HIDDEN POTENTIAL: Adam Grant on the Science of Achieving Greater Things

LinkedIn presents "I, Rufus Griskym, and this is the next big idea. Today, Adam Grant on how to unlock your hidden potential." We all remember the story of the Chilean mine rescue. On our broadcast tonight, one by one, a miner's trap for two months are brought to freedom and a rescue mission the whole world is watching. News coverage at the time focused on the heroism of the miners. How they survived for 69 consecutive days in claustrophobic darkness. What received less attention was how an unusual team saved 33 lives. The rescue mission in its early days was haphazard. Geologists and engineers were drawing up detailed tactical plans while mining professionals were racing ahead trying to deploy six different types of drills at once. There were rock climbers and police officers and firefighters on hand all eager to help but without a clearly defined mission. What they needed was a leader. So Chile's president found them one, a man named Andre Sugaret. He was an unusual pick. He didn't have the most experience or know-how. What he had was something rarer, the uncanny ability to bring out the best in teams. Andre led by listening. When he arrived at the disaster site, he conducted interviews with every expert he could find. And those interviews helped him hatch a plan. Rather than rely on existing tunnels, they would drill a new hole 2,300 feet in the ground to free the trapped miners. One day, a 24-year-old engineer named Igor arrived at the mine to deliver drilling equipment. Offhandedly, Igor mentioned to someone that he had an idea for how they could get to the miners even faster, intrigued Andre arranged a meeting with him. Igor's plan was outlandish. Instead of spending months drilling a new hole, he thought they could use a special tool called a cluster hammer to rapidly expand a hole that already existed. The only problem was that a cluster hammer had never been used to drill a hole this wide or this deep before. So they'd have to custom build a special drill to do it, and they wouldn't have time to test it. Many leaders would have laughed Igor out of the room, but Andre wasn't like that. He wasn't looking for an excuse to say no. He was listening carefully for reasons to say yes. He knew that the whole his team had started drilling would take at least four months to complete. Who knew if the miners could hang on that long? If Igor's plan could get the job done in a fraction of the time, then he figured it was worth a shot. It proved to be a good decision. So the first miner is safe and just listen to the ecstatic response here at Camp Hope. A roar of relief and delight them will surely be rippling around the world. This most phenomenal rescue operation has got off to a very promising start. In his new book Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things, Adam Grant writes, "Egor's plan helped save 33 lives. There's no question that we should applaud the creative heroic efforts from him and so many others. But let's not forget the unsung heroes of this story. The leadership practices, team processes, and systems of opportunity that made it possible for people to speak up and be heard." Harnessing the power of collective intelligence is just one of the ways we can unlock the hidden potential lurking in all of us. Today, Adam is going to walk us through some of the others, taking us from the world of competitive chess to the classrooms of Finland. We'll meet a man who became a polyglot by practicing social skydiving and a deaf woman who used deliberate play to become a celebrated musician. We have the good fortune of knowing Adam Grant well because he's one of our four curators here at the Next Big Idea Club. He's also among the most effective people I have ever known. He went from being the worst diver on his high school team as he tells it to a member of the junior Olympic team. He became the youngest tenured professor at Wharton at the age of 28 and the highest rated. He does groundbreaking research in organizational psychology and has written a series of best-selling books. His latest hidden potential pulls back the curtain on extraordinary achievement and tells us how we can all get there. The news, I think, is empowering. It's not so much raw brain power and skills that deliver extraordinary results, Adam tells us, but character, determination, collaboration, sponge-like absorption of new ideas, and the right kinds of teamwork. Adam's book will be included as a bonus in the next box going out soon to all Next Big Idea Club executive members. If you're not yet an executive member, find out more at nextbigideoclub.com. You can use the promo code "podcast" for a special discount. Today's episode of The Next Big Idea is sponsored by Grenola. I am made, life at the speed of play, momentous, quince, Shopify, and Upwork. Grenola is the AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You can try it totally free for three months, just head to granola.ai/idea. Go to iamadehels.com/nbi right now or click on the link in the description and use code "nbi" for a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. Life at the speed of play is a new book by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Mark Pinkis. And if you purchase one copy at getmarksbook.com/next, Mark will send you two. If you want to try momentous signature spec creatine, head to livemomentus.com and use code "idea" for up to 35% off your entire first order. Find your next fall favorites at quince. Download the quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com/nbi. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide from household names to small businesses just getting started. Head over to Shopify.com/nbi to start your free trial today. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. Adam Grant, welcome back to the next big idea podcast. It's always good to be a hair riffist. Thanks for having me. Well, Malcolm Gladwell has already said that this new book of yours is, quote, "Adam Grant's finest work." Do you think he would have said that if you'd stuck with the book's original title "Freaks of Nurture?" I hope Malcolm doesn't judge books by their covers, but I'll ask him or you can and we'll find out. Yeah, I actually kind of like that title. It was very polarizing. Some people loved it. Others hated it. Yeah, I could imagine. I could imagine. Well, all of your books, I was looking through all your books on my bookshelf this morning and all of your books have been hopeful. Give and take gave me hope that it's possible to be generous, to be a giver, and be successful. Originals gave me hope that my procrastination is in fact evidence of my originality, which is welcome news that I still think about. Think again gave me permission to change my mind about things, to celebrate being wrong, and lean into confident humility, which is a phrase that still sticks with me. And now your latest book, Hidden Potential, makes it pretty clear that you don't have to be a child prodigy or genetically gifted in order to develop exceptional talent or accomplish extraordinary things. And it turns out that a large portion of remarkable athletes, musicians, artists, scientists were unacceptable as children, which is great news for unacceptable people everywhere. Do you think that most people underestimate their potential? I think that most people underestimate their potential in a lot of areas. I think there's such a bias, especially in the West, toward natural talent. So you start off at a task, and if you're not immediately a musical prodigy or an academic genius or a superstar athlete, you think, well, I'm just not cut out for this. And I think the mistake we make there is that we assume that starting ability is the most important driver of growth, and it's not the only one, and I don't think it's the most important one. I think the evidence has convinced me that motivation and opportunity carry more weight over time. That to me is a hopeful message, but it's one that comes directly out of the evidence, which makes it even more hopeful. It's not conjured. Oh, well, well, and when you think back on your own journey, I mean, you were an exceptional kid, at least that's my impression. Last time we were on the show, we talked about how your friends called you Mr. Fax, because of your prodigious retention of information, which they did not intend as a compliment, apparently. And this was isolating. Do you think it's possible that part of your project has been to show everyone the magic tricks, how they work, demystifying extraordinary achievements, to lessen the divide so so we can all become more exceptional. Yeah, you know, it goes against what I was taught to do when I was performing as a magician, which is which was to hide this secret. conceal at least some of the house so that there's a and curiosity and mystery, but I don't think that serves us when it comes to achievement. I mean, how many times have we looked at someone who does something extraordinary and said that will never be me? I remember, Rufus is maybe a salient example given that we both have spent more time on stage than we intended. I remember wanting to become a better public speaker and thinking I've got to learn from the greats and watching Martin Luther King juniors I have a dream speech. I have a dream. My four little children, one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream to be. You know, one being blown away by watching the mechanics of it. You know, the electrifying speech, the poetic prose and just thinking I'll never be in that league, but then also realizing he was 34 years old. Yeah, wow. I think what have I done with my life? That's right. And that was demoralizing. It was discouraging what I should have done was I should have rowed on the clock and said how did he get there? And instead of just admiring him at his peak, you know, look at the distance he traveled. And I mean, Martin Luther King juniors had many extraordinary gifts, but the stage presence you see there was hard earned. He started entering public speaking competitions when he was 15 years old. This was two decades of work. And by the time he's 34, did that year alone? He gave over 350 speeches. That is a speech a day and both the deliberate practice that went into that, but also the growth that must have come out of experimenting and improvising and iterating is enormous. And so I think that yes, I want to demystify the process behind those kinds of achievements because it makes them seem a lot more palatable. And it also shows us the steps that we can take to travel, you know, some distance ourselves, even if that's not the destination we're trying to reach. And it's possible, it seems, in areas where I didn't even think it was possible. I mean, some of my presumptions were really modified by reading this book. So some of the research-- Yeah, you thought again, Rufus? I am. How dare you? Yeah, no, no. As hard as I try to protect my priors, in particular, like one example was the research on chess, which I always thought that chess was an example of a skill that really leaned on innate intelligence, right? That innate math skills, spatial math, was in my mind, in the category of something that was more genetically determined than maybe some other skills. But you write that intelligence turns out to be, quote, "nearly irrelevant in predicting the performance of adults and advanced chess players." The early advantages of cognitive skills dissipate over time. It takes an average of 20,000 hours of play to become a chess master, 30,000 to become a grandmaster. This requires proactivity, discipline, and determination. You probably had encountered a lot of this research before writing the book, but did the process of writing the book move you further in the direction of concluding that raw intelligence may be overrated? It did. And leave it to you, Rufus, to pick up on something that I thought was fascinating that not a single person has asked me about. Chess research. Yes. I actually had not looked into the chess data specifically. I'd been reading a lot about nature versus nurture, and the fact that everybody has hidden potential. And we've all talked about deliberate practice at one point or another. What I did not realize was that essentially, even in a brain power rich game like chess, that intelligence basically gives you an advantage if you're novice or you're a kid. You can learn the rules faster. You can memorize moves more quickly. You might have them at your fingertips more. You can see the pattern on the board more rapidly. But that over time, that can only get you so far. And that what ultimately allows people to achieve greater things in chess, and this is true in life as well, is having character skills, not just cognitive skills. Character skills are what motivate you to keep studying, to keep imagining different end games for different beginnings, to anticipate what your opponent might do, and then have a series of possible counterattacks and defenses ready. And I don't think that we spend enough time talking about character skills. When we talk about character, we think about it as virtue. We assume that being a person of character is about being good and being decent and being noble. But I've really shifted my thinking on this, and the chess research was part of this to say, character is not just will. It's skill. It's being able to put your principles into practice. So it's one thing to be disciplined, and determined, and proactive when things are going well. It's another thing to stand by those values on a hard day. That is as much about a set of learned capabilities as it is about a Nate talent. You know, I love that that's something you changed your mind on. And it just popped in my head as you were speaking that I want to start keeping a diary of everything I changed my mind on, right? Because this is kind of these are interesting moments for all of us. It's not just your former self who thought that the character is something we developed through force of will. Aristotle, you say in the book, described character as quote, "a set of principles that people acquired and enacted through sheer force of will. Now you see character more as a set of skills." So you appear to be correcting Aristotle. That's a that's a dangerous enterprise. I do not want to pick any fights with the great ancient Greek philosophers. Look, I think part of the value of social science and one of the reasons that I love my field of organizational psychology is we can test the ideas that philosophers develop with data. And through experiments and longitudinal studies and ideally, you know, whole series of careful replications that then we can accumulate a meta-analysis study of studies where we can land is at a refinement of the ideas that philosophers gave us. And so I don't want to subtract the will component. I want to add the skill component. So, you know, when when the Aristotelian view tells you that excellence is a habit, I want to say sure it can become a habit, but it's it's not just a will do habit. It's a can do habit. And there's know how that's often missing and we need to fill in those gaps to help people build a habit. And I haven't had a lot of conversations with Aristotle, but I don't think he would object to that. Now, I don't I don't think he would. And I think he probably would have applauded the clever study that Raj Chetty did using data from 79 schools in Tennessee that you kind of put forth as one of the pieces of evidence that character turns out to be really this critical component to what we all need to get ahead. Do you want to share that study? Yeah, this is a remarkable study by a world-class economist. So what Chetty does is he takes data from this project that was designed to investigate the effects of classroom size on learning. But what Raj realizes is that because kids have essentially in Tennessee been randomly assigned to classrooms, it's a chance to look at the effect of early teachers on later success. And the stunning result that the first captured my attention is that you can predict your income in your 20s from how many years of experience your kindergarten teacher had. What? Yeah, how could that be? I'm astonishing. What is going on here? And you know, there are many econometric controls in this study. It's as sophisticated and rigorous as they come. So I read this research and I thought, what is going on here? What are the experience kindergarten teachers doing? And the intuitive answer is they are giving these kids an early advantage in cognitive skills. They're teaching them the basics of math and reading and those skills are going to serve them well in life. And it is true that the more experienced kindergarten teachers gave kids an edge in math and reading. But guess what? Over the next year or so, their peers caught up where the lasting edge existed was not in cognitive skills. It was in character skills. If you had a more experienced kindergarten teacher, in fourth and eighth grade, your new teacher was still rating you higher in your tendency to be disciplined, determined, pro social and proactive. And I think the skills we learned in kindergarten about how to pursue our goals about how to avoid procrastination, about how to learn in the face of obstacles, about how to make a group more than the sum of its parts. They actually carry with us over time and they ultimately elevate us to greater heights. And I thought that was a stunning demonstration for the power of character skills. If you look at the data, fourth grade character skills mattered almost two and a half times as much as fourth grade cognitive skills in predicting later income. It's astonishing. So these four characteristics, pro active, pro social, discipline. and determined. I showed this to my older son who said, "Yeah, I think I'm definitely proactive and pro-social, not totally sure about discipline and determined," or working on that. But honesty is another another strength. But this seems really relevant information as well for parents, right? And I've always torn, you know, we had Seth Stevens-Devittovitz on the show talking about big data and all the evidence that parents just don't matter that much, not nearly as much as we think we do, not as much as community and other factors. But these two also strike me as things that kids maybe learn at home. How do you feel about that piece? Well, I think, I'm always torn on this, because I think we do tend to exaggerate the influence of parents. We have to think about peers and community factors, but also behavioral genetics has made it very clear that a lot of what we think is nurture is actually nature when it comes to personality, for example. You think that your parents taught you to be a certain way. You forget that you inherited their genes. Most traits are at least 40% heritable. That leaves a lot of room, though, for nurture to still have an influence. And when nature tends to shape as our tendency, it's not our destiny. And I think this is where parents have a big role to play. So what we know from the research on parents nurturing character skills is the way that you talk to kids matters. There's some evidence, for example, that even a preschooler, if instead of praising them for helping, if you praise them for being a helper, they're more likely to be pro-social again. Yes, because they start to pick up the identity a little bit and say, well, that's who I am. I am the kind of person who helps. As opposed to, well, that was just a thing I did. And this kind of dialogue seems to be most important in the U.S. at least around ages 8 to 10, which is when a lot of kids are starting to form a sense of identity. So if your kids are older, it's too late. No, it's not too late. It's just a little bit more of an involved conversation and they may need to talk themselves into it. But that, I think, is an opportunity for parents, which is one of the things that my wife Allison taught me is I thought it was really important. So we wanted to teach our kids to be pro-social and pro-social skills come up later in the book as you know when I'm talking about bringing out the collective potential in a team or group. But the way that I wanted to encourage our kids to be pro-social was instead of just asking them about their own achievements like, what grade did you get on the test? How many goals did you score in the soccer game? Yes. I wanted us to ask, who did you help this week? And we started making that a weekly dinner table conversation. And Allison said, well, why don't we also ask our kids who helped them? And I didn't get it at first because I was like, no, like I want our kids to be givers. I don't want to know what they got. And she explained them to me and it was genius. She said, I want them to pay attention to who the helpers are. I want them to look at who are the pro-social kids. Actually, she didn't say that because people don't normally use the term pro-social. No, she said, like I want them to pay attention to who's kind. And sure enough, when you ask your kids, like, who helped you this week, instead of just focusing on what kids are cool or who's hot, right? They start to pay attention to who cares. And I think, you know, that if your kids are older especially, like to ask not who's popular, but who's kind. I think that's a great way to get them reflecting on, well, what does it mean to me to be pro-social? And why is that important to me? And you could do that for any of these character skills. And what's exciting here and what I think the evidence supports is that we can learn character skills, right? You say, character is the learned capacity to live by your principles, which in the case of the eight to ten year old child and even older children could involve loading the dishwasher. I'm the kind of person who loads the dishwasher. That's going to be a niche. Dispenser, loader. Yeah, I'm going to annound that one. Right, exactly. That's going to be a new statement in our household. But, you know, so to me, this interplay between character and these kind of learn capacities we have to live by our principles and personality is interesting. And I think you would say personality is these inclinations we're born with, character are these learned behaviors that we adopt. But is there some point at which when learned behavior has become habitual, it becomes a natural, is there some point at which that becomes a natural inclination and our personalities, in fact, change? What do you think? Oh, this is, I mean, this is a hot topic in personality psychology right now. And I think the jury is very much out. If you look at the research of Brent Roberts and colleagues, the evidence is very clear and compelling that people do show change in major personality scores over time. So, you know, many people, for example, from their 20s to their 30s and 40s will show a tendency to become more conscientious. And that seems to be a rise with responsibility that you have more on your plate at home. And, you know, more is expected of you at work. And you rise to the occasion. What we're often relying on in these studies, though, is self-reports a personality. And so, I would say, all right, your identity changed. But, you know, ultimately, to know if your character has evolved, we need to see you through the eyes of others. And so, I'm still waiting for more evidence when it comes to, you know, spouse and coworker ratings. You know, let's get a sense of how significant that change is. Is it just your perception or, you know, is it actually leaving a trace with others? But I do think that the evidence is strong, that we can learn and evolve our character skills at any age. And I was also, you know, really impressed by the evidence from the experiment I wrote about with West African entrepreneurs, where those who were assigned to a week of character skills training got about three times the benefit. If you look at their revenue growth over the next two years of learning cognitive skills. Yeah, that's incredible. As an entrepreneur in West Africa, it was more valuable to think about and rehearse what it means to be disciplined, determined, and proactive. Then it was to study marketing and finance and practice using those skills. And I thought that was something that, you know, not only, it's like, hey, great, we need to teach kindergarteners character skills. No, we need to teach them to adults too. And adults can learn them and benefit from them. One week of study has years of impact. That's extraordinary. So we can learn these skills. We want to learn these skills. And embracing discomfort, you say, is part of the journey. It's maybe one of the behaviors that we want to do more of. I love this example of learning languages. And what it takes to become good at learning languages. Because frankly, Adam, I have never been good at it. I was French was my worst subject in high school. And I've kind of had the sense that like, I'm just, I'm just not good at it. But wow, reading that section of your book, I'm doubly resolved, resuscitate my French and maybe go after Spanish. So how can what is embracing discomfort have to do with learning languages? Well, I'm a little disappointed. I thought you would have already mastered French. And we were going to have a conversation with you speaking fluently and me understanding none of it. We'll be sure. But they must have that in Espanyola, Ciquietta. So this chapter really evolved out of me thinking, look, we've got discipline, proactivity, determination. Those are kind of the kindergarten basics. But what are the specific forms of determination, proactivity, and discipline that matter throughout life? And so the kind of determination that I was really struck by from the evidence was that the determination to seek discomfort is vital to growth. And the way this comes up with language learners is a lot of people like you, Rufus. They struggle with a foreign language or two in school. And they think, I don't have the gene or I miss the critical window. And that's that. I'm not a language person. This is not my, you know, my natural talent. And I think that's a mistake because increasingly research shows that what we thought was a critical period is actually a period in which kids learn differently from adults. And even kids learn differently from teenagers. So what do you do when you're studying French in high school? You mostly read it and write it and occasionally pronounce a few words out loud and feel like an idiot because you can't pronounce them correctly. And that's really uncomfortable. It's embarrassing. Your friends or maybe some bullies laugh at you. And you get discouraged and you don't speak it. And you mostly don't get graded in, you know, in the American school system on language speaking. It's on language recognition and comprehension and understanding. But in order to communicate in a language, you actually have to speak in it. And that's, I think, the missing component. So I met these, these two extraordinary polyglots. Sarah Maria has been and Benny Lewis, neither of whom succeeded at learning a foreign language in school. So Sarah Maria could not crack Spanish even though her dad speaks it fluently. Benny really bombed German. He stumbled his way through Irish and they both said like, this is not me. I am not cut out for the skill. And now they're both polyglots. And by my count, they can each speak more than half a dozen languages in the around the fluency and several more proficiently. And it's all self taught. So this is miraculous. My question is, how did you do it? And what I heard from both of them was the mistake I made in school as I didn't talk in order to cross that Rubicon, I had to start using it even before I had mastered it. And they both went so far as to say you should start speaking on day one. Memorize a sentence, introducing yourself or asking a question, start using it. And as you practice it, that's when you start to internalize it. And doing that requires you to accept discomfort and even amplify your discomfort, knowing you may feel ridiculous and other people might laugh at you, but that's going to be part of the learning process. Interesting. And this is something that children you're saying do naturally better than teenagers or adults. So a lot of what we thought was just an innate ease with picking up languages for children was actually more about process that they were a little more fearless and more likely to imitate and speak and interact verbally. Exactly, I mean kids are prolific babblers. Sure. When you give them a few words to use, they start to put them into practice. And the older they get, the more self-conscious they tend to become. And I think in an ideal world, it just wouldn't be uncomfortable. People would get praised and applauded for trying a language no matter how bad they were at it. That's not the world that most of us live in. And so we do have to embrace the discomfort in order to keep growing. And I think this is a general principle of learning, right? That the determination, the courage to seek out discomfort, it's a character skill that allows you to unlock your hidden potential because fundamentally, you have to over-correct and make things feel wrong in order to get them right. Yeah, otherwise we're gonna stay within a narrow comfort zone where you're already good and you're never gonna get better. Yeah, I love some of the examples of Benny Lewis, which as you were describing, had an approach that he called social skydiving, (laughing) which is he'd come into a new country, he's trying to pick up the language and he'd walk into bars and start singing a local song. Right? And this was a guy I think who you to describe himself as an introvert, painfully shy. And he just sort of forced himself. And this strikes me as both clearly a very effective approach for acquiring languages. But it's also, I think, a great way to live a more interesting life. Yeah, I mean, it's courageous, but also entertaining. I mean, the friendships that he struck up, just going from country to country, saying, "I wanna learn to speak a language," not in every case fluently, but proficiently, in a few months. And I'm not afraid to make a fool of myself while doing that. People generally celebrate it. He'll just, you could very well run into him in a bar near you, in a country of your choice one day. And you'll see that an Irish guy walk up to you and clink glasses and stumble through a sentence and realize this is how he actually comes in with a goal of making 200 mistakes a day. Knowing that if he hits that target, he will have used a lot of language. He will have heard a lot of language in response, and that's gonna amplify his growth rate. I love this idea of having targets for mistakes. We've got to invert our fear of making mistakes and make it a goal. You know, it's so interesting, Adam, 'cause this has been, for me in the last 18 months or so, one of the themes that's come up for me in all these books I've read and conversations we've had here, has been the benefits of discomfort, right? In different spheres, like we had on a Lemki Stanford addiction scientist on the show, talked about the neurochemistry of the hedonic set point and you have to experience discomfort to feel great on the other side. We've learned from Antonio DiMazio about the pattern recognition that informs gut feelings that are negative and how we can learn from bad moods. And it's caused me to like pay attention when I feel a bad feeling in my gut and learn from it. And now I've learned from your book that discomfort is this critical part of the learning process. And it somehow strikes me as relevant because we all live in a world that has become increasingly comfortable over time, right? More and more climate control. We've all become kind of discomfort avoidant. So we have to make a decision, I think, to pursue discomfort. It's not a natural impulse. - Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, the other place where I've been thinking about this a lot is with our learning styles. So you know this from the book, but the idea that everybody is a visual or a verbal or a kinesthetic learner. It's taught in schools worldwide. Many teachers believe in it. Many people internalize the idea like, oh, I don't process well on the page. I need to listen to a podcast or an audiobook or a vice versa. I'm not an audiobook or podcast person. I need to read stuff with my eyes. I'm sorry to say for people who believe that. There is no compelling evidence that these learning styles have any bearing on how you learn. They do seem to capture how you like learning, but empirically, many of us actually learn better in a style that is uncomfortable for us. - Yeah, yeah. - Because we have to work harder at it. - Obviously, I don't mind if, you know, if your favorite way to read is to listen, go for it. If your favorite way to read is to do it with your eyes, on board. But I think it's worth recognizing that, you know, some approaches are better for some goals. So we know, for example, that reading a physical book or an electronic book is better for critical thinking because you're more likely to stop and really scrutinize the arguments. We know that listening is better for immersion and engagement in some cases, especially if you wanna connect with the host or the narrator or the guest and have their voice right in your head. And so depending on what your goals are, of course, it's reasonable to focus on one or the other, but I think we do have to go out of style and make ourselves uncomfortable if the goal is growth. - Interesting, you know, I'm just reminded of all the famous authors who turned out to be dyslexic. Right, I think this was true of F. Scott's Fitzgerald, Floubert, Agatha Christie, and on and on. You know, so reading was uncomfortable for them. It was, you know, but this forced much greater attention right to word sequences. And so it also has this nice way of flipping, right, I mean, sometimes it's useful to go against the grain of what feels good. - That's such an interesting example. It, you know, it hadn't crossed my mind, Rufus. I mean, where I think most people have heard about the dyslexia creativity association. The idea that a writer would grapple with dyslexia and therefore become more sophisticated and astute at sentence structure and cadence and word choice, it's fascinating and completely plausible based on what we know about the psychology of seeking discomfort and the way that it pushes deeper processing and more careful learning. - I am a supplement skeptic. I actually take fewer supplements today than I did a year ago. Because when you dig into the science, most of them don't hold up. An exception is creatine, a supplement adoris by many of the top scientists I've interviewed on this show. 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At the next big idea club, we're producing podcasts, newsletters and events. We're working with authors, building new products and increasingly experimenting with AI. We can't possibly have a full-time employee for every specialized skill we need. That's why Upwork is my go-to platform for new hires. When I needed developers, designer, researcher, AI specialist, whatever the project requires, Upwork gives me fast access to people who are genuinely expert at that particular thing. You can browse profiles, review past work and hire someone with a proven track record. And Upwork handles contracts and payments in one place, which makes the whole process much easier. That's UPWORK.com. Upwork.com. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Okay, so we're all going to embrace discomfort. Another character trait you recommend is becoming a human sponge. Absorbing information, ideas, countervailing opinions. What are the benefits of behaving like a sponge? - Okay, so this is where proactivity comes into play. So being proactive, I think when most people here become a human sponge, they think, I want to maximize my absorptive capacity. I want to soak up every piece of information, every bit of knowledge and skill that I can find. And that is part of the puzzle. That's the obvious part. The not-so-obvious part is the filtering part because if you study sea sponges, as one does, when one has too much free time, I had a lot of fun diving into the science of sea sponges. And I learned that one of their remarkable capabilities is not just their ability to absorb nutrients. It's also the ability to expel harmful particles. They have finely tuned filters to get rid of what doesn't serve them and retain what does. And I think that humans ought to work the same way. I think seeking out information is key to growth. I think what's just as important is asking which of this information is relevant, remembering that not all critics are engaging in critical thinking. Not all cheerleaders are actually helping you improve. Sometimes they're making you complacent. And then deciding, okay, who's credible on this issue? To help me improve? Who's the right person for me to learn from here and listen to you here? That's, I think, the missing skill of being a sponge. Being a sponge is not just passive, right? In the sense that we have to, it turns out we have to seek out feedback and advice. People have done research showing that when someone has food in their teeth or lipstick on their cheek, only 2.6% of people point it out. So people will not necessarily give us the feedback and counsel that we're looking for. Nobody's going to tell me that my fly is down. I have to ask people. (laughing) Yeah. I think that the problem we run into when we're trying to grow is we know we need other people to hold up a mirror because we can't see ourselves clearly from the inside. But when we ask people for feedback, we tend to see cheerleaders and critics come out of the woodwork. So a cheerleader is somebody who applauds your best self and doesn't tell you your fly is open because they don't want to embarrass you or hurt your feelings or damage your relationship. And a critic is somebody who only tells you that your fly is open and attacks your worst self. And what I've always wanted and I think what most of us need is not a critic or a cheerleader but a coach. Somebody who sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself. So the big question is how do you get other people to coach you? And what I've learned from the research is that instead of asking for feedback, we're better off seeking advice. When you ask for feedback, you focus people on the past and they're going to tell you something you did right or something you did wrong or maybe both. But that may not be actionable for tomorrow. It's backward looking. Advice is forward looking. It allows people to focus on what you could do better next time. So I've applied this in my own life. One of my favorite places to do it is every time I give a speech, I'm thinking, okay, my host in my audience, everybody in the room is a potential coach. They all saw me in action and they probably have ideas for how I can get better. So I used to ask people, can you give me feedback? And I got either useless compliments or devastating criticism. And then I've shifted the question and asked, what's one thing you'd like to see me do next time? Or what's one suggestion you have for me? And people have tons of good tips. Just this week, I got diversify your examples to make sure that you're not just using American or Western heavy images. I also got, open up a little bit more about your personal stories. You did that in the Q&A and people really connected to it. You don't have to only talk about the data in your talk. I can put those ideas into practice right away, but I can't if no one's willing to coach me. So I think advice seeking is a really useful skill and maybe it should replace feedback seeking. - You say that we want to cultivate advisers, counselors and often more than one. And the beauty of these relationships it seems to me is also in the tutor effect, tutors actually learn more when they help others. And I think a term that you've coined, the coaching effect, right? Which is that coaches actually benefit from the coaching process, right? So this to me is exciting, that there's actually like those benefit in both directions for us to be engaging with tutors and coaches in greater quantities. - Yeah, I think we've probably all heard at some point that the best way to learn something is to teach it. And empirically, it turns out that not only do you understand it better after you explain it, you also remember it better after you recall it. So there is a benefit of teaching what you want to learn, even if you haven't mastered it yet. And that requires the embracing discomfort skill that we talked about earlier. But I think the coach effect is a fascinating addition to that, which is to say you, if you're looking for motivation, the best way to find it is to motivate somebody else who's in a similar position. - Yeah. - And that way instead of being passive and dependent on others for confidence and advice, you're active. And you realize I already have some of the knowledge I need. Like I can put my own ideas into practice. - One of the themes that to me was emerging reading your book is that if we want to learn effectively, it helps to be more childlike to some degree, which is great news for me, 'cause I decided I had peak maturity about a decade ago. And I'm now engaging in more joyful, youthful, harmonious passion, hopefully. But we've learned we should just try things, make mistakes, it doesn't have to be perfect, be curious, be a sponge. And then of course you also say, make it fun, be playful. We're all at risk of burnout or bore out, which I love, it turns out it's an actual term in psychology. If we let our work become too monotonous, how do we engage in deliberate play? - Well, this is one of my favorite ideas. I think we know that deliberate practice is important for growth in a lot of skills, but it's hard to sustain and it's hard to sustain because it can become a grind. And so this is where the research on deliberate play comes in to say, what if you took a skill building exercise and you tried to make it fun? So one of the places where I learned a lot from this is Evelyn Glenny, she's a musician, a percussionist specifically who is profoundly deaf and can't really hear the note she plays. And the way that she stays motivated to practice is she creates little challenges for herself. One of which, early on, was can I take a marimba and try to harmonize Bach on it? - Who would think to drum Bach? I love that. But that little bit of variety, it's a challenge and let's be clear, if it's deliberate play is not gamification. It's not creating a leaderboard or putting bells and whistles to trick you into liking a dreadful task. It's actually transforming the daily grind into a source of daily joy and saying, I wanna make the exercise of skill building itself one that's fun so that instead of having to push myself to do it, I can feel pulled into it. - Another trick to her success, and as I understand it to this approach of deliberate play, is to give ourselves breaks and protect the joy of the practice of engaging in this skill that we love. So it turns out that taking breaks is a critical part of the equation. - Yeah, and I think this is probably a knowing doing gap. Everybody knows that we need to take breaks. If you look at people's daily practice, are they doing it as much as they should, possibly not? - The aha moment for me was realizing, and part of this was from research I did with Ghashin on procrastination, was that sometimes we procrastinate as a break. We procrastinate because we're starting to get bored, you're frustrated, or anxious about a task. And so we divert our attention, and we think that's gonna compromise our productivity, but it can unlock creativity. It can also, along with incubating ideas, it can restore our energy. I mean, the research on micro breaks suggested even a five to 10 minute break can be enough of a reset to make a significant difference for progress and performance. And so I think there's something to be said for recognizing that if you're waiting to take a break until you need one, it's probably too late. It's a little bit like hydration, right? Like we're always told, if you wait until you feel a little dehydrated, you wait it too long, I think breaks work the same way, and we need to schedule them a little bit more proactively. - Absolutely. - Wait, in the second half of the book, you get into how we can. can apply these ideas for better learning at scale. And let's talk about the Finnish school system. I found this so inspiring. What is it that makes Finnish educators so successful? - Well, we don't really know, is the short answer because there have been very few randomized controlled trials. And I think Finland's successful education system and Estonia's too, which has risen more recently. They're both examples of what social sciences often call over-determined success. There are many possible causes. And we don't know which ones are the active ingredients. What I wanted to do was I wanted to juxtapose what does the evidence on effective education tell us? Which by the way, Finnish educators have been studying for years and teaching in their required master's programs for all teachers. - Right, right. - So basically, where's the convergence between what Finland and Estonia do and what's supported by evidence? And there are a few powerful things that I learned from the research that I think are exemplified, but not necessarily fully deterministic of some success in tiny countries. So one of the things I think we see clearly in Finland is deliberate play in school. Kids get basically 15 minutes of recess for every 45 minutes of instruction. Their learning activities are designed to be fun and playful. And I think that's important because research shows that enjoying school at five actually predicts your standardized test performance a decade later. - Wow. - So cultivating intrinsic motivation for learning early matters. That's a big one. The other one that I'm a big fan of is the practice of looping. There's a massive gap between what schools do in America and what we see in some other places like Finland and Estonia. So the basic idea behind looping is that your teacher moves up with you. So instead of moving from third to fourth grade and getting a different teacher, you have the same teacher from third to fourth grade. And there have been studies of several million kids in North Carolina and Indiana done by economists showing that if your teacher moves up with you, you actually learn more that year. Your standardized test scores improve at a greater rate. And I think that if you think about it, you would never want your kid to just have one soccer coach for a year and then move on or one piano teacher for a year and then move on. You want the coach or teacher to get to know your kid and offer personalized tailored instruction. But for some reason, the vast majority of American schools don't do this. I think that teachers need to specialize in their subjects for getting that actually teachers need to specialize in their students. And I think what's most striking about the evidence on looping is that teachers who are struggling and students who are struggling benefit, they actually benefit from it the most. Interesting. But the more time they have together, the more they can grow together. And I think what I was stunned by in Finland and Estonia is they don't just keep students together with their teacher for a second year. It's very common in elementary school in both countries for students to have the same teacher for six straight years. - Wow, wow. And I wonder if this doesn't get back to your early commentary and research on the importance of developing character skills that I would imagine the teachers who loop who spend multiple years with kids become coaches in addition to being teachers, right? And develop an ever more personal relationship and can coach them on these character skills in addition to the subject matter itself. - I think you're onto something. I think that if you're only with a kid for a year, and you've got 20 or 25 of them in your classroom, then you're gonna focus on doing whatever you can to make sure they're up to speed on the core knowledge and skills they're supposed to learn. That's right. Whereas if you've got multiple years with them, you get a much more nuanced understanding of what are their strengths and what are their areas for development. You can see their hidden potential and then work with them to develop it. And inevitably, that's gonna involve intangibles, not just material that's in a textbook or on a website. - It also seems that the culture of education in Finland and I'm guessing Estonia as well is meaningfully different. I was fascinated by the fact that when you ask people in the US what profession is most respected, they say podcaster, (laughing) just get it, got it? - Doctor. - In the US they say doctor, yes doctor. They say doctor. In Finland they say teacher. Teachers get an extra, they get master's degrees, they get paid more, they're deeply respected, they consider education a quote instrument for nation building. And they have this view that everyone is teachable. A successful school is one in which all students perform beyond expectations. There's this great example of a headmaster who's called the head teacher. Personally tutoring a student after school who's struggling to make sure that every single student in the class is excelling. And they do all this while spending several thousand dollars less per student than we do in the US. So it's not about resources, this is about technique, it's something that we can learn from. - Well said. (upbeat music) Reading is a form of meditation that makes you smarter. It's a radical act of patience in this frenetic, tech addicted world we all live in. And the data shows reading is a kind of miracle drug. It reduces stress, increases motivation, improves sleep. That's correlated with more success, higher income. And books don't run out of batteries. But what to read? We at the next big idea club can help you with that. You've heard about our app which provides daily book summaries from the authors themselves. But have you heard about our box subscription? Go to nextbigideaclub.com to learn all about it. Here's the short version. Sign up for a next big idea club, hardcover box subscription. And you will get four boxes per year, each containing two books, that's eight books per year. And not just any books, the best books of the season, according to our four legendary curators, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Kayne, Daniel Pink, and Adam Grant. Plus we discuss the books with the authors and distill them into exclusive audio e-courses. Go to nextbigideaclub.com and become a member of our growing community. (upbeat music) Turning to what makes Teams effective. There's this great observation that when teams are proactive, introverts make better leaders. You say in a footnote, I want you to know I read all the footnotes at 'em, that pizza franchises with proactive teams were 15% more profitable under introverted rather than extroverted leaders. We want all of our teams to be proactive, don't we? So should we always want to have more introverted leaders? Not necessarily, it's tempting, very tempting, especially to counteract the extroverted bias that Susan Kayne has written so beautifully about. - Right. - In quiet. I think, so this was a study that I led, and what was clear in the data is that extroverts were more effective leading relatively passive or reactive groups that were just looking for direction from above, but that with proactive groups, introverts actually got better results. And I think there are multiple reasons for that. One is that introverts actually listen more and got better ideas from their proactive people who are making lots of suggestions. - Yeah. - Two is that they kept their proactive people more motivated by listening to them as opposed to talking over them or inadvertently shutting them down. And it would, yes, it would be tempting to say, well, if you want everyone to be proactive, we should only have introverts at the helm. But remember, personality is not destiny, it's tendency. There is no reason why as an extroverted leader, you couldn't rain in your tendency to talk too much and dominate the conversation and become better at listening and asking thoughtful questions and inviting people to elaborate on their ideas and testing those. And in fact, there's a group of people who already naturally do that. Those are the ambiverts, who are somewhere in the middle of the introvert, extrovert spectrum, and tend to strike a natural balance between talking and listening, who I've found in another study actually made the best sales people when doing phone sales, that they actually outperformed both extroverts and introverts. - Interesting. - So, you know, I think that, yeah, look, we can start to predict people's performance from personality because a lot of people behave according to their natural tendencies, but ultimately, your ability to adapt is what matters more. - And the system that's in place in organizations is also relevant to this ability to empower people to be proactive and make sure that all the best ideas rise to the surface, right? And you advocate for a lattice system of management over the traditional ladder. - Yeah, there's, you know, I think the problem that so many of us face in organizations is in a traditional ladder system, all it takes is one person to kill an idea. A lattice structure is designed to mimic a little bit of what you see in venture capital, where all you need is one investor to say yes to your idea to give it a chance. and this is what. Some organizations like WL Gore, who you probably know for Gore-Tex, have tried to build to say, all right, if you have an idea, all you need to do is find a sponsor. And you can go to anybody anywhere in the hierarchy. And if you can get them on board with your idea and they think it's a good idea, they can greenlight it and then you can pilot it. And I think that if we do that, it becomes a lot easier to unlock the collective potential that's currently latent in too many workplaces. I mean, how many organizations are there where people with great ideas do not have a voice to raise them or a place to take them? - Right, which is dispiriting for the individuals and it's also robbing the institution, the organization of some of the best ideas. And this is really beautifully described in your kind of retelling of the story of the Chilean trap minor situation, which we all remember that incident. But it turns out to be the story of not just the triumph of a team, but the triumph of a system that allowed all this whole large team of people that was trying to solve this problem with these buried minors to surface the very best ideas, listen to all ideas. And that proved to be critical. - Yeah, I mean, the Chilean mine rescue was an extraordinary example of building a giant lattice and tapping into collective intelligence. The ideas came in from all corners of the earth. And of course, it's expected that that would happen in the face of such a dire emergency. But I think one of the lessons we can take away from that rescue is that the person you promote into a leadership role does not have to be the most knowledgeable person in the room. They have to be the person whose most capable of bringing out the potential in everyone. And I think so often we end up promoting the loudest voice that's the babble effect or we end up elevating the most narcissistic person because we confuse their confidence for competence. And the Chilean rescue went really differently where the guy who was ultimately appointed to lead the effort Andres Tugaret, he was basically chosen for his pro-social skills because he was known as somebody who was not motivated to be the smartest person in the room. He wanted to make the room smarter. That's a lesson we could all take away. Let's find the person whose most capable of elevating the group and let's elevate that person. - Absolutely. How can we take Adam what we've learned about human potential to make our institutions more fair in how they operate? - You know, I worry a lot about institutions. So I think a lot about colleges and workplaces as examples that miss out on hidden potential. And they do that by rejecting or overlooking diamonds and the rough. If you think about both college admissions and job interviews, we tend to index heavily on past performance, which is not always a good predictor of future potential. And I think the systematic mistake that's made is I'll take this from my diving days. We all know that performance is supposed to be a function of execution and degree of difficulty. But when we're vetting people and figuring out who we're gonna let in the door, we only weigh execution and we completely ignore a degree of difficulty. We don't pay enough attention to how hard your major was, how difficult your classes were, how challenging your neighborhood was, how much adversity you faced and overcome. And this is hard to do. We do not have good metrics for gauging adversity. And a lot of efforts have been thrown out the window because they end up inadvertently disadvantaging a person or a group. What I think we could do is we can pay more attention to trajectories. So there's research showing that if you're looking at high school grades and who to admit to college, freshman year grades are basically irrelevant for how you're gonna do in college. Sophomore grades are a little more useful. Junior year grades are highly diagnostic comparatively. And then the most important of all are senior year grades. We don't even bother to pay attention to your second semester grades, because you've already decided or gotten in. And we have a GPA where we average across all four years and weigh those equally. What we forget is that if you look at the slope of performance over time, somebody who struggled freshman or sophomore year and then showed dramatic improvement or steady gains from junior to senior year, that is usually a sign that they have faced and figured out how to overcome adversity. In turn, that's a sign that they often have strong character skills, and that we are underestimating their potential. So Rivas, I would love as a concrete step if we all weighed grade point trajectories, not just averages. But I think this goes far beyond grades. We need to look at the individual adversity that somebody has faced and the trajectory of growth that they've attained. And that's a signal of how far they're gonna go in the future. - Absolutely, yeah. And weighing character through interviews, which I don't know how much these institutions actually weigh the interviews at least universities and other sources, yeah, seemed to be prudent. Well, in our final minutes, I wanna go back to an earlier topic, which is the importance of character, which is a skill we can all develop. And you say, intriguingly, as more and more cognitive skills get automated, we're in the midst of a character revolution. How so? - The reality is that we've talked for decades, maybe even centuries, about how cognitive skills are what separate us from animals. - Mm-hmm. - I think where we are now is recognizing that character skills are what elevate us above machines. We can work really hard with generative AI to write a constitution. But we can't rely on AI to write its own constitution. We need human judgment to figure out what good principles are and how to practice them. I cannot imagine a world in which that changes. I don't wanna live in a world without changes. And I think that the character skills that we've been talking about today are ultimately gonna become more valuable over time because we can't automate them, we can't code them. We can't easily put them into an algorithm. - Yeah, yet another argument for doubling down on character as the critical differentiator. Well, thank you so much, Adam Grant, for being with us today. It was just a pleasure, as always. Well, as always, thank you for having me. - And while I'm at it, Adam, thank you for being one of our four curators of the next big idea club, our whole community so appreciates what you do helping us identify these great game-changing books. It's just a real gift. - Well, I'm honored to have a chance to share ideas, as always, and love what you've done with the next big idea club and it's so much fun to be part of it and pick books for this thoughtful, curious community to engage with. Adam Grant's new book is called Hidden Potential, the Science of Achieving Greater Things. If you sign up now for a next big idea club executive membership, we will send you a copy. Visit nextbigideaclub.com to learn more and use the code podcast for a special discount. Today's episode was produced by Caleb Bissinger, Sound Design by Mike Tota. Special thanks to the team at the LinkedIn podcast network who are always helping us unlock our hidden potential. Speaking of LinkedIn, I'd love it if you'd subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter. It's a behind-the-scenes look at this show and it comes out every Thursday. To subscribe, follow the link in the episode notes or search for me, Rufus Griscum, on LinkedIn. Next week, New York Times columnist David Brooks will be here to teach me and you how to have better conversations. See you then. [MUSIC]