Adam Grant: The Surprising New Research On Procrastination, Perfectionism & Happiness!

Work has to suck, you have to be selfish to get ahead, and you can’t become more original, these are just some of the myths that Adam Grant busts and replaces with an upgraded way to see the world. Adam Grant is Professor of Management and Psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been named one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and one of Fortune’s 40 under 40. He is also a #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books, including ‘Think Again’, ’Give and Take’, and ‘Originals’. In this conversation Adam and Steven discuss topics, such as why star players ruin teams, how to be original, why character beats genius, and the myths about entrepreneurs and risk. 00:00 Intro 02:00 Finding Happiness Meaning & Success 04:50 Redefining The Game & Changing The Rules About Success 07:20 Who Are More Successful, Givers Or Keepers? 10:25 Taking The Initiative: Great Ideas Need Execution 14:21 What Happens To Procrastinators? 21:37 Who Are The Originals Of Our Time? 22:22 What Are The Characteristics Of Originals 23:48 Why Child Geniuses Won't Become Adult Geniuses 25:09 Being A Perfectionist 27:12 The Importance Of Urgency 33:11 The Importance Of Leaning Into Difficulty 38:21 What Role Trauma Plays In Becoming Successful? 40:56 What Determines What Sibling Will Be More Successful? 48:25 What Makes A Risk Taker? 53:18 What Takes To Build A Great Team 57:38 What Happens To People When You Take Them Out Of Their Team Culture 01:01:33 How To Not Get Complacent If You're Successful 01:06:01 Disagreeing With Your Boss 01:10:09 What Science Says About Group Vs Individual Thinking 01:15:51 Unlocking Your Hidden Potential 01:26:27 Self Promotion Vs Idea Promotion 01:28:41 Think Like A Scientist 01:42:56 Last Guest Question You can access The Athletic article, ‘Does Cristiano Ronaldo make teams better or worse?’, here: https://bit.ly/3SWnckE You can purchase Adam’s book, ‘Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things’, here: https://amzn.to/3SQ2rH8 Follow Adam Twitter - https://bit.ly/3OEdq45 Instagram - https://bit.ly/3UveeMg YouTube - https://bit.ly/4bpaAtg Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  If you're running a business, people have probably told you to use AI or get left behind. And I get that urgency. Still, AI doesn't fix a messy business. It exposes one because AI can only work with the information it can see. So if you ask AI something about your business, about stock or sales or customers or about your team, that information needs to be connected to the AI to be useful. That's the idea behind NetSuite by Oracle, the sponsor of this episode. NetSuite is the AI-powered business management suite that securely connects your financials, your inventory, your commerce, your HR and your CRM into a single source of truth. And with NetSuite Next, AI is built into that connected system. It can surface useful insights, help with routine work, and let you ask questions about your business

• 0:43Steven Bartlett?

  in plain English. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free if your business is generating seven figures or more. Just go to netsuite.ai/bartlett. That's netsuite.ai/bartlett.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  This episode is sponsored by Asana.

• 1:02Steven Bartlett?

  Let me admit something to you. I'm a little bit messy. I have got ADHD and sometimes I forget things. I'll put something in Google Drive. I'll put something on my desktop. It's all over the shop. And I can't imagine how much that is costing me as an entrepreneur or as a creative. I never thought of this as a project management problem. I just thought of it as a me problem. So let me give you a window into my fiancee Melanie and how she operates. She's running a business and she doesn't rely on remembering everything. She creates systems that means she doesn't have to. And one system she's made for her business is that when people attend her retreats and they get automated itineraries and they get packs sent to them automatically after the retreat, all thanks to Asana. So if you're someone who constantly feels like you need to be better, more organised, maybe ask yourself a different question. Is it actually you that needs to change? Or is it the way that you're working?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Asana has always been great at organising work and breaking down projects into tasks. Now, you can assign those tasks to AI teammates. These are agents that already understand your work and keep things moving without you having to chase, check or remember. When something needs a real decision, it comes back to you. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, so less falls through the cracks and less has to live in your head. Try it at asana.com. A-S-A-N-A dot com.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Ronaldo is an individual superstar, but the way he plays his game does not elevate the team. So what can we learn from this? First of all. Adam Grant.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Business psychologist.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  One of the world's most influential career and business thinkers. He will help you do the best work of your life and reach your professional potential. My job is to study how to make work not suck and help you become a better version of yourself.

• 2:38Steven Bartlett?

  So what are some of the myths and findings about unlocking our hidden potential?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  These might surprise people. It turns out that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a risk factor for burnout. Firstborns score higher on IQ tests, but laterborns tend to be more willing to take risks. We don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do. It's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It is decades of research on brainstorming has shown that if you get a group of people together to generate ideas, if instead you'd let them work alone, you would have gotten more ideas and also better ideas. When people talk about imposter syndrome, that feeling is actually pretty rare. What's much more common is imposter thoughts, but there are all kinds of benefits of having those thoughts. For example, data from 50,000 people found that Chrome or Firefox users are on average better performers and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or Internet Explorer.

• 3:26Steven Bartlett?

  Give me one more.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Okay, well, this is the most vital skill to unlock the hidden potential in yourself. So what you have to do is, before we wrap, I have a couple of questions for you.

• 3:34Steven Bartlett?

  Why do I feel nervous?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  You should feel nervous.

• 3:36Steven Bartlett?

  Thank God.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  First question is, what's something I can do better as a podcast guest?

• 3:41Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, gosh.

• 3:54Steven Bartlett?

  Adam, at the very essence of your work, what is it you are trying to do, teach, or give people?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I want to give people the most useful insights from social science to help them think more clearly and critically and make choices that will build happiness and meaning and success.

• 4:17Steven Bartlett?

  And if you think about your career over the last couple of decades, what points of inspiration have you pulled from to give you as an idea of your sort of academic and experience profile?

• 4:29Steven Bartlett?

  That has poured into all of this work, all of these books that sit in front of me now.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  So I'm an organizational psychologist by training. That means my job is to study how to make work not suck, which sometimes is a tall order. But I'm interested in how we find meaning and motivation, how we can lead more generous and creative and curious lives.

• 4:49Steven Bartlett?

  We were talking earlier about the books that you've written. This particular book in front of me here, originals, one of my team members, Grace Miller, she went around her office and gave a copy of this book to everybody and she wrote a personalized note inside. When you use this word originals, you yourself are an original in many respects. I had a read through your earliest years and it was quite clear to me that you were different in several ways. Throwing that question back at you, you know, I've got this photo here, actually, my team printed off for me.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was seven years old and I was obsessed with Nintendo. And I think there must have been a Saturday where I was, I must have played for seven or eight hours straight and then I got really frustrated when I didn't beat the game. And my mom said, like, these video games are just like turning my happy kid into a gremlin. And I'm worried that they're frying his brain. And she called the local newspaper and said, you should do a story about how video games are hurting kids. And they said, you're right, and we want to profile your child. So here I am with a lot of hair and no teeth, just

• 6:10Speaker 02

  hooked on a video game. And, you know, what's funny about this is if you read the research on the effects of video games, it turns out that most of the benefits outweigh the costs, that kids who play video games even a few hours a day, end up with more self-control, better working memory, more grit and self-discipline, because they're constantly having to face and overcome challenges and build their resilience. And there are even some possible mental health benefits. So video games were not the devil, as my mom thought.

• 6:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny because when I was reading about those early years where you seem to be quite obsessive when faced with a variety of different challenges, it did feel like you're someone that's committed their life to trying to beat the game, first by understanding the game and then understanding the levers you need to pull to to beat the game. Is that like an accurate assessment?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  That's fascinating. I never thought about it that way. I think that that's been a huge part of my motivation. But I think at some point I got dissatisfied with the idea of beating the game and I wanted to try to make the game better.

• 7:16Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  I think maybe to take a specific example, I remember, so I had I had a moment in, gosh, it was 2011. I found out I got tenure and

• 7:30Steven Bartlett?

  Tenure?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  So, you know, essentially a job for life at at my university. And the question is now what? You can keep just doing research and teaching classes. And a group of students sat me down and said, you should write a book because you should make your knowledge accessible to people who aren't in your class. And I felt like I didn't have anything to say. And I was passionate about teaching other people's ideas. And they said, no, your research has influenced us and we want you to make that more widely available. And I think at some point, it hit me that what they were asking me to do was to try to redefine the game. That at the time, I think the the lesson I was trying to teach them was you

• 8:15Speaker 02

  do not have to be a selfish taker to succeed. And actually, I'd done a bunch of research showing that people who are givers, who were happy to help others with no strings attached, in the long run, actually outperformed expectations. And my students said to me, look, what you've taught us is, we don't have to, you know, kind of take a me first competitive attitude all the time, achieve a lot of success, and then start giving back. We can be sharing our knowledge. We can be making introductions to try to help people connect and expand their networks. We can be giving others feedback and solving problems for them. And that can actually contribute to our success. You've got to get that message.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Message out there. And so, you know, making the case that it might be better to be a giver than a taker was my first attempt to to change the the way we define the game and and really the way we think about the rules of success. And that's kind of been my mission as an author ever since to ask, what are we getting wrong in the way that we try to play the game and how do we shift it?

• 9:15Steven Bartlett?

  I want to talk about that. And I I'm a Manchester United fan. And I was thinking, I've been debating my friends in our Manchester United chat for the last two years about Cristiano Ronaldo. And we have two contingents in the group. And this is to your point about giving and taking. We have the one contingent who think that he was tremendously beneficial to Manchester United and really any team that he touches. And then you have me, who believes that on balance, when you look at the the stats, he actually has a net negative impact on the team. Because he takes more than he gives. And then in reading your book, you use the word Ronaldo.

• 9:52Steven Bartlett?

  So I feel like this is a wonderful opportunity to ask you about that and what your thoughts are on those kinds of sort of self self centered individuals in in teams.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's such a fascinating dynamic. So I'm not a Ronaldo expert, but the way the way that he carries himself and the way he plays his game does not scream giver to me. And I think the best evidence I've seen that speaks to this is a study of NBA basketball teams. So there are obviously some differences between basketball and football, but I think one of the commonalities is is you have high interdependence. Where the team really depends on every player to play a critical role. And what you see in the NBA data is that if teams have more selfish takers on the team, more narcissists, they actually fail to improve over the course of the season. You end up having a ball hog who doesn't elevate the team.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  And that's especially true if the biggest star or somebody in the core role is very self centered. And so I think based on that evidence, there's a case to be made that Ronaldo is is basically, you know, he's an individual superstar, but he's not making other people better. And I think the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. I think a true leader, I think Messi is more like this, is somebody who asks, how can I make everybody around me more effective?

• 11:13Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna have to say I agree.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Do you?

• 11:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I do agree. And I spent some time looking at the numbers and I credit The Athletic as well for doing a piece called The Ronaldo Effect, where they looked at every team he had joined since he was at Real Madrid, and every single team, according to the data, and I'm kind of paraphrasing here, I'll put a link in the description below to the article I'm referring to, had fallen in performance when he joined post his Real Madrid days, which means he went from Juventus and all these clubs, and they've all gotten worse. He's actually gone out now to play in the Middle East, and that club was top of the league when he joined. They're now second in the league, and they had a six-point lead when he joined. So I think it speaks to something about this idea of giving and taking for optimal team performance. But Ronaldo, in many respects, is an original.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to argue with that.

• 12:00Steven Bartlett?

  You know what I mean?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  I mean, look, some of the things he can do on a field, you just wouldn't expect a human being to be able to pull it off. So there's definitely extraordinary skill, and I think improvisational creativity there. But yeah, we can ask some questions about, is that ultimately in service of the team?

• 12:19Steven Bartlett?

  What is, when you wrote this book and called it Originals, what did you mean by an original? How do you define that?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  I think about originals as people who don't just question the way we've always done it, but actually take the initiative to create a better way. So it's not just about having a new idea, it's about taking action to create change. And I think that's so important, because I think it's often said that ideation without execution is just hallucination. There are so many people who dream up interesting ideas but never do anything about them. And actually, I'll give you a personal example. When I was in university, I had a roommate, this is 2000, who had an idea for a social network. And he said, what if we could build like an online yearbook, where everybody had access to each other's

• 13:09Speaker 02

  profiles, and they could communicate, and they could plan parties? And he stayed up all night coding it, and actually building the basics of the platform. And then he never followed through, and never did anything with it. And then, a few years later, Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook in the house next door. And I could look at that and say, my roommate was an idiot. Like, why didn't he do anything about it? But guess what? I missed that same opportunity. 1999, I co-founded what was called the first online social network on our campus. And it was an e-group of, we had connected about an eighth of our entering college freshman class before, before we got to campus.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  And we were all exchanging messages and connecting. And then we got to campus and we shut it down because we said, we all live in the same town now. Why do we need an online community? And so I made the same mistake. I was part of a group of people that had a very original idea and we did not execute it.

• 14:09Steven Bartlett?

  So the difference is execution, though?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  I think it's the biggest difference.

• 14:12Steven Bartlett?

  And what does it take for someone to be an executioner?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  I hope no one becomes an executioner, but maybe an executor would work. I think, I think that it's not what I thought. I think, I assumed that you had to be somebody who was always the first mover. That, you know, if you didn't act on the social network idea in those first few years, it was going to be too late. But as, I think you know, you know this already, Stephen, but I was surprised to find that some of the best originals are actually procrastinators. That they don't rush in. They wait for, they wait for their best idea as opposed to just immediately implementing their first idea. And of course, they're testing and iterating and experimenting along the way. But I, well, let's, let's go back to my Nintendo days here.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  I've felt like I'm, I'm not an original thinker for a long time. And one day I had a PhD student, Jihei Shin, who came to my office and said, you know, I actually think that procrastinating can make you more creative. And Jihei is incredibly creative and I didn't believe her. I was like, no, this can't be true. And she said, really, I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating. And I didn't believe it because I guess I've, I've always been what psychologists call a precrastinator, which, which is somebody who, the moment you have an idea, you want to immediately put it into practice. And so I, you know, I was always excited to get things done early and I was, I was proud of being a good finisher. And Jihei said, you know, I actually think that's a mistake. And I challenged her to test it.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  And so she went out and studied people in various jobs and had them actually fill out a survey on how often they procrastinate and then their supervisors rated their creativity. And then we ran some experiments together where we tempted people to procrastinate by putting different numbers of funny YouTube videos available while they were supposed to be doing creative tasks. And then we got their creativity scored by experts. And lo and behold, it turned out that people who procrastinate a little bit are more creative than people who precrastinate like me.

• 16:16Steven Bartlett?

  What's your conclusion as to why?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Well, we had a few hunches at first that we tested. Well, the first thing I wanted to know is what happened to the people who always procrastinated? And Jihei was like, I don't know, they never filled out my survey. No, they did eventually fill out the survey and they were also less creative. So both extremes were bad. If you never procrastinate, if you always procrastinate, you are less creative than if you sometimes do, or if you do a little. And what we found is there are a couple of mechanisms at play. One is that procrastination can lead you to incubate ideas in the back of your mind. So you have time to connect the dots, see patterns you didn't see before. Another is that you end up getting some distance from the problem

• 17:00Speaker 02

  and that allows you to reframe it and look at it from a broader perspective. And so what was interesting in the data, though, was that procrastination only boosted creativity if you were intrinsically motivated by the problem. So if you were putting it off because you were bored or you didn't care, then it didn't stay active in the back of your mind. But if you were putting it off because you were stuck and you hadn't figured it out yet, or you were being patient and you wanted to have 10 or 12 more ideas before you decided which one to pursue, then you actually got a creative boost.

• 17:32Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. And I really relate to it because

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Do you?

• 17:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Are you a moderate procrastinator?

• 17:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, 100%, 100%. I think this is important to say because I think sometimes people think that I get a lot of messages from people saying, Steve, I'm procrastinating so much. How do you not procrastinate? And I always look at that and say, I'm not the guy to tell you how to do that because procrastination in my mind is a bit of a tool.

• 17:56Steven Bartlett?

  As you said, there's different types of procrastination that I notice myself doing. One of them is when I get stuck on something and I find myself picking up my phone as if I'm a man possessed. I literally, what I'll do is I'll be in the middle of work and then the next thing, I'm on Instagram. I'm like, how did that happen? Oh yeah, because the part in this piece of work you got to is psychologically difficult for some reason. I don't feel prepared or whatever. And then the other thing I notice myself procrastinating on is just when I'm thinking through something, I'll end up just walking around the house, I'll end up cleaning, doing the dishes or whatever, and then coming back to the piece of work later. But I would say that I'm definitely a procrastinator.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  That's so interesting. And I think, let's be clear, I'm not encouraging people to procrastinate more. That's not the goal here. The goal is just to normalize procrastination and say, it's a natural part of the creative process. Everybody does it sometimes. And even though you expect it to be counterproductive, in certain situations, it can actually lead you to better ideas. And I think there's maybe a myth worth busting here. Research led by Fuchsia Serwa has shown that we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do. So a lot of people think, I'm being lazy, I'm avoiding effort. What's wrong with me? Why don't I want to work hard? But it turns out, it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It's negative emotions, unpleasant feelings.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  You are avoiding a set of tasks that makes you feel frustrated, confused, bored, anxious. A lot of procrastination is driven by fear. I don't know if I can do this. I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge. And so I put it off. And I think one of the best ways to manage that is to ask, what are the tasks that you consistently procrastinate on? What negative emotions are they stirring up? And then how do you change those?

• 19:42Steven Bartlett?

  What do you procrastinate on?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  I procrastinate a lot on editing, actually, and revising. I love rough drafting. It's very, it feels very creative for me. It's fun to figure out, what does the best evidence say? How do I tell the story that brings the evidence to life? And then the process of tinkering to get each sentence just right, it bores me. And so I put it off. And I had to figure out, how do I make that more interesting in order to stop procrastinating altogether on it?

• 20:09Steven Bartlett?

  And how did you do that?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Well, one of the, one of the things I did was, one of my goals in, in my recent writing was to, to try to get less abstract and more concrete. And so what I started doing was I started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors, which was such a fun experiment. So how would Stephen King write this paragraph? How would Maggie Smith, an amazing poet, how would she write these sentences? And, and that, that made it a creative exercise again.

• 20:38Steven Bartlett?

  As I was doing my research ahead of this conversation, I was watching your TED Talk. And one of the things that really stood out to me in your TED Talk was where you start talking about internet browsers. I immediately checked which browser I was using, and I was using Google Chrome.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 20:52Steven Bartlett?

  But you make the case that people, you can tell someone's, I guess, creativity? I'm paraphrasing, I'm putting words in your mouth here, by which internet browser they use. And there was a really important message in there for me. So can you tell me about that? Exactly what the findings can tell us?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, I was sitting at a conference that helped to organize, and this researcher, Michael Hausman, is giving a presentation. He's got data from 50,000 people, and he, he knows, they're filling out a survey, and then he's tracking their job performance, huge range of jobs. And he knows what web browser they're on. It's one of the automatically collected data points. And he's like, I wonder, I wonder if, if there's anything there. And he finds that he can predict your job performance, and also your likelihood of staying in your job, from which web browser you're using. This was so weird. And he, he stood up and he said, I don't know what's going on here. But it turns out that Chrome and Firefox users are, on average, better performers,

• 21:54Speaker 02

  and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or Internet Explorer.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  And immediately, I had a hunch. I'd been studying initiative and proactivity and being an original thinker. And what hit me was Internet Explorer and Safari are the defaults. They came pre-installed on your phone or your computer. In order to get Chrome or Firefox, you had to question the default and say, huh, I wonder if there's a better browser and take a little bit of initiative. And so I started proposing this and people are like, great. So if I download a better browser, I'm going to be better at my job. No, it's not about the browser. It's about the resourcefulness to say you want to be the kind of person who questions the default and asks if there's a better way. And I think what happens is in people's jobs, I've gone on to study this with some colleagues,

• 22:44Speaker 02

  the kind of person who upgrades their browser is also the kind of person who asks, is there a more creative way to do my job? Can I reinvent the way that we work together? And that ultimately not only makes you better at your job, it also helps you create a job that you want to stay in.

• 23:03Steven Bartlett?

  It makes sense. And so on an ongoing basis, I'm only going to hire people who have Mozilla Firefox or Chrome installed in their browser. It should be an interview question.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  I don't know if I would go that far.

• 23:16Steven Bartlett?

  No, you said it, so I'm going to do it.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I think it's a fun question to say, okay, how did you? Like, let's not limit it to the browser, but talk to me about how you've challenged the status quo in the past.

• 23:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a really good question.

• 23:32Steven Bartlett?

  When we think about originals, who are the sort of landmark originals of our time in your mind?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  What domain do we want to talk about? Are we talking tech and business?

• 23:41Steven Bartlett?

  Tech and business, let's go for that.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I mean, it's hard not to put Elon Musk on that list. You can love him or hate him, but when it comes to dreaming up the vision and also taking the initiative then to try to make us a multi-planetary species with SpaceX and build reusable rockets, which NASA had never really thought to do, moving us into an all-electric car future.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  I think there are a lot of things to complain about with Elon's leadership and decision-making and the way he communicates on the platform formerly known as Twitter. But I think he's an original, no doubt about it.

• 24:16Steven Bartlett?

  How does he fit your profile of an original?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I think I think he fits first and foremost because he challenges the status quo would be the beginning. And then secondly, I think he's he's relentless in trying to make his vision a reality, which is, I think, I think something that's that's driving some of his former fans crazy right now.

• 24:38Steven Bartlett?

  Some people might say, well, he, you know, he was like a child prodigy, or he was a child genius. So that's why he's so so great. Do you agree with that statement? Or do you dispute it?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I think it's hard to say in his case. I think, you know, my job as a social scientist is to ask, what does the evidence tell us about child prodigies? And it turns out we overestimate them in a lot of cases, because once you're, you know, once something comes naturally to you, you often have a hard time thinking about it in original ways. So, you know, you see kids, for example, who can play a Mozart Sonata at age four, and they they drill over and over again, and they're amazingly fast learners. And practice does make perfect, but it doesn't make new. They don't learn how to write their own original scores. They don't get experience with failure, with trial and error. And so they don't take enough risks to figure out, how do I invent something that's never existed before? That's,

• 25:31Speaker 02

  you know, that's not true in every case. But it is empirically true that most child prodigies do not become known as adult geniuses. And I think that's in part because they don't learn to stretch their creative muscles.

• 25:42Steven Bartlett?

  Because they're overwhelmingly talented, so they don't need to put in the hard graft that others do, and they don't need to fight for new information in the same way that others do?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  In some cases, they get rewarded over and over again for basically just mastering the way everyone else has always done it. And so they don't, they don't learn to break free from the mold.

• 26:02Steven Bartlett?

  These adult geniuses, then, what is it that they have that child prodigies don't?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of it is, is what I've come to think of as character skills, which is a set of capabilities to put your principles into practice. So they're often people with hidden potential. They they may not be naturals at first. They could be, you know, underdogs or late bloomers or slow learners. But they are obsessive about making themselves uncomfortable, saying, if I only play to my strengths, then I'm never stretching myself and I'm not taking on enough new challenges. There's a bunch of research to suggest they're like sponges. They're soaking up lots of information and then trying to filter what's helpful out in. And then you kind of rule out what's harmful.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  And they are they're what I've come to think of as imperfectionists, which is they're they're really careful and disciplined about saying, when is it important to aim for the best and when is it OK to look for good enough?

• 27:04Steven Bartlett?

  Perfectionism is a topic people talk about a lot. And I think everybody it seems to me that everybody wants to be considered a perfectionist, as if being a perfectionist is better because what does that say about my my values? It means that I really care about things being great. It therefore means by way of that, that I think I'm I produce great things. And saying you're a perfectionist is almost like saying I make great work. But you're saying that being there were some there are often times where it's better to be an imperfectionist, that the judgment of knowing when something is good enough.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think you're on to something here. So, you know, when when you have to answer that annoying job interview question, what's your greatest weakness? It's everyone's favorite answer. I'm too much of a perfectionist. It's like Michael Scott from the American office, like, I have weaknesses as a leader. I work too hard and I care too much. And yeah, people do think that perfectionism is, you know, ultimately more of an asset than a liability. And that's why they they try to get away with that in the weakness question. But the evidence tells a really different story. Research led by Tom Curran here in the UK shows that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a risk factor for burnout.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  It also, if you look at the best evidence available, perfectionists do get better grades in school, but they don't actually perform any better in their jobs.

• 28:22Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 28:24Speaker 02

  I think the jury's still out, but my hunch, based on the evidence that's been gathered so far, is that perfectionists are good at school because they know exactly what's going to be on the test. And so they can cram and memorize until they're prepared to ace the material. The real world is much more ambiguous. You don't know exactly what's going to show up in your performance review. It's not entirely clear what work is going to be valued. And perfectionists are terrified of failure. They don't want any flaws. They don't want any defects. They want to avoid every mistake. And so they don't take enough risks. They focus very narrowly on the things they know they can excel at, and they don't end up growing.

• 29:06Steven Bartlett?

  Running a small business can feel a lot like being alone at sea. And too often, you're not steering the ship yourself. You're getting dragged underneath all of the admin, things like offer letters, onboarding, wages, payroll, filing taxes, and health insurance.

• 29:22Steven Bartlett?

  And that's where our sponsor Gusto helps. They help you break free of all of this clutter and all of this admin work and all of this headache. Gusto is an online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses, just like some of you. It's an all-in-one, remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use platform so that you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere in the world. That way, you can channel all of your energy into growing your business, rather than just keeping your head above water, which is a feeling I know very, very well. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/dairy and get three months free when you run up your first payroll through Gusto. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/dairy. That's gusto.com/dairy.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price Tool for years now. With the Name Your Price Tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy, or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they'll make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price Tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. And evolving and improving enough.

• 30:33Steven Bartlett?

  I wondered if urgency has a relationship with this as well, because in order to be successful in the real world, you have to be somewhat urgent, which means sometimes you have to say, that's good enough, let's go, let's move, let's move. And I guess a perfectionist would, if left to their own devices, would try and slow time down so that they could focus more on this, this thing right now. They'd probably never ship that social network. They'd probably still be in their bedroom in, in America somewhere working on it. Whereas Zuckerberg made a thing that was good enough and shipped it, then learnt from that. And the iterative process of making something better is probably more conducive with success than just, you know, the lean startup talks about this a lot, like, get it out there and learn from it versus just incubating it forever.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, I think, a key Eric Ries point, and it's been backed up by a bunch of ironically experiments showing that founders who experiment more end up being more successful because they're able to pivot faster when something doesn't work and they, they get lots of, of market feedback and signals on what's going to be successful and what isn't. And you, I know you've, you've lived that. But, you know, it's, it's interesting that you point this out because this, this is a lesson I learned firsthand during my days as a, an attempted athlete. So after being too short for basketball and too slow for, for football, I stumbled onto springboard diving. And I, I, by the way, I had no business being a springboard diver. I was afraid of heights. And also my teammates nicknamed

• 31:58Speaker 02

  me Frankenstein because I was so stiff. But I really loved it and I wanted to get better at it. And I was a perfectionist and I thought that was going to help me because in diving, you're supposed to get perfect tents. Well, guess what? I have my most basic dive, a front dive pike. You just jump up, touch your toes, go in head first. I wanted to work on perfecting that all practice. And I was working on these tiny little adjustments that would take me from a six and a half to a seven and not ever learning harder dives and failing to raise my degree of difficulty. And that really stunted my growth as a diver. Until one day, my coach, Eric Best, pulled me aside and he said, you know, Adam, there's no such thing as a perfect tent.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  And I was like, have the Olympic announcers been lying to me when they say a dive was done for perfect tens? What's going on here? And he said, if you look at the rulebook, a 10 is for excellence. There's no such thing as a perfect dive. And that really shifted my perspective. And what we did then was we said, look, I'm never going to get a 10 on any dive. What we have to do is to calibrate, what's a realistic goal for each dive? So for, you know, front dive, we started aiming for sevens. And I would want to do 30 of them in practice. And when I did my third one and Eric said that was a seven, it's time to move on. When I was learning a much more complicated, uh, front two and a half with a full twist, you do two flips, uh, 360 turn, and then a dive. Uh, the first goal was, we want to do this for twos. We just want to make it.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  And then I got a little better at it and we started aiming for fours and fives on it. And Steve, I have to tell you, this has been one of the most useful lessons I've learned in my career is when I start a project, uh, whether it's a book or, you know, a podcast season, or I'm writing an op ed, uh, the first thing I do is I ask, what is my target score here? And for a book, it's a nine because I'm going to pour two years of my work life into this. And, you know, I hope a lot of people will read it and it's going to be useful to them. So it really matters to do it about as well as I can. When I'm writing a post for Instagram, I'm pretty content with a six and a half, just above getting canceled is my target there.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  But that, that calibration is helpful because I could spend all day crafting that Instagram post and then I'll never get anything done.

• 34:14Steven Bartlett?

  Do you, when you're thinking about what's good enough through that framework, is part of the equation, the return on time spent? Because I'm thinking about the Instagram quote, like if you have a 10 out of 10 Instagram quote, what's the return on that versus a 10 out of 10 book, which can completely, as we've seen, change someone's entire life? Like a 10 out of 10 TED Talk, you have a phenomenal TED Talk. I think it's got tens of millions of views and that can change your entire life in a way that any Instagram quote, I've had some banging Instagram quotes. I've had a couple of viral ones and what ends up happening is everyone just copies what you said and just posts it and you never, it never really does anything for you. But a 10 out of 10 TED Talk like you've got, or 10 out of 10 books, like, you know, exceptional books can change your whole life.

• 34:58Steven Bartlett?

  So maybe part of the equation is to think about the potential reward from the investment.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  I think that's such a powerful way to frame it. Well, let me react to a couple of things. First of all, I don't take tens. So you're being overly generous here. And I always want to know, what can I do to get a little bit closer to 10? But I think, I think the, thinking about the return on effort is really valuable. And I think about that less in terms of like, what's the immediate reward for me? And more in terms of how can I have the greatest impact for the investment of my time? And I think you're right. You know, like Instagram is a, it's a quick hit of dopamine and it feels really great when you get a lot of likes and, you know, enthusiastic comments on a post. And then it fades really fast. And like, I don't know. I mean, people, when I first became an author, people said, you know, well, the pen is mightier than the sword.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  And, you know, of course, ideas, you have to be in that world. I don't know if the pen is actually mightier than, than the sword. I do know that the ink lasts and that, you know, people ask questions about a book that I wrote a decade ago. Nobody asked me about my social media posts from several years ago. And I think podcasting actually lives somewhere in between. Right? We, like, when we talk, sometimes ideas stick. Actually, there's some evidence that audio is more memorable and more intimate than what you pick up on the page. But I think it's a little more fleeting. Like, I don't, I don't remember a conversation I listened to from a few years ago, the same way I remember a book that changed my worldview. And so I, I put a little bit more into writing than I do into talking.

• 36:30Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. I want to talk to you as well about something you mentioned earlier, which was this idea of doing difficult things. You mentioned it in passing. And the question that was stored in my brain is, what is it that makes a certain type of person choose and lean into difficulty? And a certain type of person lean out of it? Because that appears to be one of the key sort of correlating factors with success in life. Your ability to choose discomfort.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think this is such a vital skill. And I want to be really clear to say it's a skill, right? It's not just a personality trait. Yeah, you know, some people are born with a little extra, maybe you could say, reserve of willpower, or they have the discipline, or the grit, or the resilience, and it comes naturally to them. But this is very much a learned skill, and I think the clearest demonstration of this for me is in the marshmallow test, which has been wildly misunderstood in the last few years. So you're familiar probably with the classic demonstration that Walter Michel did with his colleagues, where you take four-year-olds, you put a marshmallow in front of them, and you say, "You can have one now, but if you're willing to wait until I come back, then you

• 37:41Speaker 02

  can have two." And then the original finding is that if, the longer you can delay gratification, if a kid can wait 10 or 15 minutes for the extra marshmallow, the better they score on a standardized test like the SAT. A decade later, the better grades they get in school. There are all kinds of benefits of this delay gratification skill. Well, in psychology, recently, there's been a controversy about whether it replicates. And some of the replications have shown that if you have a lower socioeconomic status, you struggle at the marshmallow test. It's really disappointing, but it's not at all surprising. And in fact, that was part of the original research, is if you grew up in a world of

• 38:23Speaker 02

  scarcity, and I know you can relate to this from your own lived experience, you could not afford to wait for the second marshmallow. It might never come. You didn't know if you could trust the research team to come and bring you one. And so you didn't have the chance to practice that skill and learn the habit. But what's really interesting is if you watch kids who crush the marshmallow test, it's more skill power than willpower. What they have are simple strategies that actually make the temptation less tempting. So you see one kid will actually sit on, he sits on his hands so that he's, it's a little slower for him to reach out to the marshmallow. Another covers her eyes so she doesn't have to look at it. And then there's one kid who actually smushes it into a ball and starts bouncing it.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  So like, you don't want to eat that anymore. And this is, this is why I say it's a set of skills, not just a matter of will. Because if you have techniques for making discomfort less uncomfortable and you know how to get, I guess, I guess if you know how to get comfortable being uncomfortable, then you are willing to go into many situations where you're a little bit out of your depth and say, yeah, this might be awkward, this might be embarrassing, but I'm going to learn something. And I guess, you know, for me, that was, that was public speaking. Like we were, you touched on giving TED Talks earlier. I would have never dreamed of, of standing in a red circle. I had no business whatsoever giving a TED Talk. I'm an introvert. I'm extremely shy. I was terrified of public speaking.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  And in one of my first lectures, a student wrote in feedback afterward that I was so nervous, I was causing them to physically shake in their seats. And the only way for me to get over that was to put myself continually in that situation and get used to the discomfort.

• 40:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is that really the key here? Cause I, I'm just thinking as you're speaking about the people who I look up to, like even like a David Goggins, who just seem to be able to hold themselves in discomfort more than anybody else. I mean, a friend of mine called Russ is running the entire length of Africa at the moment, from the bottom to the top of Africa. He's running it. He's doing like two marathons a day, you know, most days. And I'm thinking, are these people just like super humans that were born with this switch in their brain that I have to, I can only turn on if I have some kind of traumatic incident? Or is it, is, does the evidence support the fact that this is a learned skill?

• 40:42Speaker 02

  I think everything that matters in life is always a complex interaction of nature and nurture. But I think we underestimate the power of nurture in these situations. So Goggins is a great example. I mean, he's a machine. Was he always that way? No, his whole story is about, you know, feeling like he was he was vulnerable and wanting to become somebody where no one could hurt him. Right? And I think when psychologists study that, my favorite theory is probably called the theory of learned industriousness, which is a mouthful. But what is about is the idea that if you reward effort, if you reward hard work, if you reward seeking out discomfort, then over time, being in uncomfortable situations starts to take on secondary reward properties.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  In other words, you get a little bit of Pavlovian conditioning, where when you've pushed yourself a little bit past where you're comfortable, that feels good and you're used to that leading to something positive. And that can become sort of a self reinforcing cycle.

• 41:42Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking, as you're saying that, about the role trauma plays in people becoming successful. And if we if we take on this idea that those that push themselves forward and then get rewarded for it are more likely to repeat that behavior, the question should probably become, who are the people that got the greatest reward from pushing themselves out of their zone of comfort? In my mind, for you to want to push yourself out of a situation, the situation's probably not great. And I was thinking about Goggins there, what he had to do. And many people that I sit on this podcast and speak to, it appears to be the case a lot of time that there was something traumatic or difficult going on in their home life with their parents, maybe,

• 42:25Steven Bartlett?

  that forced them or pushed them to pursue something out of their zone of comfort. It actually often pushes them off the road most frequently traveled. And they become like an original because they went through the shrubs and the prickly bushes.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:42Steven Bartlett?

  Is there evidence to support that it is helpful in becoming an original?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  So it's complicated because I think in a lot of the examples we look at, there's a survivorship bias. We see the people who manage to overcome adversity. We don't see all the people who are broken by it. And so we always have to pause and ask, is this causal? Or is it just revealing that certain people who happen to face adversity and were able to take something out of that, you know, we're growing from that. I do think what we know is that resilience is underestimated as a general rule. So if you look at, for example, rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, they are lower when people go through the trauma than people's reports of post-traumatic growth, saying, look, I wouldn't wish this on myself or anyone else.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  It was a terrible experience, but I had to grow from it and it made me better or stronger in some way. That's more common than being completely paralyzed or shattered by traumatic experiences. I think the other thing we know is that resilience is not an individual's skill. It's not a muscle you work on just by yourself. It requires a support system, which I think of as scaffolding, a temporary structure that helps you scale a height you couldn't reach on your own. And I think a lot of what that looks like is having a parent, a mentor, a coach, who believes in your potential and not only helps you find the motivation,

• 44:12Speaker 02

  but then gives you the tools to bounce forward from the hardship you faced.

• 44:17Steven Bartlett?

  When we're talking about this point of nurture is I am the youngest of four kids. And in your work, you discuss how that can be consequential in my relationship with risk and convention and all of those things. What does the data say about siblings and how the order in which they're born can determine their... Character skills.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Okay, we need a giant disclaimer on this. The science of birth order is a mess. It's full of conflicting findings. A lot of the world's leading experts don't agree on the patterns. And what I'm going to tell you is I think there are two patterns that have very consistent evidence across large samples and rigorous studies, but they are tiny effects, tiny. So they don't say anything about you and your future possibilities. There are patterns across very, very big samples. So let me, let me start with the bad news for you, Steve, which is on average, firstborns score slightly higher on IQ tests than their younger siblings.

• 45:21Steven Bartlett?

  Agree to disagree. You're welcome to disagree on that. No, no, I'm taking, I'm taking it. That, that does, that does make sense.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  The major mechanism that seems to explain it is what's called the tutor effect, which is if you're the firstborn and you have younger siblings, you end up teaching them a lot. And when you explain things, you remember them better and you understand them better. The best way to learn something is to teach it. And the last born doesn't have a younger sibling to teach. And so sometimes they just miss out on that opportunity. Tiny, tiny difference on average, you will find many brilliant laterborns, many average intelligence firstborns, so don't, don't take anything from that. But it's an interesting finding. To the point that you raised, the other, the other finding is that laterborns tend to be more willing to take risks and become originals.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And my, actually, my favorite example of this comes from research Frank Soloway did on sports. So this is a study of every pair of brothers who ever played major league baseball. So you've got two siblings, same family, same parents, same upbringing. They all, they both make it to the pros. Actually, sometimes there's even a trio. And the question is, which brother takes more risks when it comes to stealing a base? Which, you know, in, in American baseball is, is one of the riskiest things you can do because it's very easy to, to get, to get at. Cause you have to basically outrun a ball that's flying in the air. And you have to outsmart a pitcher and a guy is ready to catch the ball. And it turns out that the later borns are much more likely to take those risks.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  They're more likely to try to steal a base and they are also more likely to succeed in stealing a base. So you're a last born, why? Like, where does this pension for risk taking come from? What's your hunch about the mechanisms?

• 47:03Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, gosh. Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is because I saw it in your writing and I was like, that's it. It's my parents gave me way more freedom. When I was 10 years old, and I say this a lot, but when I was 10 years old, if I left the house and I didn't come home for two days, there was no consequences. Whereas I watched my sister try that when she was that same age and it was, it was like, we would call the police. If she wasn't, if she wasn't home before like 10, would call the police. And as they went through the cycle of having kids and they got to the fourth one, it was almost like, I say this all the time. It was like they assumed I was the age of the others and they assumed that their job of parenting had been done. And that's what I attribute it to because in that independence, in that void, you can start to experiment. And you can start to learn and take risks and then you get the feedback from those experiments, which for me was starting businesses at 12, 13, 14.

• 47:48Steven Bartlett?

  First kid in our family to not go to university. So it, yeah, it made a lot of sense when I read about it. And I also do believe that my, all my siblings have a higher IQ than me. I think if we did an IQ test, I think every one of my siblings would beat me on it. And I think they would all agree. My brothers, my brothers are geniuses compared to me. Jason works, Jason, my, my, the sibling that's a year older than me, went to two of the best universities, et cetera. He's a genius. He's much smarter than I am, but he will even say that what he learned from me was risk. He says this, he said it this Christmas. He was like, when you came to my house at, when I was 18 and I slept on his sofa. He goes, he was in a university, he was off to get, you know, really, really great job as like an actuary.

• 48:32Steven Bartlett?

  He had gone to the London School of Economics to study that. And I was this dropout sleeping on his sofa because I'd stopped by London. And he said to me at Christmas, he was like, the fact that you weren't concerned about your future. Inspired me, which ultimately led him to quit his job in the city. He was like, I learned from you risk taking.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 48:52Steven Bartlett?

  And yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  So that's amazing because you benefited from extra freedom and independence. And then you were able to actually pay that back to an older brother.

• 49:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  I think for me, that's also the most compelling reason why later borns end up taking more risks and trying new things. There is another theory that has some support that I think might be an additional piece of the story, which is usually the first born ends up sort of impressing parents by being a conventional achiever. And then the thinking is that that niche is filled. And as a later born, you got to find a way to stand out. Like, well, getting good grades in school is not going to differentiate me from my older siblings. They're, they're always going to be ahead of me. So let me try something that's a little bit road less traveled.

• 49:35Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I completely relate to that as well. Risk taking, it is often believed that risk taking is a key factor in what makes entrepreneurs successful in their life. But your research and your work in originals on in chapter one, page 17, kind of starts to debunk that myth in a, I think, a really liberating way.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  This is, this is good news for me as, as somebody who's not a big risk taker. It turns out that risk takers are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but the most successful entrepreneurs don't love risk. They take, they take cautious risks and they're, they're constantly trying to figure out how to reduce the downside and increase the upside. You know, I guess this goes in two directions. One direction is to say, if you never take a risk, that's actually a risky way to live your life. It's like, it's like building a stock portfolio where you only invest in safe, predictable mutual funds. No, you need a balanced portfolio. You're actually safer if you have some risky investments and some more cautious investments. And I think life is like that, too.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  I think on the, the other side of that, though, you don't want to just be throwing caution to the wind and making a bunch of dumb bets. What you want to do is you want to figure out what's the probability of this unproven idea succeeding? And then do whatever you can to raise those odds.

• 50:54Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting, because that's not the story we hear in the movies and in the, you know, and I guess that's part because we want to frame ourselves as heroes when we tell our own story. And so framing oneself as a hero involves showing a huge courageous risk you took. Whereas really, when I think if you you're saying if you zoom in, you'll see how the best entrepreneurs protected their downside of that risk.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's critical. So let's go back to Elon for as an example. I had dinner with him a few years ago, sort of interested in what can we learn from from what's worked for him? And then also what hasn't? And I was talking to him about risk taking. And he, you know, he was talking a lot about wanting to to put the first humans on Mars. And I said, how could you possibly be willing to to gamble on that? It seems so unlikely. And he said, Well, when I, you know, when I first started, I knew it was extremely low probability. And so that wasn't the original mission for SpaceX. The mission was, I want to build a reusable rocket. And that's much more realistic. And I can get

• 52:01Speaker 02

  people on board with that. And I can get a government contract to do that. And I said, Okay, quantify this for me. Like, what are the odds that that you're going to make it to Mars in your lifetime? And he said, Well, you know, a couple of years ago, I would have said, I don't know, seven, eight percent. Like, and you're doing this despite that? And he said, Well, no, no, the probability has gone way up since then. I'm like, Okay, tell me more. And he said, I'd probably say 11% chance now. This is firing you up? He's like, Come on, that's double digits. Like, we're close to reality. But I think that calculus of saying, I've got to know that this is unrealistic. And I've got to

• 52:41Speaker 02

  have a side bet, which is something that can build me a viable company. And reusable rockets are what did it. That's what made SpaceX work. It's not the mission, the moonshot, or actually, it's a Mars shot. That's not what would ultimately allowed them to do what they do now.

• 53:00Steven Bartlett?

  Is that in part on his behalf, a bit of a framing thing to,

• 53:06Steven Bartlett?

  as you said, get people on board? Because I think about Neuralink in the same way. When he first started talking about Neuralink, it was all about interfacing with AI. And our need, the AI is coming and we need a way to be able to interface with it because it's going to be so much smarter than us that we basically need to become these cyborgs. And in more recent times, he's focused on the ability to give people who have lost access to their limbs, the use of their limbs back. And I was thinking about the transition there he's done in messaging. The latter, this idea of helping people who are disabled regain their ability, seems to be an idea that people will get on board with and will fund. The other idea of interfacing with AI and us becoming cyborgs doesn't appear to me like something people would get behind and fund.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  No, they either don't get it or they don't want it.

• 53:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Not for me. Yeah, this is, this is a common challenge for, for original thinkers is sometimes their bold visions are just not palatable to other people. And there's a term that I love that Deborah Meyerson and Maureen Scully coined. They talk about being a tempered radical.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Which I think is a great phrase to say, take your, your big extreme idea and try to moderate it to make it a little bit more familiar and a little bit closer to what other people think is plausible and desirable. And then if you do that successfully, you can smuggle your vision inside a Trojan horse.

• 54:25Steven Bartlett?

  And that's all about bringing them with you.

• 54:28Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Let's talk about people then, people in teams. It's one of my real obsessions is, is the topic of team culture. And it's something that you write about in part two of your book. Team culture. What are we, what are we generally missing about what it takes to be and to build a great team? What are, what are some of the sort of first myths that come to mind about the greatest teams that you, your work has debunked?

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Well, this is one of the big topics in my world of organizational psychology. And there are, I think, a bunch of findings that might surprise people. The first one is that we elevate the wrong people to leadership roles consistently. There's research on what's called the Babbel Effect, which is the idea that the more you talk in a meeting, the more likely you are to get selected as the leader of a team. So we reward people who dominate the conversation, even though they are not actually better at leadership. And often, they're worse because they fail to include and learn from the voices around them in the room. They're so obsessed with being the smartest person in the room that they fail to make the room smarter.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  And I think what happens there is that we're consistently mistaking their confidence for competence. So we need to change that. The people I want to elevate into leadership roles are basically people who bring generosity and humility to the table. Generosity is about saying, I'm going to put my mission above my ego, and I'm going to try to make everybody in the room better. And I guess it's a form of servant leadership. And humility is about saying, it's my job to know what I don't know and try to learn from every single person I work with. And I think the idea of being a lifelong learner is something we throw around a lot, but we don't take seriously.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  I think part of being a lifelong learner is recognizing that every person you meet is a potential teacher. Every single collaborator of yours has lived experiences you haven't, has expertise that you don't. And if you fail to realize that, you are stunting your own progress. So I think we've got to get humble givers into leadership roles because they're there to make the team successful.

• 56:42Steven Bartlett?

  I've always had a suspicion that, based on the size of the company and where it is in its life cycle, that a slightly different culture is required. And in your work, you talk about these commitment cultures. Now, a commitment culture, is that a cult?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  I hope not. The good ones aren't.

• 57:01Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  So you're anticipating the Baron and Han in research on hundreds of startups for 15 years. And they compare a cultural blueprints where some founders say, I am going to build a star culture. I want to hire the biggest geniuses and the best talent. And that's, that's what's going to make us great. And other founders say, no, I want to be about commitment. I'm going to focus first and foremost about, do you fit the culture? Do you live our mission and breathe our values? And then you run the horse race and ask which of which approach is more successful from a culture perspective. And lo and behold, the commitment cultures win. They are dramatically less likely to fail, significantly more likely

• 57:45Speaker 02

  to go public. And you think, we're good. Like, we've, we've hired people who are all in on our company. They made us a wildly successful startup. And then guess what? After these companies go public, they grow at slower rates.

• 58:00Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 58:02Speaker 02

  There's a major risk that if you are hiring on culture fit, you are then saying, I'm only going to bring in people who are similar to each other. And you end up weeding out diversity of thought and background and promoting group think.

• 58:16Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. So, okay, you're all a little bit too close to the same painting.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  You're, you're replicating what's already working for you and becoming more and more homogeneous. And this is not to say the culture fit is inherently bad. You do want people aligned on your three to five core values. And that's important. The mistake we make is when we look at fit, we think about, well, I want a bunch of people with the same personality traits. And I want a bunch of people who, you know, who went to the same college, or, you know, studied the same subject. And then you end up with a really narrow band of expertise, and that leads you to stagnate.

• 58:48Steven Bartlett?

  How important do you think the culture you're in is on your own chance of success and performance? I often think this. I think we've, we've been lucky, even as a podcast team, to be in a great culture. And I play out the scenario, if you took one of our team members and maybe Move them to another culture. How much would that impact that team member's personal performance and chance of success?

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Oh, actually, Boris Grozberg studies this. He studies what happens when you're a star in one culture and then you move to a new organization. So he studied this with with Wall Street security analysts. So finance professionals. Turns out, if you are a star performer at your current firm and you leave for a new firm, it takes you, on average, five years to recover your star performance. Unless you take your team with you. And then you maintain your star status from day one. What Boris argues is that we underestimate the importance of the people we rely on to do our best work. And this is not unique at all to Wall Street.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  You can see it in research on cardiac surgeons, where you know how it's it's pretty common for surgeons to operate at multiple hospitals. Well, it turns out that the more practice you have at Hospital A, the lower your patient mortality rate is at Hospital A. But then when you go over to Hospital B later that week, it's as if you haven't practiced at all because you're with a different team. They don't know your strengths and weaknesses. You haven't built effective routines together. You are much more interdependent than you realize, even if you think you're an individual expert. You can see it in sports, too. It takes pro basketball teams three to four years on average, even if you've recruited a really talented team, to maximize their odds of winning a championship because they

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  just haven't figured out how to be effective together. There's even there was a NASA simulation years ago where you had to do you had to go through a flight simulator. And some crews were were exhausted. They'd just come off of a, you know, a multi-leg, multi-day, sleep-deprived journey. And others were well-rested. And it turned out that the the well-rested crews, who were strangers, actually made more potentially catastrophic errors than exhausted crews that had just flown together. And having a little bit of shared experience was enough to to compensate for the lack of sleep. Now, I'm not suggesting that we should have pilots fly together and only sleep for, you know, two hours a night. But the idea that that your history together was even more important than how alert you

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  were is something that I think we ought to take really seriously.

• 1:01:26Steven Bartlett?

  Gosh, it's like a double edged sword though, because so your history together matters. So you want to be, you want to be with a familiar group of people. However, if you're too familiar with them, you're not going to come up with original ideas and be as creative and innovative as possible. So it's a balancing act between familiarity and novelty in the by way of introducing new members to the group that have new ideas as it relates to business.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 1:01:53Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  And you, you actually see this in the sports data. After that, you know, three or four years of experience together, the benefits of shared experience start to level off. And maybe the players get old. This is part of it, but their routines also become really predictable.

• 1:02:06Steven Bartlett?

  Predictable to the opposition as well in the context of sports. Other coaches can go, they always do this, they always do it like this. This is how we'll defend against it.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Same thing is true in business. I think it's one of the reasons why so much innovation and disruption comes from the outside, because inside an organization, people get so attached to the way we've always done it. They fall victim to what's called cognitive entrenchment, where they start to take for granted assumptions that need to be questioned. And you need to bring in outside talent, fresh perspectives, or rotate yourself, shift your, your country, shift your role, shift the, the group of people you're working with, go learn a new skill set in order to, to get out of that entrenchment.

• 1:02:43Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about, and when you study companies and people that innovate, and let's just focus specifically, say, on the, the idea of teams that innovate. Let's just, I mean, bring it right back to the context of even, you know, this podcast, this podcast team is actually about thirty, thirty two, thirty three people now across the whole sort of business of the diary of a CEO. It's going well, you know, we, we do well.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Better than well.

• 1:03:10Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going well. It's like, you know, we've done a good job. I think that's, that's, that's fair to say, but there's a risk with that, which is when you've been right several times, you can start to get a little bit creatively complacent. And also.

• 1:03:26Steven Bartlett?

  I saw, I think it was Morgan Housel's book, Same As Ever, some research that shows when you are succeeding, when you're like number one at the thing you do, teams kind

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price Tool for years now. With the Name Your Price Tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they'll make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price Tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

• 1:04:05Steven Bartlett?

  Switch off creatively and they go into a defense mode, which is, okay, this is how we've always done it and it got us to here. So let's just keep doing it that way. But to self-disrupt almost doesn't make sense, you know? And so my question to you is, from what you understand, what is the best way to keep a team like ours continually striving for the next thing, even when the outside world thinks you do a lot of things right?

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Best example I've ever seen was in a podcast episode I did at Pixar a few years ago. So let's go back to 2000. Pixar is at the top of its game. They've completely reinvented the way that animated movies are made. We used to think you had to draw them. Now they do them by computer. Toy Story is a huge hit. They've got monsters. They've got talking bugs. And, you know, they're riding as high as you can in the entertainment industry. And what most companies would do in that situation is they would rest on their laurels and keep making films the way they've done them. Because like you said, we should double down on our success. We know our core competencies. We're getting a ton of rewards for it. Well,

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull, who were running the show, were not content to rest on their laurels. And they knew that when you're succeeding, you actually have the most slack capacity to disrupt yourself, which is, of course, when most leaders are at least likely to do it, because they don't think they need to. And they said, we've got to, we've got to shake things up. So they went and hired an unproven director named Brad Bird. He was coming off a commercial flop. It, his previous film had been just this huge disappointment in terms of box office returns. And Brad came into Pixar and his charge was to change the way that they made animated films.

• 1:05:50Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Because they wanted to keep getting better and they wanted to keep innovating. And Brad came in with a vision that he was told was crazy for a new animated film. He was told it was going to cost half a billion US dollars and take 10 years to make, which is just a nonstarter if you're a film studio. And Brad got frustrated and he said, all right, you know what? Give me, he said, I want the pirates. I want the black sheep. I want people who are dissatisfied, disagreeable and disgruntled. And I'm going to build a band of misfits to try to prove that this movie can be made. And that group ends up finishing in a three-year period. So they shaved a year at least off the original expected time.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  They end up coming in under budget, becomes Pixar's most successful film ever, wins them some major awards. You might have seen it. It's called The Incredibles. And what I think is incredible, no pun intended, about that story is a couple of things. One, you know, just the will to break something that's not broken deliberately. I think that's huge. Number two, what Brad does is he discovers that there's a particular kind of disagreeableness that's really valuable. It's not just being cranky and ornery for the sake of it. It's not being a complainer. Brad says, I want people who are like racing cars stuck in a garage. Like they're just being stifled and, you know, shot down and I'm going to open the garage and let them go.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  So in my giver taker framework, I would call those people disagreeable givers. They're gruff and tough on the surface, but they're doing it because they want to help and they have ideas to make things better. And they're not content to just stick with the status quo. And there's a bunch of research to suggest that people who are highly disagreeable, if they're doing, if they're challenging people because they care, they actually end up driving more innovation. And so I've actually started advising leaders that most of us know the value of a support network and surrounding ourselves with mentors and colleagues who have our back. But what you actually need to get better is a challenge network, a group of thoughtful critics who you trust to hold up a mirror so you can see your own blind spots more clearly.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  And Steve, this is not the norm when I work with leaders and founders. I think it's pretty common, actually.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  I don't want to name a specific example here, but I have interacted with a fair number of entrepreneurs and CEOs who have this vision of them coming into the office one morning and saying, "Good morning." And a bunch of people go, "Great point."

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  It's a scary way to live. But you know this, as you gain status and power, it's harder to get people to tell you the truth. And that's why those disagreeable givers who are willing to challenge you are so valuable.

• 1:08:40Steven Bartlett?

  How do you cultivate that? What can you do to cultivate a circle of disagreeable givers? Or just people that are gonna tell you the truth?

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing you do is you pay attention to who has actually been willing to push you. And you let them know that they play that role in your life. So I've actually done this in the past couple of years. I've had people who tore apart book drafts for me, people who told me I needed to go back to the drawing board on an early version of a TED Talk. And I've gone to them and I've said, "Hey, you may not know this, but I actually consider you a founding member of my challenge network." First response, "What the hell is a challenge network?" Because disagreeable people always talk like that. Now they don't. But I had to explain it. And I said, "I know I haven't always taken your challenge as well. Sometimes I've been defensive, other times I've just been dismissive because I'm on a path and what you brought was diverting.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  And I regret that because I know I need you. You have to push me to think again and question the way I do things. So if I ever, if you ever hesitate because you're afraid of hurting my feelings or damaging our relationship, don't. The only way you can hurt me is by not telling me the truth." And the particular conversation I found really powerful there is to let people know that they often feel a tension between honesty and loyalty. I don't see a trade off there. For me, honesty is the highest expression of loyalty. The more candid and direct you are with me, the more I will value your input. And sometimes that's enough. In other cases, I have to go a step further, which is something that I explored in some research.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Turns out that sometimes asking people for input doesn't get them over the hurdle. They're still afraid, or they think it's just an exercise in futility. So what you have to do is criticize yourself out loud and say, "Here are the things I think I'm bad at. Here are the current shortcomings I see in my work." And what you're doing then is you're not just claiming you're open to feedback, you are proving you can take it.

• 1:10:37Steven Bartlett?

  So in that instance where you criticize yourself out loud and you say, God, I'm so bad at this or that, is in part why you're doing that to make it a safe space for them to then build on what you've just said?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're trying to create psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson describes it. And in some research that I did with Konstantinos Koutifris, we found that when leaders sat down and didn't just say, I want to know what I can do better at, but said, here are the things that I think I need to work on, a year later, when they were randomly assigned to do that, their teams actually were more willing to speak up and challenge them and give them constructive criticism. And I think part of what happens when you do that, and I actually do this in my own classroom, I read students, some of the toughest feedback I've gotten in my career. One said that I reminded them of a muppet. Never told me which muppet. Thanks for that.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  There was another where a military leader had written, I gained nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor got useful insight.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  It was not fun at the time. But what I find is, when I read those comments out loud afterward, I hear much more honest input from my students. They tell me things that they think are not going well in my class. They give me new ideas for improvement. And I think what I've done there is I'm showing that I take my work really seriously. I don't take myself that seriously. And I'm sort of unoffendable is the goal. And sometimes they build. They'll say, yeah, we see that weakness and you still need to work on it. And other times, they say, well, maybe you have a blind spot. You didn't tell us about this area where you're struggling, but we see this here.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Steve, I have to say, a lot of people get the concept but are afraid to do it because they don't want to admit what they're bad at to the people who work with them. Well, guess what? The people you work with every day, they already know what you're bad at. You can't hide it from them, right? So you might as well get credit for having the self-awareness to see it and the humility and integrity to admit it out loud.

• 1:12:48Steven Bartlett?

  On this point of teams as well and groups of people, the other thing that was quite challenging that I loved that you discussed is this idea that brainstorming doesn't really work well. And to maximize collective intelligence, we get more and better ideas when we work alone. And again, it kind of, there's a through line here with what we said at the start about procrastination and the use of boredom. One thing that's really helped me recently that I wanted to share and see if there's any resonance with you is when I have ideas, usually when I'm alone, to be fair, or when I'm reading or when I'm thinking or writing about something, I then write them out into memos now, which is just like a couple of pages for me to understand them and then I share them with people. Before, I didn't do that. Before, I was a bit more of a pepperer.

• 1:13:29Steven Bartlett?

  I take something I was thinking about and just pepper it into like a group chat. Whereas now, having time and space to write about it seems to be helping me to refine the ideas better, but it just helps me to come up with better ideas. My question here is about how groups of people form their best ideas and what you'd suggest based on the research.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Well, you're living the evidence. So let's, yeah, let's unpack this a little bit. I think decades of research on brainstorming have shown that if you get a group of people together to generate ideas, if instead you had put them in separate rooms and let them work alone, you would have gotten more ideas and also better ideas. A lot of people are surprised by this and there are a few reasons behind it that have good support. One is called production blocking. We can't all talk at once. Some ideas get lost. Two is ego threat. I don't want to look like an idiot, so I bite my tongue on my most unconventional ideas. And then three is conformity pressure, which is sometimes called the hippo effect. My favorite acronym, hippo stands for the highest paid person's opinion.

• 1:14:32Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  As soon as that's known, people jump on the bandwagon and you get too much convergent thinking, not enough divergent thinking.

• 1:14:42Steven Bartlett?

  How do we get past that in organizations? Is it about anonymity with ideas?

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  It can be. If you're in a low psychological safety environment where people are worried about their reputations, then yes, anonymous ideas help. But I want to get to a point where people are willing to put their names on their ideas. So I want to go in the direction that you've gone personally, which is psychologists recommend brain writing as an alternative to brainstorming.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  What you do is you recognize that writing is not just a tool for communicating, it's a tool for thinking. When you write out your thoughts, you can't get away with a half-baked idea that kind of is sold by your charisma. You actually get tested on your logic. And what you do is recognize that individuals are more creative than groups. They have more brilliant ideas. They have more variety than groups do. But they also have more terrible ideas than groups. And so we need a process to generate variety and then filter toward quality. And what brain writing does is you have everybody write down their own separate ideas. Then you collect them and you have everyone do independent ratings. So you get their judgment preserved before they're biased by what their peers think.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  Then, once you have all the ratings, you take the most promising ideas and you begin developing and refining those. And what you're trying to do then is to take the wisdom of crowds to make the ideas with high potential succeed. And I think for me, brain writing is one of the best ways to unlock the hidden potential in the group because it is not the loudest talker. It's not the most enthusiastic speaker who necessarily has the most compelling ideas.

• 1:16:16Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking, as you're talking about how I might implement that into some of my teams, and I was thinking about, so how would you create anonymity of the submission of the idea without people having some idea based on the way the person's writing who it is? You know what I mean? Because there's some people in our, I think, in my teams that you'd be able to just know from how they wrote something who it was.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Here's an idea. Thinking out loud. One thing I've tried from time to time is I've paired people up to then write down and pitch each other's ideas.

• 1:16:47Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  So you're separating the person who had the thought from the way it's being communicated. And I wonder if rotating a little bit that way could help.

• 1:16:55Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. So you could have one person read out all the ideas, basically, to a full group and then have them write independently? Or, yeah, interesting. Potential. Why did you write this book, Hidden Potential?

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  I wrote it, I wrote it really for two reasons. One is that I saw in the evidence that we underestimate potential in ourselves and others consistently. We think you can judge where people will land from where they start. But as we talked about with prodigies earlier, you can't always do that. And I'd read some, some classic research on world-class musicians, artists, athletes, and scientists, showing that they rarely stood out as better than their peers early on. Their early teachers, their coaches, even their own parents didn't know how much potential they had. And when they did stand out, it was not for unusual ability, it was for unusual motivation. They were, they were driven, they were passionate.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  And I wanted to dispel the myth that if you're not instantly good at something, you should walk away from it and only play to your strengths. And I wanted to do that in part because it wasn't just the evidence that spoke to me. I'd lived this. I was a terrible springboard diver when I started. I never would have imagined that I was going to be a junior Olympic national qualifier. As we talked about, I really struggled with public speaking. I didn't expect to go there. And I also, I failed the writing test when I arrived at university and was assigned to remedial writing, and here I am, an author. And so I've lived hidden potential along with studying it, and I felt like it was time to put those ideas out into the world.

• 1:18:29Steven Bartlett?

  Do you really, do you believe that your potential exists somewhere? Or do you think it's something that you create every, every time you push yourself?

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Can I say both?

• 1:18:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, that's probably, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've always wondered this. I've always wondered if I'm, if my life is the pursuit of my potential, or if my life is the creation of my potential.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  That is a brilliant question. I love the way you frame that. I think it's always a little bit of both, because we all have different, you know, skills and strengths that come naturally to us and different challenges that, that are hardwired. And so you could say, like, I had a ceiling on my athletic ability. Like, there are just, there are certain things I'm never going to be able to do as, as badly as I wanted to become a professional athlete. But a big part of me learning how to become a decent diver was, was trying to raise that ceiling. And after I retired, Eric, my coach, said to me that I got farther with less talent than any diver he'd coached. I wasn't sure if that was a compliment, but it actually is a huge compliment because he felt like I'd stretched my capabilities.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  And I think for me, hidden potential is about realizing that we all have capacities for growth that are invisible to us and sometimes to the people around us.

• 1:19:43Steven Bartlett?

  As it relates to unlocking that growth and being that overachiever that you were as it relates to diving, is there anything we haven't discussed that is critical to unlocking that potential?

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  I think so. I think-

• 1:19:57Steven Bartlett?

  Throw some of those things at me.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one of my favorites, so can I tell you a little story?

• 1:20:01Steven Bartlett?

  Please.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  One of my other challenges as a diver was I was afraid of heights and I also was afraid of extreme pain. There's nothing fun about doing a belly flop when you're up on a three meter springboard, never mind a 10 meter platform, which I avoided like the plague. And I was especially afraid when it was time to try a new dive because I was going to hurl myself into midair, spin and twist, get lost, and there's a high probability that you're going to smack. So I would stand there at the end of the board shaking. I would waste a lot of time in practice. Sometimes it would be five minutes, 10 minutes. One practice, I stood on the board for 45 minutes and I wouldn't go. I was wasting my time. I was wasting my teammate's time. I was wasting my coach's time. And Eric finally

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  said to me, he said, Adam, are you going to do this dive?

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  And I'm like, ever? Like, yes, of course. One day I will do this dive. And he said, great, then what are you waiting for?

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  And I've heard that voice in my head every time I've been afraid to take a risk and I've been hesitating to go outside my comfort zone. I heard it when I was afraid to write my first book and I didn't think I was ready. I heard it when I was considering giving a TED Talk and I didn't feel capable of doing a good job at it. I think the lesson I took from that was I thought that I had to build my confidence in order to take the leap. And that was completely backward. You build your confidence by taking the leap. And so I was kind of waiting for the magic day when I felt ready. And the reality is you become ready by putting yourself in situations that you don't think you can excel at yet.

• 1:21:46Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think that's enough to push people off the board? As a sort of analogy for life generally, because there'll be so many people that have just heard that. And just hearing that will enable some of them to take the leap. And then there's this other stubborn crowd that will hear that, that will understand it, that will believe it's true. And they still won't take the leap. They still will stay in that job. They still won't push themselves beyond their zone of comfort. Is there anything else that's required to get those people over the edge? Or is it too individualistic to know?

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  Well, I think one thing that group of people might have in common is a pervasive imposter syndrome. Right? The sense that, well, first of all, when people talk about imposter syndrome, sometimes they say, okay, like, I'm a fraud and it's only a matter of minutes until everybody finds out. And that feeling is actually pretty rare. What's much more common, if you look at the research of Basima Tufik, is imposter thoughts, everyday doubts about, am I as good as other people think I am? Am I ready for this role that other people are encouraging me to take on? Can I afford to quit my job and try becoming an entrepreneur? And what the research suggests is that there are actually some surprising benefits of

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  having those imposter thoughts. Basima finds, she studies medical professionals, investment professionals, military cadets, students, that when you have more frequent imposter thoughts, they actually can become fuel to motivate you to persist toward your goals. And the reason that happens is there's a gap between what other people think you're capable of and what you feel prepared for. And you realize, okay, I've got to put in extra effort and I've got to be better at listening to other people and learning from them in order to close the gap. So Basima's advice is when you feel like an imposter, you should recognize that other people think you're pretty amazing and now, all right, let's live up to those expectations. And I would go even further.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  I would say it's really tempting to trust your own judgment of your abilities above other people because you know more about yourself than any other human can possibly know about you. But here's the problem, you know too much about yourself to compare yourself accurately to others, and you're also not neutral, right? You can't be objective and independent and unbiased. So I think what you want to do is you want to, you want to see yourself through the eyes of people who know you well. And if multiple people believe in you, it's probably time to believe them.

• 1:24:16Steven Bartlett?

  Give me one more. Let's make this the closing one. As it relates to realizing our potential and unlocking our hidden potential, which is, you know, if I, if I was able to achieve anything with this podcast over the time that we ran it, allowing people to realize and pursue their potential, I think would be one of the greatest achievements that we as a team could have achieved by doing this podcast. It's something that I just think, I think people's, much of their happiness, much of their fulfillment, much of their health probably lies in the pursuit of their potential, whatever that means. And all of the opposite stuff, much of their dissatisfaction, their unhappiness probably lies in their, their regret and their understanding that they can and could have done more in their lives. I mean, you think about Broner where all the time that study she did on those palliative

• 1:25:00Steven Bartlett?

  patients where so many of them wish they'd lived the life true to themselves. So many of them wish that they'd taken that jump and pursued that thing that was maybe a little bit more risky. So what is the closing argument here for those people that are trying to unlock their hidden potential?

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Well, I think if, if you look at regret, psychologists find that our biggest regrets in the long run are not our failures. There are failures to try. And it's, it's the actions not taken that we wish we could redo the most. I think finding the, the motivation and the courage to take those risks is, is not always easy for people. And I think one thing that I've found helpful over time that, that has some good evidence behind it is a lot of us know we need other people's input in order to get better. So what we do is we ask for feedback. And the problem with asking for feedback is you end up with a bunch of cheerleaders and critics.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  The cheerleaders you don't fully trust because they see you through rose colored glasses and they just applaud your best self. The critics are devastating. They attack your worst self. We want our coaches, people who see your hidden potential and help you become a better version of yourself. And Steve, you've seen this forever. World-class athletes and musicians and actors have coaches. We all need coaches in our lives and they don't have to be somebody we hire. You don't have to have a budget. They're people that you rely on who are part of that challenge network, who enable you to keep growing. So how do you get your cheerleaders and critics to be better coaches? What you do is instead of asking them for feedback, you seek their advice. When you ask for feedback, people look at the past.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  If you ask for advice, they turn to the future and they become more specific and more actionable in giving you tips and suggestions. So if you go back, I'll give you the personal example on this one. Go back to the military leaders that I taught, who told me that they gained nothing from my session, but they hope I learned something. I've got a bunch of critics in that situation. And they're demoralizing me. I want to give up. I'm like, I wonder if I could actually build the ability to hibernate. And then in a few months, I'll feel better. But I had committed to teach a second session for these military leaders. And it was about a week later, I didn't have time to reboot all my content.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  And so I went to my critics and tried to turn them into coaches. And I asked them for advice on what to do differently in the next session. And one of them said, a big mistake I made was I led with my credentials. And I tried to convince them that I was an expert. Well, I was 25 years old. These are seasoned military leaders. They've got multi-billion pound budgets. They've got thousands of flying hours under their belts. They've got Top Gun-style nicknames. I'm not going to convince them that I am more experienced than they are. And this one person said, you should try calling out the elephant in the room. Be a little more vulnerable. So I walk in the next week, I look out at the room and I say, all right, I know what you're all thinking right now.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  What could I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old?

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  Silence. And then one guy, call sign Sandune, jumps in and he says, "That's ridiculous. You gotta be at least 13." They all burst out laughing. It broke the ice. I'm more or less taught the same material, but the feedback was much more positive afterward. They told me that although I was junior inexperienced, I dealt with the evidence in an interesting way. And they liked learning from somebody who was almost as young as the millennials they were trying to lead. And I learned from that experience that the very people who were, it felt like they were trying to take me down. If I asked for their advice instead of their feedback, they actually gave me a tip that built me up.

• 1:28:53Steven Bartlett?

  It made me think about something that I learned from reading your work, which is this difference between self-promotion and idea promotion as well. I actually sent it to a friend earlier on. My friend runs a personal branding company. It's called Ashley. The company's called Great Influence. And he spends his time basically helping leaders build their personal brand. And he'll often send me things that he's seen online. And when I read about your concept of self-promotion versus idea promotion, I realized that all the things he sends me that are bad are self-promotion. And all the things that he sends me are good, are fundamentally idea promotion. What is the distinction, just so we're clear?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  I think the distinction for me is that self-promotion is about saying, "Look at me. Let me tell you about all my accomplishments and awards. I'm going to show off my trophies and I'm trying to impress you and make you think that I'm great." Idea promotion is saying, "I have something worth sharing and I want to elevate a product, a service, an insight." And people have dramatically different reactions to the two. The first comes across as narcissistic and bragging and self-centered. The second is actually seen as an act of generosity. You're taking your knowledge and your skills and you're trying to create a gift for other people and hoping that they receive it. And I think this is so important because a lot of people don't share their ideas. They don't put their work out there because they're afraid of looking like they're self-promoting.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  And they are doing such a disservice to the world by not releasing their creativity.

• 1:30:24Steven Bartlett?

  So many people have a problem with that. So, you know, so many people have a problem, especially when they're making a transition from being someone who was quiet or silent to that first post, that first book, that first. And part of that is because of the impact it has on the people that know you. So for me, for example, the first time I wrote like a quote or an idea online, I felt that anxiety of, oh my God, my friends from school are going to think, I think I'm like Mahatma Gandhi or like Nelson Mandela or something because I'm sharing my ideas. And the sheer fact that I'm sharing my ideas means that I think I've got good ideas and I think I'm smart. And so the best thing to do is just not to share the ideas so that my friends don't judge me.

• 1:31:08Steven Bartlett?

  For whatever reason, I managed to persist and I shared an idea. And I actually, in the early stages of sharing my ideas on the internet, I got some feedback from my friend Jamie that told me one of our mutual friends was like criticizing me. He was saying like, who the fuck does he think he is? This was like nine years ago, maybe. Who the fuck does he think he is? He thinks he's da, da, da, da, et cetera. That was difficult, persisted, and I'm so glad I did because it changed my life. And I think of so, there's so many people that are in that exact moment where they've got ideas, they've got skills that they could share. It would transform their lives and add value to the lives of other people, but they're stuck because, yeah, they're scared of it feeling like self-promotion.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  I believe everyone has ideas worth sharing and that we have a responsibility to not deprive the people around us from learning. And I think the, the great thing about the democratization of knowledge is that anybody can access anybody else's ideas. And so I think there's an opportunity for all of us to put our thoughts out there. This, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think the framing as personal branding is helpful because it's center stages self-promotion. I don't want to have a brand. When people tell me I said something on brand, I feel like I've been typecast or I'm losing my authenticity. What I want is, I want to have a reputation. I don't want to be a shiny product that's packaged with a bunch of slogans. I want to be somebody who's known for a set of values.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  And, you know, one of those values is, is original thinking and rethinking. And that means I shouldn't even disagree with my own ideas. If I don't contradict myself, I am failing to learn. Gosh, I remember after Give and Take came out, I got branded as the nice guy is finish first guy for the givers over takers message. And I was so annoyed by that, first of all, because a lot of givers aren't nice. Helping other people is different from being polite to them. And the disagreeable givers were a case in point of that. And eventually I was like, maybe, maybe my next book needs to be called Take and Take. And write about why selfish assholes succeed just because I'm so committed to evolving what I think.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  And I don't think you do that if you're trying to maintain a personal brand. That's, you know, that's, that's consistent in representing a certain slogan. I think you do that if you're trying to live a set of values.

• 1:33:28Steven Bartlett?

  Amen.

• 1:33:31Steven Bartlett?

  It really has made me rethink, rethink just the term personal branding, but really the purpose of, the true purpose of idea promotion is the pursuit of truth, right? And knowledge and in the process of that, you obviously gain a ton yourself. But we talked about earlier, I think they often call it the Freiman technique, where by writing and sharing, you're actually learning more than anyone else. I think it was James Clear that said, the person that learns more in any, in any, most in any classroom is in fact the teacher. But this, this, this, the importance of being okay with being inconsistent, being continually wrong, your old work contradicting your new work is very important, but not easy to do because, because of the cognitive dissonance that admitting you're wrong creates.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  This is a central question of Think Again. And I, I'm so struck, I originally learned this framework from Phil Tetlock. And then I started studying it. I'm so struck by how many people spend too many of their waking hours thinking like preachers, prosecutors and politicians.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  So when you go into preacher mode, you're proselytizing your own ideas. In prosecutor mode, you're attacking somebody else's ideas. And in politician mode, you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your ideas. And I always like to ask, I find that that most people have a dominant style that gets them in trouble. So mine is prosecutor mode. If I think you're wrong, like it is my professional and moral responsibility to correct you, which never goes well. And I've even been called a logic bully, which my wife had to explain to me was not a compliment.

• 1:35:04Steven Bartlett?

  I think I'm a logic bully.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  Are you?

• 1:35:06Steven Bartlett?

  I think so, sometimes.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Fellow prosecutor.

• 1:35:08Steven Bartlett?

  It's my, it's, maybe this is an excuse. So maybe I'm bullshitting myself here. But when I hear an idea, I think part of my pursuit of learning is by challenging it. And that's not always a good thing, especially when it's your girlfriend and she's just trying to tell you something and you're like, no, but logically, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, and I read this study and I did this podcast, duh, duh, duh, duh. It's like you don't need to interact with people like that all the time.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  I make this mistake all the time. And I, you know, Alison calls me out regularly. She's like, you, you, you actually do not need to argue with an idea to understand it. And you don't have to pressure test every single, you know, point that's made. Sometimes you can listen and learn from other people as opposed to duking it out to try to figure out who's right. And I think it's such an important note because in prosecutor mode, you've already concluded that other people are wrong and you're right. So you, you lose the ability to open your mind and the same thing happens if you're preaching or politicking. You know, you're, you're basically drinking your own Kool-Aid or listening only to your own tribe and trapping yourself in an echo chamber.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  And so I got really curious about how do we, how do we get out of those modes? What's an alternative? And my favorite alternative is to think more like a scientist. When I say think like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope or, you know, a telescope. I mean that you don't let your ideas become your identity. That you recognize every opinion you hold, it's just a hypothesis. You can test it. Every decision you make, just an experiment. It might succeed, it might fail. And when you do that, it turns out when people, people can be taught to think more like scientists. When you teach people to see their opinions as hypotheses, their decisions as experiments, lo and behold, they make better choices. They achieve more success because they become more flexible. They change their minds faster. They're quicker to recognize that they're wrong.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  And that means they're quicker to get it right.

• 1:37:07Steven Bartlett?

  But if, if Jack had loads of ideas and every single time any idea came out of his mouth, even if it was a good morning, and we all went, Jack, you're, you're so right. It's hard to see how Jack's self-esteem or his ego doesn't take a boost there. And him become more committed to being right in the future. Because then imagine if we did that for one year as an experiment, then suddenly we turn around one day and go, Jack, what are you talking about? That is wrong. You can imagine his, his ego, you know, swelling and going, duh. So I guess what I'm trying to say is how difficult it is for us to disassociate our self-worth with being right.

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, I've, a colleague once told me that the worst problem he sees in humanity is the addiction to being right.

• 1:37:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  And I think it's much more important to focus on getting it right than being right. And one of the ways you do that is you do not let your beliefs become part of your self-concept. So people, wait, what, what do you base, who are you if you're not what you think? You are what you value. What's the difference between values and beliefs? Beliefs are what you think is true. Values are what you think is important. And I think this is such a critical distinction because when you start to, to base your identity, your sense of self and your, your ego and your self-esteem and self-worth on what you think is true, then admitting you were wrong is a major threat.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  Whereas when you start to see yourself as someone who values curiosity or is a lifelong learner, now changing your mind is a moment of growth. So a simple example, before evidence-based medicine, there were a lot of people who called themselves doctors and be like, oh, you're feeling anxious? Let's give you a frontal lobotomy.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  You think that's an effective way to treat anxiety. That's a belief of yours, right? If that becomes part of your identity, if you're, if you see yourself as a professional lobotomist, you are never going to believe the evidence that this is harmful. If you see yourself instead as somebody who helps treat anxiety and that's your value, the moment you read the careful evidence saying, this is not working and it's also really dangerous, is the moment you change your mind. And so I think what this means fundamentally is you have a set of principles that you stay true to, but you're very flexible when it comes to your practices and policies.

• 1:39:37Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to do my very, very best.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  Try it at your own risk.

• 1:39:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'm gonna try. Adam, thank you. Thank you for all the work you do because you, you forced me to challenge myself over and over again in the, in all the books you've written. But central to all the books you've written is the idea of challenging oneself, which I think is one of the most important messages, which is just this continual pursuit of truth, knowledge and questioning the status quo and then questioning that. And I think that, that process of sort of iterative experimentation, that humility, that ability to maintain the student mindset throughout your career is the path to success in both your professional pursuits, but also your personal ones. It's one of the things that's really helped me in my relationships is this idea of remaining humble to new information and facts.

• 1:40:23Steven Bartlett?

  You embody that as a human being, but you embody it in all of your work and your work is original. And that's why it's so challenging. Something I aspire to in the work that I make is to, to, to go to those extra lengths to create wonderfully original work. I, I sometimes sit on the show and I will recommend someone to go and buy one of the author's books, but in, in this case, I can't because I think people need to buy them all. They all offer something so challenging in a very important way. The Hidden Potential is the newest book, right? That's the, that's the brand new, that came out in October last year, didn't it? But they're all essential books for different chapters and different perspectives and different phases of life. So I'd recommend everybody go buy all three of the books that I have in front of me here, which is the originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential.

• 1:41:06Steven Bartlett?

  Get them as a nice little package deal on Amazon because they are really important books to push your thinking forward. And that's exactly what you've done for me as an entrepreneur. You've pushed my thinking forward. So a huge thank you from myself, but also for the millions of people that have benefited from your work.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  Thank you. That's incredibly generous of you and it means a lot to me considering the source because you are an original.

• 1:41:25Steven Bartlett?

  I'm very kind.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  And one of the things I love about Diary of a CEO is you are constantly challenging people to rethink their ideas and to try new things and unlock their hidden potential. So you're doing what I study on this show and I think it's amazing. And you know, not anyone can make Malcolm Gladwell cry. I've known him for over a decade. I've never seen him break down into tears before or since. So well done there.

• 1:41:53Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Before we wrap, I have a couple of questions for you.

• 1:41:55Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, go ahead.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  I snuck a couple in as we were going, but there are a couple of things I was curious about in your game.

• 1:42:01Steven Bartlett?

  I feel, why do I feel nervous?

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  I'm turning the tables here. You should feel nervous. I'm judging you.

• 1:42:06Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  No. First question is, where do you think your hidden potential lies?

• 1:42:11Steven Bartlett?

  I think my hidden potential relies in what you would typically think of more creative mediums like music and theater and things like that. I think that's where my hidden potential lies. And I think much of the reason I haven't ever pursued it or unlocked it is because I've lived under this limiting belief that I don't have the right to because I'm a, my identity says entrepreneur.

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Time to expand your identity.

• 1:42:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yes. And also because I'm just not good at, I'm not as good at it as people that I think of as like musical or, you know, it's only in recent-

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  You're not good enough yet.

• 1:42:52Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  Okay. So you're not Beyonce today?

• 1:42:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55Speaker 02

  Don't bother trying.

• 1:42:56Steven Bartlett?

  But I can be Beyonce. But if I committed more time to it and I could get over the initial hurdle of the delta between me and Beyonce, maybe I'd pursue it and maybe I'd become it. But I think that's where my hidden potential lies is in the creative things. And I think it's in part because I have, when you've succeeded at something, it reinforces your identity as that thing and that can trap you in a box.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  It can. I guess for anybody who's stuck and afraid to take the leap, maybe instead of identity, they should focus on the activity.

• 1:43:25Steven Bartlett?

  So true.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  What's something you've rethought lately?

• 1:43:30Steven Bartlett?

  I always rethink my approach to the way I am with people and your work as well, like especially in the research in the lead up to meeting you. It made me rethink the way that I am with people. I think I've been programmed to think that my approach is

• 1:43:47Steven Bartlett?

  a successful approach. When I say my approach, I'm very obsessed. I'm very particular about detail. I'm, I sacrifice a lot of personal things in a pursuit of work. So I just, I was up till 3am last night, just working on a bunch of different businesses when my girlfriend was in bed. I actually got out of bed at 1am to go and work when she'd fallen asleep. That's the kind of guy I am. And I struggle to tolerate people that don't think like me, as in people that aren't as obsessed, that aren't as like committed. And I've started to think that if I zoomed out on my approach to life, maybe I'm going to end up in a worse place because of that. Maybe I'm going to have less connections. Maybe I'll be richer, but maybe I won't be richer in a psychological or social capacity. And so I think about that a lot because the thing that

• 1:44:29Steven Bartlett?

  served me so well, that's taken me out of the situation of being a shoplifting, pizza stealing.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  Marshmallow.

• 1:44:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Kid that was like insecure is this approach. And maybe as we kind of talked about in organizations where they have to go from that commitment culture to a different culture, maybe I need to go to a different culture in this chapter of my life to be successful in this phase of life, which is maybe a little bit more of work, life harmony. Maybe I need to soften up a little bit at times. Just because it resulted in success in a business capacity, doesn't mean it's going to result in a success in all these other capacities of life. I think about this all the time.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  Love that. So you're rethinking your workaholism.

• 1:45:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm going to have the last question because it's a tradition on this podcast, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. So the question that's been left for you, they didn't sign it. That's unusual. What is your first historical, rather than personal memory, i.e. the first time you realized there is a big world out there unrelated to you and your friends and family? Wow.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  What an interesting question. You know, I don't know if this was the first. It's the most vivid. It was 1989. I was eight and I heard Billy Joel's song, We Didn't Start the Fire. And I had never heard of most of the references in that song. I was like, what's Stu DeBaker? I knew what television was. What happened in North Korea and South Korea? And I ended up doing a project, just a personal project, to get the backstory of every reference in that song. And I didn't know it, but that was the first research project I ever did. And I guess it was foreshadowing.

• 1:46:12Steven Bartlett?

  Wow. That is an obscure answer that I wasn't expecting. I was expecting some kind of like world tragedy or something. That's so interesting.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  That's the one I remember.

• 1:46:20Steven Bartlett?

  Adam, thank you.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Thank you. This has been a joy and an honor.

• 1:46:25Steven Bartlett?

  Appreciate you so much. Thank you.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  Right back at you.

• 1:46:51Steven Bartlett?

  If you're running a business, people have probably told you to use AI or get left behind. And I get that urgency. Still, AI doesn't fix a messy business. It exposes one because AI can only work with the information it can see. So if you ask AI something about your business, about stock or sales or customers or about your team, that information needs to be connected to the AI to be useful. That's the idea behind NetSuite by Oracle, the sponsor of this episode. NetSuite is the AI-powered business management suite that securely connects your financials, your inventory, your commerce, your HR and your CRM into a single source of truth. And with NetSuite Next, AI is built into that connected system. It can surface useful insights, help with routine work and let you ask questions about your business in plain English.

• 1:47:36Steven Bartlett?

  For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free if your business is generating seven figures or more. Just go to netsuite.org. AI slash Bartlett, that's netsuite dot AI slash Bartlett.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  This episode is sponsored by Asana.

• 1:47:53Steven Bartlett?

  Let me admit something to you. I'm a little bit messy. I have got ADHD and sometimes I forget things. I'll put something in Google Drive. I'll put something on my desktop. It's all over the shop. And I can't imagine how much that is costing me as an entrepreneur or as a creative. I never thought of this as a project management problem. I just thought of it as a me problem. So let me give you a window into my fiancee Melanie and how she operates. She's running a business and she doesn't rely on remembering everything. She creates systems that mean she doesn't have to. And one system she's made for her business is that when people attend her retreats and they get automated itineraries and they get packs sent to them automatically after the retreat, all thanks to Asana. So if you're someone who constantly feels like you need to be better, more organised, maybe ask yourself a different question. Is it actually you that needs to change? Or is it the way that you're working?

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Asana has always been great at organising work and breaking down projects into tasks. Now you can assign those tasks to AI teammates. These are agents that already understand your work and keep things moving without you having to chase, check or remember. When something needs a real decision, it comes back to you. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams. So less falls through the cracks and less has to live in your head. Try it at asana.com. A S A N A dot com.

• 1:49:07Steven Bartlett?

  As I founded building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at. And that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances. Zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business and increasingly, and this is maybe the most

• 1:49:48Steven Bartlett?

  important thing, is help you make decisions. Finally, we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that, quite frankly, has never loved finances that much.