Pod Insights How to Be a Better Human Power, purpose, and the American presidency with Jared Cohen | from ReThinking with Adam Grant About this episode What do the most powerful people in the world do after they've achieved success? Jared Cohen is a history buff and a presidential historian. His latest book, “Life After Power https://bookshop.org/p/books/life-after-power-seven-presidents-and-their-search-for-purpose-beyond-the-white-house-jared-cohen/20157976?ean=9781982154547,” is a fascinating exploration about what seven American presidents did after leaving the most influential job in the world. In this episode of ReThinking with Adam Grant, another podcast in the TED Audio Collective, Adam and Jared discuss the psychology of the founding fathers, debate the pros and cons of pursuing a legacy, and share what these historic figures can teach us all about pursuing and finding purpose.
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0:01 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times.
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1:32 Chris Duffy? Hey, everyone. Chris Duffy here. On How to Be a Better Human, we try to offer you advice that might change the way you think about your life. And today, I want to share another podcast with you that I think might also make you think differently. It's actually called Rethinking, and it's Rethinking with Adam Grant. Now, if you don't already know Adam Grant's work, he's incredible. He's an organizational psychologist who explores the science of what makes us tick. And each week on his show, Adam talks to some of the world's most fascinating and influential people to uncover bold insights and surprising science that can make us all a little bit smarter. In this episode, Adam is talking to Jared Cohen, a historian and businessman. Who spent years working on a book about American presidents,
2:12 Chris Duffy? specifically a book about how that kind of extraordinary power affected seven very different presidents' perceptions of meaning, purpose, and legacy. And I like that this isn't necessarily just an episode for history buffs. This is an episode for everyone because Jared is using history to talk through some of the really profound everyday questions that we all have about fulfillment and purpose and what that looks like, even at the very highest levels of success. If you liked this episode, and I think you're going to, you can find more episodes of Rethinking with Adam Grant wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back with How to Be a Better Human next week, but for now, on to the show.
2:53 Speaker 01 Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
3:11 Speaker 01 My guest today is Jared Cohen. He was a Rhodes Scholar and has been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. He worked in the State Department under both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, then fought extremism as founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Google. Today, he leads global affairs and innovation at Goldman Sachs. In his spare time, Jared is a history buff, and his new book, Life After Power, is a riveting look at who seven American presidents became after they left the Oval Office. It's brimming with insights for anyone who's ever wondered, what's next?
3:52 Speaker 01 Hey, Jared Cohen.
3:53 Speaker 02 Hello, Adam Grant.
3:55 Speaker 01 I want to talk to you about a lot of things, but I have to start it. When did you become obsessed with American presidents? Because you've been into them as long as I've known you, and I know a lot longer than that.
4:07 Speaker 02 So, look, my career has spanned foreign policy, technology, and now finance. And the only thing that's consistent in my life is an unhealthy obsession with the US presidency. I suppose it started when I was eight years old. My parents bought me this children's book called The Buck Stops Here, and it had rhymes that went with each president. So I remember, you know, 10 and 7, Johnson A., they almost took his job away. And it was kind of very catchy for a precocious young kid. And presidents, you know, when I was growing up, they were the most famous people in the world. My early memories are of, you know, George H. W. Bush going on TV announcing the war in Panama, Desert Storm. And so for me, these were the most visible figures that I remember, and I just developed an obsession with it. One of the big interests
4:52 Speaker 02 that I had was what happens when presidents die in office in these abrupt transfers of power and how they changed the course of history. And my last book, Accidental Presidents, kind of captured that. And when that book was done, I asked myself the question, what else am I interested in? And I got really consumed by this question of, okay, I focused on what happens when presidents die in office, but what happens when they survive the office and they come down from the stratosphere? And there's years and sometimes decades that they still have to live and exist in a world where they're constrained and in a much lower station.
5:26 Speaker 01 It's such a fascinating topic, I think, not just for heads of state, but for all of us, because there comes a point in our career and our lives when we decide we're going to step back from our positions of greatest influence. And the question is, now what? And I want to talk about what you learned about the now what. But before we do that, I'm struck by the fact that you said unhealthy obsession. How have you suffered from being interested in presidents?
5:50 Speaker 02 I would describe the unhealthy part of my interest in presidents as manifesting itself in strange ways. Somebody can ask me about anything, and I can take it on a tangent into some seriously obscure, geeky presidential history that people may or may not be interested in. I collect presidential oddities as well. I like owning these pieces of history that make you feel like you exist in the past. So I have the vial of Poison that Charles Gatto's sister sent to him when he was in prison after he murdered President Garfield. You know, I have the, one of the few surviving champagne glasses from the John Adams White House. You know, it's these artifacts or these things owned by presidents or that touch different parts of presidential history.
6:36 Speaker 01 You picked a series of presidents. You obviously weren't going to write a book about all of them. But I think one of the things you did was you chose presidents who were archetypes for different choices that you can make about what to do once you were, you were done leading the country. Whose, whose choices surprised you the most?
6:52 Speaker 02 So the first thing that I'll say, Adam, is that, look, there's no more dramatic retirement or firing than leaving the presidency of the United States. I mean, you go from having more power than anybody else in the world to living with a muzzle on your mouth and being constrained with a sense that there's nothing left to, to, to achieve. So the, the question itself was very interesting. And as you mentioned, all of us at different stages of life are asking this question of what's next. We ask it in micro ways throughout the course of our life. And then we eventually get to this thing that we call retirement, which is really more of a mirage and a transition and a milestone than, than, than anything else. And what I was struck by is very few presidents of the United States after leaving
7:36 Speaker 02 office had a good experience in, quote, "the political afterlife." For a lot of them, they got stuck and bogged down in settling old scores and they were grumpy. Some were alcoholics. One of them joined the Confederacy. One of them, you know, was a northerner who became a southern sympathizer during the Civil War. But the combination of health, finances, broken relationships, lack of purpose, all these things aggregate in the post presidency to create conditions for a pretty unpleasant life for a lot of them. So the question is, who's left standing? I focus on Thomas Jefferson and the founding of, of the University of Virginia, John Quincy Adams, who became the leader of the abolitionists in the House
8:17 Speaker 02 of Representatives, Grover Cleveland, who mounted a successful comeback to the presidency, William Howard Taft, who finally got his dream job of being Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Herbert Hoover, who was on a long path to recover, a path to serving the world after being broken by the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter, who found a way to create a never-ending presidency as a former president, and George W. Bush, who found a way to completely move on. He stood out in the sense that his popularity has gone up and he's done less to invest in it than any others, and that, for me, was worthy of a study. But what's interesting is there really were only seven that I thought warranted a deeper look, and they had some things in common, but each of them pursued life after power
9:01 Speaker 02 in a very different way, and they do represent seven different archetypes. And what I find fascinating about that is there's not a perfect monolithic blueprint or playbook for how, when we are going through transitions in our lives, whether it's towards the end, in the early stages of life, or the middle of life, there's not a playbook or perfect blueprint for how to do that right.
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11:55 Speaker 01 I think the one that I found most interesting in the book was John Quincy Adams. What was powerful for me about his story was he had higher impact from a lower seat. Talk to me about what he did and what you took away from it.
12:09 Speaker 02 Here's a man who began his career appointed by George Washington to serve in his administration. And then he dies serving in the House of Representatives alongside a freshman congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. I mean, talk about a living connection between the past and the future. His presidency was the least eventful part of his life. It was basically an intermission between two of the greatest acts in American history. The first act of his life was a series of steps and jobs that led him on the path to be president, and that was largely architected for him by his famous parents, John and Abigail Adams. But his presidency is a political stillborn, and cries of corrupt bargain, you know, basically make it impossible for him to achieve anything as president.
12:53 Speaker 02 And so then, much like his father, he's defeated for reelection in 1828, and he's completely distraught. I mean, I got really, really deep into reading his diaries, and I would say I sort of appropriated some of his melancholy in the process. I mean, it's hard to imagine a more self-loathing, self-pitying, miserable human being than John Quincy Adams after he's defeated.
13:15 Speaker 01 Okay, you actually just explained why this is an unhealthy obsession. Because you went into the depths of somebody else's despair.
13:22 Speaker 02 His writings and his diary, they describe a man just completely destroyed. And so he goes back home to Quincy, Massachusetts, and he annoys his wife, he's annoying his kids, he's annoying his friends, he's spending all of his time fighting with people who wronged him at every stage of his life. And finally, everybody sort of gravitates around this idea that like, just get back into service so you stop annoying the rest of us. And the only thing that John Quincy Adams knew was a life of service. And he'd already been Secretary of State, he'd been president, he served in the US Senate, he'd been an ambassador to multiple countries. And the only thing left was like the lowest station of all, which is a mere representative in the House of Representatives.
14:05 Speaker 02 And he basically agrees to run, he's elected, and he ends up as this sort of ex-presidential novelty and sort of a joke in the lowest station he's ever had in his career. For his first year and a half... He does what a member of the House does in the late 1820s, early 1830s, which is you get petitions and you read them. And what happens is some of these petitions are petitions to abolish the slave trade in DC, petitions to emancipate the slaves. And then the reaction from the slaveocracy in the House of Representatives really astonishes him. And he realizes, wait a minute, they don't want me to read these petitions. That's an abomination to the right to petition. So then he starts reading more of them.
14:47 Speaker 02 And as he reads more of them, the slaveocracy gets increasingly agitated and they end up gagging him. And so then it's the right to petition is curbed, then the right to speech is curbed. And, you know, it all sort of culminates when he fights to rescind the gag order and defends the Amistad slaves before the Supreme Court. And what he realizes is that without searching for it, the cause of abolition found him. And in a much lower station, he found a much greater calling. And he stumbled into this mission that frankly, he had never championed at any other stage in his life. And he gets elected to nine terms in the House of Representatives. And before John Quincy Adams, the abolitionist cause was viewed largely as a fringe movement or a radical movement.
15:32 Speaker 02 And we know that Abraham Lincoln was inspired by what he saw from John Quincy Adams and that the intellectual architecture around the need for a constitutional amendment to get to emancipation inspired that young congressman who would go on to become one of the great presidents of the United States.
15:47 Speaker 01 That's an extreme example of not just bouncing back, but bouncing forward. To go from complete despair, an unsuccessful presidency, to helping to plant the seeds of the Emancipation Proclamation? Pretty extraordinary.
16:02 Speaker 02 His story tells you that if you're patient and you just kind of let things play out, you may actually find the greatest cause of your life. I wouldn't describe him as an open-minded person. I would describe him as an impatient person. He was meandering at the right moment. But had he leaned into some sort of deliberate cause, he may never have become the champion for the abolitionist movement that changed the course of history.
16:29 Speaker 01 It's a strong case for patience. It also makes me think about something that developmental psychologists have been interested in ever since Eric Erickson first coined the distinction between generativity and stagnation. The question that I think all of us face around, am I going to contribute to the next generation? Or am I going to basically let my knowledge kind of ossify and not share it with others? And it seems to me that in some ways, John Quincy Adams confronted the tension between happiness and meaning. He could have done lots of things that were personally pleasurable and enjoyable, but a little bit devoid of purpose. And through seeking something that was more meaningful, he found what might have been
17:13 Speaker 01 a little bit less fun work, but ultimately more enjoyable contributions to make.
17:19 Speaker 02 I think that's right. There's something else about John Quincy Adams that's worth calling out, and this won't be relatable to everybody, but he had a fighting spirit. He loved fighting with people and quarreling with people and intellectually outfoxing people. And he shows up in the House of Representatives and he just thinks these members are just the epitome of mediocrity. His success in the House was a combination of being motivated by this cause, but it was gradual. What keeps him going is just the day-to-day play-by-play of winning and outsmarting. And it's what drives him. At the end of the day, he's a political and an intellectual animal.
18:01 Speaker 01 There are so many sayings about how power affects people, right? So we think about Lord Acton, "Power corrupts." I've found that to be oversimplified, and I feel like a lot of the research in psychology says, actually, power doesn't corrupt so much as reveal. It amplifies the values and traits that you might have hidden when you were on your way up the ladder. But once you've gained enough influence and status and authority, you feel like now you can kind of show your true colors without major risk. I'm interested in how these dynamics play out when people lose power. So I guess the question for you, Jared, is, does losing power uncorrupt people? Or does it also have a way of revealing or concealing who they really are?
18:43 Speaker 02 If I reflect on the seven presidents that I write about, The only one that I think really enjoyed being president and reveled in the power of the office was Jimmy Carter. And I think therefore, it's fitting that what Jimmy Carter did that's different from any of the others is he was the first one to really build infrastructure around being a former president. He basically built a former presidential administration. But I think for the rest of them, the power of the presidency in a lot of respects, it actually got in the way of what they wanted to do. And the architecture of the presidency ended up hindering the areas where they were most passionate, right?
19:27 Speaker 02 Jefferson, his entire life, was very clear about what he wanted to do. All he wanted to do was create the very first arts and sciences university, but he had this founder's obligation where he had to keep coming back and serving. He had to be vice president. He had to be secretary of state. Then he had to be president twice. And all that did was cut years off his life and delay what he actually wanted to do, which was found a university. Herbert Hoover, before he became president, was one of the most revered men in not just the United States, but the world. He was the man who fed the world after World War I. He was the hero of the recovery after the Mississippi floods. He was an orphan who rose to be a self-made millionaire. He's a man who lived 90 years, and he's defined
20:10 Speaker 02 by three and a half of the Great Depression. I think his view is, one, democracy is a harsh employer, something that he had said. But I think that he would have been a very happy man had he never had to be president, because he would have been the great humanitarian for his whole life. And so, at least for the seven presidents, or six of the seven that I focus on, I think what's fascinating is, once they move to life after power, once they leave the presidency behind, there's a period of time where they work to kind of rediscover who they were before they were president. They almost have to exorcise out of them all of the sort of poison of the office and the politics and the baggage
20:52 Speaker 02 of the presidency. And each of them got to that pretty quickly and rediscovered their raison d'etre. And it looked a little bit different, and it evolved from the time from before they were president. It's kind of a tale of two types of power. The power of the office, which is intoxicating for some, but the power of purpose, which I think defined a lot of these men that I write about.
21:13 Speaker 01 It also makes me think about the classic triad of implicit motives that David McClellan put on the map in psychology. The idea that some people are driven by achievement, they want to succeed. Others are primarily guided by a desire for power, they want to have influence and control. And then some are drawn to affiliation, they want to connect and belong. As I hear you talk about the six that were not that happy as presidents, they sound like they follow the arc that David Winter has captured in some of his research, where it's almost misplaced ambition. You're an achievement motivated person, and the highest form of success is to become president. But then, the process of having to campaign and also to govern is not about achievement, it's about power.
21:55 Speaker 01 And if you're not somebody who's power motivated, it's extremely frustrating to be blocked from achieving your goals, to be constantly having to wheel and deal. The amount of schmoozing that's required is really counterproductive and annoying for an achievement motivated person. And then, you leave the office, and you have to recalibrate. You're freed from having to accumulate and exercise power, but your achievements seem really small, or what you're capable of achieving seems really small. And so then, trying to figure out, how do you express that motivation? It's a bit of an adjustment at some level. What do you make of all that?
22:30 Speaker 02 With each of the presidents that I write about, each of them either enters the post-presidency or discovers something in the post-presidency that they become dogmatic about in terms of some kind of cause or motivation. And whether they realize it at the beginning of their post-presidency or later in their post-presidency, they come to discover that, unshackled from the office and all the politics and constraints, they're better positioned to do something about it than they were in office. Look, even Jimmy Carter, who loved the presidency more than anything, over time, he came to appreciate the fact that, wait a minute, what I care about is human rights, free and
23:11 Speaker 02 fair elections, curing disease, and the post-presidency and being a former president that's willing to criticize my Democratic and Republican successors means that I can basically- Do all the things with the presidency that I loved and I don't have to deal with any of the garbage that bogged me down. We all know people, they got offered the dream job that they wanted and the timing wasn't right. Maybe they had a challenge with one of their kids or they didn't want to move somewhere and they had to turn down something that they really lusted after. That was William Howard Taft, except it's because he chose to basically be subservient to his wife and his three brothers and his mentor Theodore Roosevelt. And he basically turned down the court multiple times because everybody else wanted him to be president. But he never lost this sort of desire or
23:56 Speaker 02 this sense of purpose to one day serve on the court. And William Howard Taft, his final 10 years of life were the happiest years of his life because he served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Each of these presidents, what's fascinating is as they get older, as their legs give out, as their health fails, as all their friends start dying, they actually accelerate their activities. Herbert Hoover was the most busy from the ages of 80 to 90. William Howard Taft was most busy in his last 10 years. And I have a theory on this, that because those first years out of office are such a challenging transition, and because they reflect back on the presidency sometimes as lost years, which is interesting, that towards the end of life, they become conscious of their own
24:41 Speaker 02 mortality and they accelerate their activities because they feel like they have to make up for lost time.
24:47 Speaker 01 And that brings us to your presidential outlier, George W. Bush, who you spend a lot of time with and who is just a complete enigma to me. When I think about the motive profiles, the research I've read scores him low in both achievement and power compared to affiliation. And I guess that sheds some light on his choices, but it's just so hard for me to fathom, going from the enormous station of president and also the complicated legacy, the guilt of an Iraq war that didn't need to be fought, to saying, I'm just going to paint. I can't imagine it. Can you help make sense of this?
25:28 Speaker 02 If you look at the active post-presidents, Bush's popularity has gone up more than any of them. And so among the living ex-presidents, or the active living ex-presidents, he's the outlier. It's also true that he has probably done less to proactively invest in his legacy than any of the other active living presidents. So I think we can all agree that that's worthy of a study. A journey into George W. Bush's brain is like a psychological thriller into things that for most of us are impossible to understand, right? When I sat down with him, the first thing that he said, he said, "Look, when it's over, it's over. I don't miss it." He lives his life in chapters, right? So, once the political chapter was
26:11 Speaker 02 over, he just completely moved on. That's one aspect that I think just makes him unique to the other presidents. He's just able to do that. So that's point one.
26:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would maybe add low tolerance for ambiguity to that puzzle.
26:24 Speaker 02 Very, very low tolerance for ambiguity. And he didn't just sort of stop being an ambitious person. So the question is, where does all of that go? So the way Bush ends up painting is, after he raises money for the Bush Center and has this nervous energy, just by happenstance, he's meeting with historian John Lewis Gaddis. And Gaddis basically says to him, "You seem kind of bored. You should paint. Churchill painted." And the way Bush describes it is, he got sort of historically competitive, that if Churchill could paint, he could paint also. He didn't embark on painting for any esoteric, deep reason. It was just like, "Oh, I'll try this." And the more he did it, the more he realized, you know what, this is giving him an endless learning experience. It's something that he will never master.
27:05 Speaker 02 Through painting, he can, you know, actually embrace a post-presidential voice around things that he cares about and categories of people that he cares about, and push an agenda without undermining his successor. And that's what it's become. It did not start that way. And he has a very quarrelsome view about legacy. I mean, he said over and over again, that this idea of spending the present, investing in when you're dead, it just doesn't make any sense to him, right? His view is that they're still writing books about George Washington. By the time they get to him, he's going to be long dead. And so he really just has this adversarial view of spending any time investing in legacy, and yet he's conscious of, and sort of amused by the fact that by basically not doing that, you know,
27:50 Speaker 02 the joke's sort of on everybody else, because his legacy seems to be the one that's actually gone up.
27:54 Speaker 01 I was gonna ask you, and you've shifted already my thinking about the answer about, does he not care about his legacy? But I think what you're saying is, he's not indifferent to it. He just knows it's mostly out of his control.
28:07 Speaker 02 I asked him if he paints out of guilt. I said, a lot of people think you paint out of guilt. And there's no evidence of deviation from the decisions that he made, other than that he acknowledges they were controversial. And he just has this view that decisions are made, and it takes decades upon decades to understand whether those decisions were worth it. And he thinks that legacy is something that gets written about in the history books, and life is meant to be lived. He's invested so much in his faith and in his family. I mean, the one thing that I'll say about him, a lot of these presidents that I write about, they leave the presidency with their family just in complete tatters. He is authentically close to his family, authentically close. It's something that he did before he was president, invested in when he was president,
28:52 Speaker 02 and as soon as he had more time at his disposal, he made sure that he doubled down on that. And I think that that's also a pretty important set of things that kind of keep him grounded. Because his view is like, the history books will write about me as president, but when I'm kind of old and, you know, frail, it's a question of like, do my daughters love me? Does my family love me? Do they want to be around me? The ambition that takes one to be governor and president not once, but twice, doesn't lend itself towards somebody who can live in the present. And yet, he's like totally at peace, and he doesn't think about the future, he doesn't think about the past. And this is bothersome to people who want him to kind of have a reckoning about his
29:35 Speaker 02 legacy and, you know, decisions that they disagree with.
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31:58 Chris Duffy? environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
32:11 Speaker 01 I want to do the lightning round through the lens of your presidential history obsessions. Most overrated president?
32:17 Speaker 02 John F. Kennedy.
32:19 Speaker 01 Worst advice a president has ever given?
32:22 Speaker 02 I would say the worst advice a president has ever given is some combination of the multiple slave-owning, civil rights obstructing presidents that through the platform of the presidency have slowed social and racial progress in this country.
32:43 Speaker 01 Best advice a president has given?
32:45 Speaker 02 I always loved Theodore Roosevelt's advice to get in the arena.
32:48 Speaker 01 Hard to argue with that one. What's the presidential biography that most people haven't read but should?
32:54 Speaker 02 Ooh, that's a good one. There's a book called Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard that is like a thriller into how James Garfield's doctors, in an attempt to try to save him from a non-lethal wound, ended up killing the president.
33:10 Speaker 01 Wow, all right. Putting it at the top of my thriller list. What's something you've rethought in your life from studying presidents?
33:18 Speaker 02 I think that there's this assumption that we all have that you can wait until later on in life to figure out the last chapter. And I think what's striking from each of these presidents is the investments that make for a good final chapter in life, they start at the middle of life. The people you have around you, the relationships, the family, the hobbies, the intellectual interests, the ability to detach from the burdens of the past. I think what I've learned is if you defer all of that until later, it's too much. And what you really want towards the end of life is to have something purposeful that keeps you going, something that you can keep learning,
34:02 Speaker 02 and people around you who love you despite any of the things that you've achieved in your life.
34:09 Speaker 01 What's a question you have for me?
34:11 Speaker 02 Out of all of the seven presidents and all the different paths that they've taken, from a behavioral psychology perspective, what surprises you most?
34:24 Speaker 01 I think for me, the biggest surprise is that more of them aren't like Jefferson. I really would have thought that a successful post-presidency is about doing something bigger and more meaningful and lasting. And I guess I expected them to be more grandiose. And the sort of walking out of the office, like you described it, you're giving up some of your power, but you're also free of all kinds of constraints. So you have enormous status. You have a world-class network. And now you can pursue your vision. And so I guess I'm surprised that not every one of them sat down and said, okay, I'm going to build a great university and change the face of education in America. And that
35:03 Speaker 01 it was that their ambitions were so much more diffuse and kind of, I don't know, I don't want to say pedestrian, but ordinary. I guess I'm curious, Jared, I think you know more heads of state than anyone in our generation on earth. You're in frequent communication with many presidents and prime ministers around the world. It seems to me so narcissistic to even think that you could be capable of doing a job that complex. What do you make of them?
35:34 Speaker 02 It's a very lonely job, and it's a very isolating job. And the longer you are in a role, the more isolated you become, the lonelier you become. Trust becomes very difficult. Information flow changes. And so I think what I'm struck by with a lot of these leaders, I get to know them in a very personal way. I spend big chunks of my day joking around with them and sending each other memes and engaging them on a very informal way. There's plenty of substantive engagement as well. But when you break down those barriers of formality, I'm struck by how little space they have for just regular friendship and emotion and the value that they feel.
36:18 Speaker 02 When they can let their guard down and when they know they can really trust somebody, right? So things like trust and informality in friendship become really, really sought after, rarified things and the walls and the barriers only get higher as they accumulate more power. And so what's interesting is when they eventually leave office, and I found this also with the presidents in my book, they lose the power and they lose the platform, but all those barriers are still up. And the transition comes, they may be the same person, but they're psychologically discombobulated because the guardrails are still up and the presidents who are able to break that down end up, I think, being the happiest.
37:02 Speaker 01 I love the point you made earlier about how sometimes it's a mistake to rush into finding your purpose. That actually sitting in a transition and sort of allowing your peripheral vision to kick in can prevent you from diving headfirst into something that might not end up being aligned with your values or interests. Are there any other life lessons that you've taken away from this project that we should be aware of? Because now would be the time to tell us.
37:28 Speaker 02 I think whether you're a president of the United States or a CEO, one of the most important things to do, and I would argue it's a necessary step in order to be able to have a successful life after power, which is to unburden yourself from what your successor is doing. Whether it's your chosen successor or successor you don't want, you're going to have to watch them dismantle some portion of your legacy. You can completely detach from it and move on and that clears a lot of brush for you. You can say, you know what?
38:05 Speaker 02 My thing is going to be that whether it's this successor or another successor, I'm going to be completely unchecked. And that's the Carter principle, and it worked for him. The problem is, most people end up in this in-between, which is a bad place to be, where you say that you want to move on, but you can't resist the urge to settle scores of the past and press rewind and undermine your successor. And by the way, It's whether you do that in public or private doesn't matter because the interesting thing with a lot of the presidents that I write about, their biggest obstacle is their own head, right? They mentally just have a hard time getting past what's happening
38:47 Speaker 02 to things that they created and what's happening to their reputation and what's happening to their legacy. And so that limbo or that hybrid of intellectually telling yourself you've moved on but impulsively not moving on is, I believe, the greatest obstacle that prevents people from making a proper transition.
39:09 Speaker 01 It's obvious how that applies to job transitions. I think anybody who's going through a transition at work can make a commitment to giving up the reins and actually moving on and not interfering with the person who's filled their shoes. I also think this applies generationally in families, that it would be really nice if parents stopped telling their kids how to parent, right? It's a version of the same mistake. I remember saying to my mom at some point, if you wanted me to learn this lesson, you should have taught it to me when I was growing up. Your window is past. Now it's my job to figure out how I want to raise my kids. And I wonder if you think this lesson applies to that kind of transition, too?
39:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. On the surface, it shouldn't seem like learning about and reading about the lives of seven presidents and their search for meaning and purpose after the White House could be applied to something like the relationship between a parent and a child over how the next generation parents. And I think it's an extraordinary story that something so kind of other stratosphere would have so many prescriptions for something that in some respects seems so relatively mundane when compared to like things we read about in the history books. And I think that's an amazing part of behavioral psychology, which is, look, at the end of the day, you know this better than anyone else, Adam. There's only so many different types of human beings or archetypes of human beings. And whether
40:31 Speaker 02 they're presidents or parents or CEOs or middle managers, human beings are complicated in only a certain number of ways. And the prescriptions for how they navigate their complicated brains and their complicated lives, they kind of transcend whether one is at the pinnacle of power or whether one's power is simply a matter of the fact that this is my child, mom and dad, not yours. So leave me alone.
40:55 Speaker 01 Well put.
40:57 Chris Duffy? Jared, as always, this has been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot.
41:00 Speaker 02 Thank you, Adam. I really enjoyed it.
41:04 Chris Duffy? This conversation got me thinking about the arc of success over the course of a lifetime. It's good to plan your path up a mountain, but it's also important to consider what you'll do once you reach the summit and who you want to become on the way back down.
41:25 Chris Duffy? Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.
41:59 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.
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43:18 Speaker 01 Hi there, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast. And this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.
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