdrawn and you're going to be boring. And, you know, it's actually modulation and variety that will keep your audience engaged and you need to work on that. And I found that as I worked on that, I would stumble over my my content.

• 53:07Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 53:08Adam Grant?

  I tripped more on the stage. I was, you know, I was so focused on trying to get my pitch right and have awareness of and control over my tone of voice and the way that I was articulating things and how much emphasis I was putting in different places. And even pacing, right, that everything else fell apart and I felt like I was getting worse as a speaker. But I had to get to the point where like some of those adjustments would happen naturally. I didn't have to think about them anymore in order then to sort of put the pieces back together. And I would say there was there was probably a three month period where I felt like I couldn't give a talk without being completely in my head and ruminating about everything that was going wrong. And it was, it was

• 53:53Adam Grant?

  really frustrating, but it was it was a necessary backward step in order to unlearn a set of habits that were were holding me back from being able to deliver my message effectively. And I didn't think about this as a metacognition problem at the time of, oh, I'm taking something off of autopilot that was automated incorrectly, and I need to now rewire it in order to to put it back on autopilot. Yikes. That would have been helpful. Where were you 10 years ago?

• 54:21Brené Brown?

  Where were you when I was like slamming every ball from the baseline? Like, um, yeah, like. I could knock the paddle out of your hand, but it's a different sport. And so, yeah, this is, this is such a good conversation. Let's save the questions for next time because they're, they're really good and they're complex. And I think we can learn a lot from them, but I, we've covered a lot today. So any key takeaway for you today from our conversation, starting with Eileen, metacognition, Dunning Kruger?

• 54:55Adam Grant?

  I think, I think we've covered most of my key takeaways, but one thing we didn't maybe make explicit that we should is, as I listen to you talk about Eileen Gu, I, I'm struck by how rare it is for people to even admit out loud that they think about their own thinking and they work on improving their thinking. And I think the idea of normalizing, hey, my brain didn't come with an operating manual. It didn't come with an owner's guide. I need to spend a lot of time observing how it works, figuring out what it does well, what it doesn't do well, so that I can achieve mastery over it, or at least, you know, not constantly interfere with it

• 55:38Adam Grant?

  and have it interfering with me and my goals. I think that's, that's something we should, we should all aspire to do more of.

• 55:46Brené Brown?

  I mean, I really, I love that for your takeaway. And I'm gonna, I plus that one. And I would say for me, as we normalize the discomfort and the building of this, I think my takeaway is better skills plus better metacognition equals better calibration. Metacognition without skill or skill without metacognition is, there's a fragility to it that we need to be cautious about. Yeah.

• 56:20Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's a wonderful way to wrap.

• 56:24Brené Brown?

  Yeah, I love it. See you next time. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

• 56:38Adam Grant?

  We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.