How novelist Gabrielle Zevin learned to enjoy failure

Support comes from wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global, your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose wise. You can send spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart, get wise, visit wise.com. Season C Supply. Hi, I'm Molly Graham, host of WorkLife, a podcast from Ted. The most important lessons about work usually aren't the ones anyone teaches you. They come from experience, from uncertainty, from figuring things out as you go. On this show, my expert Gess and I explore how careers really unfold. Through change, through doubt, through the decisions that shape who we'd become over time. Because those moments aren't the exception, they are the work. Listen to WorkLife wherever you get your podcasts. I've had books that did really well, I had books that have done less well, and I've gotten really good at failing. And I'm proud that I'm good at it. You know, I'm proud that I don't experience it as devastating. Hey everyone, it's Adam Graham. 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. My guest today is Gabrielle Zeven. She's best known as the author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which won the Goodreads Choice Award for the best fiction of 2022. It's her 10th book, and it might be my favorite novel published in the past decade. While the book is more for me than maybe some of the others have been, it is with a great awareness of all the use that exists on the other side of the thing that you have made. The book centers on two characters, Sadie and Sam, who start a video game company together. I was torn between racing through it to find out what happened, and savoring every sentence so it would never end. When I finished it, I went through withdrawal. What do you mean these characters in their world don't exist? And manage that by inviting Gabrielle to my podcast to discuss the many questions she raised about success and failure, creativity and collaboration, and friendship. I have a confession to make, which is, I love Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow so much that I'm afraid to read your other books. I think that's okay. Is it? For a very long time in my career, I knew that the likelihood of anyone liking any two of my books was very unusual. So I was always really happy if somebody just really loved one. I was like, yeah, don't risk it. I feel that way about writers too. Sometimes you feel that I want to read everything by that writer, and sometimes you feel very sated by the experience that you've been given. For me, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is my tenth novel. I had other novels that did well before that, but I think, and it's something I talk about in the book. There's a long period of time when you're tasting your abilities, do not completely align, and I'm not saying that all my other books are bad. Some people truly love those other books, but for me, I didn't necessarily feel that I had reached that place where tasting abilities had aligned until tomorrow and tomorrow. This isn't a necessarily great promotional gambit. I should be telling you, read every single one, Adam Grant, because they are all equally wonderful. What I really think will happen if somebody was to read all of my books is they'd have a sense of the progression of an artist over time, and maybe that would hold interest, but I don't think one could have exactly the same experience or anywhere near the same experience from the books they came before. That's a really unusual thing to hear any creator confess to you. It's a horrible thing to say. Again, very early in my career, I wrote this fantasy novel called elsewhere. For some people, there'll be nothing I do that's ever approaching elsewhere. They love elsewhere, but I wasn't that person. I was like, what am I going to do after that? I like, as an artist, the fact that the blank page is truly a blank page. I like when I write the next book that I get to burn it all down and start again. I do think maybe a little bit more than some other writers I know where there's maybe more of a continuum from book to book. To me, it would be a nightmare too. For instance, write a series that lasted my whole life. I like starting again. It's something I think Sam and Sadie like too. For better or for worse, I definitely don't want you to burn it all down, because I had this feeling while I was reading the book. I read it in Europe, and it was one of those moments where I ended up pulling an all-nighter because I could not put it down. It was completely immersed in Sam and Sadie's lives and in the world you created. I was really torn between racing through it to find out what happened and reading in slow motion so that it wouldn't end. I think I probably did a mix of the two, but I put it down and I honestly felt like I was going through withdrawal. What do you mean these people aren't real? What do you mean there's no dong and bong's pizza? Can I get one of my restaurant her friends to start one? It was devastating. I do want you to continue that world at some point. I would be okay if you waited a few years, but maybe ideally in the next decade, is there hope? When I first started writing books, I didn't necessarily understand that the hardest part of anything is the beginning of the thing, and that once you had the people there, once you had gotten through the business of introducing all the things you needed to introduce, that you could kind of hang out with those people for a long time. So originally, I would say that, I feel like the book ends exactly where I want it to end and I would say to you, I'm done. I'm never going to revisit those people again. But now I think it's possible that someday I'll revisit them again. I do like the Phoenix-like aspect of writing novels. I do like that once the novel is done, I am done with that world for some time. I would say that's music to my ears and to many other listeners ears that you're not entirely sure you're going to abandon this for you. It's more a never-save never. I'm really intrigued by this observation you made about this being the first novel where what you produced actually lived up to your vision. And I'm curious about how much of that you actually think is skill versus taste? Well, I think the taste you get fairly early on, you have a sense of the things you like or don't like, the things you're drawn to or not drawn to. I was not thinking of ira-glass, but there is an ira-glass quote that is very similar. It was, you have to tell yourself a little lie to kind of make yourself work at the beginning that this isn't quite as bad as you think it is, but it may be just as bad as you as you think it is. It was something I had experienced. There are so many things I think when you start out that you just don't know how to do, you don't even know what you don't know how to do. And then you don't understand why the things you're making aren't coming out like the things you love when you kind of have to ignore the fact that the things that you have made are not like the things that you love and you can't always know why that is. When did you know during the writing process that you'd made it? On tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Yeah. When I was finished with it, I kind of knew that people would be resistant to the concept of video games. And I knew that because I was resistant to the concept of video games, I knew the ways in which people would say like you can't make serious art about this subject, you know, that there is such prejudice against any art form that's new, but the thing that drew me to video games was that it was that the coming of age of that industry had taken place entirely within my lifetime. The entire history of video games is contained between the 70s and now, you know, and so that it was exactly the same age as me, it seemed to me a perfect way to tell a story about, again, the story of tech, the story of art and the story of an artist across time. Because I knew there would be these prejudices against the concept, the book would have to be better than anything I'd ever written before. I'd have to be more thorough and demand more of myself than I had before. So it wasn't until I was done that I actually thought I had done it. I remember saying to my partner that I didn't care what happened with this book because it pleased me. You can't understand quite how needy and ambitious I am. So for me to say that I don't care what happens was a big thing for me to say and to actually feel this sense of pleasure and satisfaction in the work I had done. I think one interpretation of what you just said is that, you know, essentially you found the right story or the right characters and you had this skill all along to make something that was as great as your expectations. A different explanation is you actually gained skill through writing the previous nine novels and then this was the culmination of all the growth, which arc describes your experience better? The second, there is a part of every creative person that tells yourself little lies just to make yourself be able to do the thing. That helped me get through again all of the work over time, but I don't think I started with the skills. I learned things from both doing work and then also seeing the way people responded to work, you know, and to kind of figure out how I could be a more effective communicator in my novels, especially as the novels I wanted them to be more complex than they had been before. I spent the past few years thinking and writing a lot about hidden potential. I don't think your potential is at all hidden. I mean, it's clear that you've been a brilliant writer for a long time. Where did you level up skill-wise to use a gaming metaphor? - When you write your first novel, you have no sense of what it is to have an audience interact with that novel. In a sense, it's the purist you'll ever be because you're not thinking about the audience. And so over the years, I would say, I thought probably more about the audience as time went on. And then it became that I thought excessively about the audience where that wasn't very useful to think about them that much. As a novelist, I had wanted to write books that everybody could understand in the whole theater. And then as time went on, that became less interesting to me. And I was fine with the idea that maybe the job wasn't to communicate with as many people as possible, but maybe the thing was to communicate something very specific about being a human that only you can know. So I think some of it was that I had changed as a person and the work changed during that time as well. When I first started to engage with notes that people would give me, so I mean professional notes like from editors or those kinds of things, I would have to hold them literally physically away from myself, that I would hold them at arm's length because it felt very tender to go in back into work. And over the years, I have become somebody who doesn't feel that way at all. I am ruthless. And I realized that my special skill was that I could pass over work thousands and thousands of times every day that I worked on the book. I read everything that I had ever written on the book before I got to that moment in the book that I would be working on that day, which gets really difficult when your book approaches 500 pages. And I wanted to be not just a novelist in it. I wanted to be in the same place that a reader would be that day when coming to that piece of information. So things like that, just realizing that there weren't as many shortcuts except that all you could do is throw tons of time at something and that you could improve it that way. And that maybe, again, my fear of both criticism, my fear of going back in and really grappling with the text in an aggressive way had prevented me from writing as well as I could be writing. And unlearning all the things that you learn because you think I'm a professional. At this stage in my life, I don't think publishing is at all interesting. I think publishing is this boring topic that gets in the way of telling really unique stories. Once upon a time, it was an accomplishment to publish. It is an accomplishment to publish. I'm spoiled in that sense. I was fairly young when I published my first book and I thought I had made it. There's never a time in your life and you'll feel as happy about where you are as when you have that first publishing deal before you actually see all the ways in which that ostensible success will be followed by a series of obvious failures. That was something I have grappled with. It was funny 'cause I was listening. You were on a hidden brain not that long ago. A lot of the ways you're thinking about failure are the same ways the book address failure. - Tell me about your thoughts since you already know some of mine. - I actually really enjoy failure. - I'm sorry, what? - I do. I know it's not. - You like failing? - I have gotten really good at it. - Are you a real person? - I am. - I've never heard someone say they like failing. - I don't mean I like it. I mean, I find it to be a really creative place if you let it be. So when my first novel came out, I had two novels come out that year. One for children and one for adults. And the one for adults did quite poorly. Like devastatingly poorly for me at that time. And the one for children did quite well. So I had the whole gambit of success and failure within that year. And I remember when the adult novel failed, like going out into New York City and walking into Zaybars and thinking like, the deli man knows I failed. They're not gonna give me like smoke salmon because Gabrielle Zeven is a failure. And just really feeling like that I was walking around. I think Sadie describes it as coated with a fine coating of ash, that kind of thing. And then you realize that when you fail, like in a sense, it's not the worst thing that can happen because nobody calls you, you're completely alone. And you get to kind of focus in on creatively the thing that you want to do next. When you have something that succeeds, then your phone rings a lot, you're very busy. It's hard to find a place creatively to go that's quiet enough and private enough. And so in a sense, success can be a less creative place. At least it has proven for me at different times. You know? - That's fascinating. - I hope it's not awful to say, but you and I went to Harvard. And so that wasn't something on the agenda for me. Like I didn't see that being the way my first novel went down. And so it failure wasn't part of a thing that I saw for myself. And then it ended up being so creatively interesting once I kind of gave myself over to it. - It seems to me that it's completely backward. As a psychologist, I think being a Harvard alum allows you to still feel like you're smart and to still carry around an image or reputation of being intelligent. And you get this not only a cushion when you fall, but you get many more opportunities than to bounce back and bounce forward. And so it's ironic, I guess. The more devastating part is there's a bigger gap between what you expected of yourself and the outcome you got. - It wasn't that I was unprepared to fail, I think, from going to Harvard. Because in fact, the truth is I was a terrible Harvard student as well. Or not terrible, I was just not exceptional in any way there. But I think there is a mentality you have when you go to an elite institution that once you kind of pass through a certain hoop that you are there. And that was the amazing thing was realizing and how little it mattered that I had gone to Harvard in terms of how people were going to read anything that I wrote, that in a sense I could have gone anywhere. And what really mattered was the book at hand and the thing that you made. And that in a sense that Harvard was not going to provide any buffer from that. But I do completely agree that when I'm talking about failure, I also have the structures in place where I can fail more than most people and it isn't devastating. And I think that has to do with class and all of those things that are, again, external to this. I'm talking about more if you are fortunate enough to have some kind of safety net where you can keep going at the thing. It's interesting, though, because your experience initially of failure tracks with some of the research in the status world. So years ago, I was the editor on a paper that was accepted led by Jennifer Carson Marr looking at when you lose status by failing or being rejected, how that affects your subsequent performance, depending on your initial status position. The short version of the finding was that if you started out relatively low status, failing didn't hurt your future performance. But if you started out with high status, you were crushed by failure. Jenny and her colleague did a couple experiments where they showed that self-threat was the mechanism that when low status people failed, it didn't really destroy their identity or their self-esteem. They didn't expect that much of themselves to begin with. But when a high status person failed, boom, the entire world around them came crashing down. They were crippled by a self-doubt, and they felt like they were never capable of doing anything good again. So given that, how did you recover? How did you get out of that zone? The thing that happened was, so this one adult novel comes out in May, and then in September, this children's novel comes out, and it instantly does really, really well. The success was wonderful because it gave me more money, and I realized that that's what it really was going to do, that that's what success was going to do, that it would give you more money to try to be creatively more audacious. And so every time I've had a success, what I realized was that it bought me freedom, so that if you could kind of have enough successes to balance out the failures, that you were basically winning in life. And by the way, by the time I write tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it's the longest period of time in my career between books, you know. And that's because I'd had enough books at that point do well, that I could take five years to try to figure out if a novel about video games was a terrible idea and researched on a thing that was very complicated. And I think so much of the book really is about how much finance is determined the kind of art that you make at different times. I think Sam and Sadie have very different approaches to art because of differences in their class and their background. Part of the way that you avoided wallowing and despair for-- I did wallow, Adam Grant. I did wallow. I wallowed for some time. How long? Tell me what the wallowing was like. Did you still write? I wrote in this kind of strange defensive place that I don't think led to necessarily good creative work, where you want to write the next novel to prove everyone wrong, you know. That kind of thing. I don't actually mind working from a place of revenge. I don't mind that. I find that to also be creative. Like there are a lot of sort of negative emotions that can be creatively fueling in a way. But at that time, it wasn't that great. Then I don't remember how I got out of it, except that I did continue to write every day. Eventually, I think I just had a perspective on both of those things. That again, this was going to be a part of my life forever. If you agree to get on the roller coaster that is a career in the arts, I mean, this is a corny metaphor, but there's going to be ups and downs. So in a sense, I feel very fortunate that I had all those experiences in this very short time, I think, if I'd had-- and I sometimes [BLANK_AUDIO] novelists that have like first their first novels out and it's like a wild success and it's old millions of copies and you know there's the movie and all of that. I can honestly say I don't feel fully jealous of those people. I don't because I know that in a way it's very difficult to follow up with success. Having a true failure and a modest success is a lot easier in terms of plotting a path forward for you in the arts. I want to come back to the the wallowing and failure for a second and think about this this research on status loss and how it hurts people who have a lot of status more even though it should hurt them less and the antidote that the researcher studied was self affirmation. The idea that if you could validate a different scale or a separate element of capability that then losing status didn't hurt so much so like your book fails but you're still a good friend and then you can deal with it more effectively. Talk to me about that experience and whether that's part of what you did to move forward and whether there are other tricks or techniques or forms of self-talk that you used. I don't know that I'm good at anything else. I don't think I have any self-affirmation for myself. I wish I was a great friend. It's funny because people will say that you know tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow's a book about friendship but really it's about how difficult it is to I think be a good friend to somebody across time or maybe how simple it is just that you need to keep reaching out and trying and that kind of thing. I think an important distinction to make is just that something can creatively fail or creatively succeed and also business wise fail you know and so a failure is not always across all elements of the thing that you're talking about you know so for example in the book there's the game they make called both sides as a creative success in many ways but it is definitely a business fit it's a commercial failure and I think learning that was useful for me as well. Learning that there were ways in which you might succeed within a failure you might have learned to do some things that you didn't do before you might have gotten closer to the thing and so sometimes I think what I could find in it was enough reason to go on that there was enough that was there that could lead me to the next thing. I'm thinking about some work that Tori Higgins has done on being promotion versus prevention focused and the basic idea is that both people and and projects vary in whether you're trying to attain a good outcome or avoid a bad outcome and if you're aiming for success when you hit it you experience joy but if you're trying to avoid failure the best case scenario when you reach your target is relief. I do think that's true. Well I guess then that begs the question where did you land with tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow emotionally. So it's my tenth novel the eighth novel did really really well sold close to a million copies here but also it sold like an insane number of copies in China and so I had so many financial opportunities from there to really think without the pressure of time what would I do because before that time I didn't think I was rushing my books but I felt a pressure to again publish regularly and that kind of thing I don't have a trust fund or something like that and the funny thing was the ninth novel came out and it did really poorly it sold like a tenth of what the eighth novel had done I thought after that eighth novel had done so well I had walked through a door that was success and that there was no coming out of that door again but it turns out you can come out of that door again for whatever reason and so by the time I wrote tomorrow and tomorrow tomorrow I think it kind of came out of both the success the financial success of that other novel and the failure of the one that followed it and also just feeling like if you ever got locked into a Barnes and Noble say and like you just ended all of time in a Barnes and Noble civilization ends and you're there there's plenty to read forever like in a sense no one needs another book from anyone and so just the realization of that how many books were published every year and that really the only reason to write a book is because you had the absolute and utter conviction that it needed to be in the world and so for the first time I was able to kind of use that as my place from which I would work I was talking with two of my favorite collaborators who also devoured tomorrow at all one of them said that you wrote beautifully about the power of creating something for someone and creating something with someone and the question was posed if you can only do one which would you rather do and why but now I'm rethinking that question and it seems to me that based on what you've said so far that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was not created for someone or with someone other than yourself in a sense the book was written for myself but also with a very strong awareness or experience of how audiences come to a novel you know like you think for example that a book should be fast fast fast the patient always move but as I had gotten further in my career I realized sometimes you want to slow the pace you want to slow the pace to nothing you want to make it go quiet and so that's maybe antithetical to just thinking I'm only thinking about a reader and yet I am thinking about a reader because I know that I'm going to give you a different experience of pacing that I'm just not hoping that you turn through this as fast as possible I think when I started out as a novelist I thought a fiction as a mask I could wear and the characters I wrote were as far from me as possible I didn't want anybody to possibly mistake me for anyone in any of the books I didn't want anyone to think those parents were my parents and then over the years that became less interesting to me and I let the mask slip and I came to a place where I was writing I think closer to myself you've spoken about being good at solitude and liking it as well and yet you're writing is so infused with relationships I feel like it's the connection between the characters as much as their individual lives that makes them leap off the page what kinds of relationships were you drawing on when you read this book I have a partner that I have been with a long time and that we collaborate creatively together and sometimes we've made things that have succeeded and sometimes we've made things that failed and we've probably made more things that failed than succeeded in the the balance of things and yet I think we just really enjoy working together we enjoy making things and I'm drawing upon that relationship all the kind of petty squabbles one has and to make something silly like art and how it can feel so important and it can feel like everything and so that was a huge source of a lot of my salmon Sadie and Sadie and Dove and and even all the other game designers like Adam you know Simon and Ant and Charlotte and Adam Worth and all these other relationships of couples that are making things and and I'm sure there's a lot of Hans and myself in that but I'm also drawing on all the professional relationships I have as a novelist I think people think of novel writing as solitary and largely it is until it all of a sudden just isn't if it goes well there are lots and lots of people in the room with you and understanding that at some point in every process there has to be someone who goes at and says you should read this thing you should watch this thing you should play this thing because I'm telling you to so that was really what say the Mark's character was about for me Mark's isn't an artist he's perhaps more of like a business person and yet he's very creative he has a lot of ideas of his own and just realizing that you need to have those people in a creative process as well Support comes from wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world your life is global your money should be too some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers don't be fooled extra costs often hide and bloated exchange rates choose wise you can send spend and receive money in over 40 currencies count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google that's how millions save billions on hidden fees be smart get wise visit wise dot com season sees apply hi I'm Molly Graham host of work life a podcast from Ted the most important lessons about work usually aren't the ones anyone teaches you they come from experience from uncertainty from figuring things out as you go on this show my expert guess and I explore how careers really unfold through change through doubt through the decisions that shape who we become over time because those moments aren't the exception they are the work listen to work life wherever you get your podcast that is a great segue to the lightning round oh my god do you have a favorite video game today I'm gonna say my favorite video game is dualingo interesting okay what is the worst career advice you've ever gotten I think people telling me to repeat myself in what sense I think the world when you make anything that's successful they just want you to do the same thing over and over again when I think that's to be resisted what is the worst writing advice you hear given regularly people confuse the idea of show don't tell from Sid Fields screenwriting book and it has to do with how you write a screenplay but people apply that to novels all the time and it drives me crazy because novels are all tell they're not all show do you have a favorite writing tip all I know is that I have done it every single way that you can write a novel at this point so the only writing tip I really have is to read a lot and get a really good chair so you've written more books than I have and And the two I'm proudest of, the biggest difference between them and the others is just how specific and clear the starting vision was. I felt like they ended up at a different level because I knew exactly what my thesis was going in. And the idea was sort of already fully formed, as opposed to working it out as I went in. I know that's not true for every writer, every book. But I've come to increasingly believe that in fiction as well as nonfiction, a book lives or dies on the quality of the initial idea. First question is, do you agree or disagree? No, I think fiction is just so different than nonfiction in that sense. I think any idea can be something amazing. If one fully exploits that idea, you know, so I'm not sure that I fully agree. For me, a good idea is an idea that is a big bowl. I also agree with that. I think that creativity is abundant, but great execution is scarce. Yeah. So then the second part is given that you have to start somewhere. As a novelist, what do you think is most important? A compelling character, an interesting world, or a rifting plot? And I know they're interdependent to some extent, but which piece do you personally feel is most critical to figure out first? As a reader, I don't read for plot. I understand that people do, but I don't care. As a writer, I think the thing that matters the most is character. It's interesting to hear you say that because I normally don't like novels that are character-driven. I read for plot, and it was one of the reasons I was so surprised by tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, because it does feel like a story that the character is really animate, and the plot was secondary, and I did not expect to love it so much based on that. I think the thing that separates a good novel from a great novel is not that it doesn't have a plot. It should have a plot. It should have a world. And honestly, Adam, I want all the things. I want the world. I want the plot. I want the characters. And I think reader should want all of those things. But I think the thing that makes a great novel is the character you talk about after you've closed the book, the people that you're left with, because the things that happen to them, maybe you'll remember them, maybe you won't. But when you think about Gatsby, you think about Nick, you think about Gatsby, you think about Daisy, or something like that. I think a great novel is a great character. What is something you've been rethinking lately? What is something you've been rethinking lately while I think about what I've been rethinking lately? I feel like every podcast we do, I end up rethinking something. But something I haven't spoken about yet that I've been rethinking is how I gauge productivity. So I used to think about it as how much I got done in a given week. And now I think about it much more as the value I create in a year. That's smart. I think that is really smart. But to your point, it's gotten easier with the luxury of some successes that they create freedom. I guess something I've been thinking about a bit recently is empathy. You know, when I think about so much that's going on today in the world, I think empathy may be a flawed system, but I don't know a better way for writing novels or for living in the world. To take the moment to imagine how somebody feels other than yourself, to me seems absolutely vital for the survival of our species. Maybe this is semantics, but I've come to prefer thinking about it as compassion. To say you don't have to be particularly good at imagining somebody's pain or definitely feeling their pain. Right. Please don't feel their pain. And try to acknowledge it. Or even just something less than compassion, just even just trying to imagine before you post or before you do something, how does it feel to be some other person in the world? I think this is a useful exercise, even though it is a potentially flawed system of going through the world. I wanted to ask you about some of the mic drops in the book. There are an unusual number of them for a novel. I thought you wrote the best critique of cultural appropriation concerns that I've seen. You said the alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. You gave more eloquent words to the reaction I've had over and over again when people are told you can't write that character because you don't represent that race or you don't come from that culture. Well, this is not like a movie where you're taking a role from somebody. No, I will say that first of all, that isn't necessarily my point of view. It's something that the character says in the book. But from my point of view, I am a person of color, half Asian and half Jewish, much like Sam in the book. If I could only write about exactly what I was, that would certainly take me out of writing about all of life's rich pageant, really, which I think is kind of the job of the novelist. The job of the novelist is to imagine people other than yourself. Novels do reflect the world and they reflect right now. The world we live in has many, many kinds of people in it. So I don't think of fiction that is devoid of writing about the experiences of other people is preferable to a fiction that occasionally gets it wrong when writing about those other people. And that's just kind of where I've come down on it, you know. I would rather see a badly written half Jewish, half Korean person in somebody else's book. And to have at least had that person who wrote it, if it seems as if they tried to honestly endeavor to imagine somebody who is different from them, I don't want to fault that person just because they tried to do that. Next mic drop, you wrote about the delight of other people's parents. Yeah. That cracked me up. I've experienced it. Your parents are your parents, but when you introduce them to some other people in the world, all the kind of things you might have complained about them are instantly erased because they become people again. Do you think that's because they're on better behavior when they're interacting with people who aren't their kids? Or maybe there's a public-private difference. I think it's both those things. I was thinking about how much of that is parents and kids being stuck in a pattern. And then not unlearning that as they grow up, I know so many people who had difficult relationships with their parents as kids. And then suddenly as adults, they realize it's much smoother, but the transition was very slow. Yeah. And also vice versa. It's a consequence, but it's so slow. And I think it's not just slow. I think we fight it at a first step. In a sense, when you kind of give up on the idea that your parents or your parents, you're giving up on you so most. Like in a sense, you benefit from them being in that role. You wrote about love as a constant and a variable. I do think that love is a constant and a variable. But the difficulty, and when I even kind of wrap my mind around it, is at one point, does love become a constant. You have to decide that it is a constant at some point. Another thing that is a constant and a variable at the same time is time. Time itself. It always moves forward at exactly the same rate, but it feels different to us depending on how we perceive it. But I did think it was a good metaphor for allowing love to change, while also knowing that it is fixed in a way once you've decided for some people, once you've decided you've loved something, you love it. Okay. Last thing before we wrap. I think my favorite phrase in the book as a psychologist was "Gate Shut Panic." Yes. It was definitely something I felt. So much of the book is about what it is to be in your 20s and super ambitious. I think it's not necessarily something that gets written about a great deal, like what do you do after you graduated from college, but before you've made your place in the world. I wanted to write about that. "Gate Shut Panic is torsion's panic from the German. It's this fear that a door is closing behind you and you are running out of time and you'll miss an opportunity." And as soon as I heard about that word, I was like, "Oh yes, that was how I felt my entire 20s." Well, it's another one of those interesting paradoxes because having that fear, the gate is going to shut, is often what leads you to sprint to get there. But it can also lead to some really suboptimal choices on the way. In a sense, it's an illusion. It's something you feel and it can drive you. I think that it gives you this super energy to get things done. But really, it's a long time before that gate actually shuts. It's your perception that the gate is shutting, that ends up being the frightening thing about it. Yes. So it might be good for motivation, but bad for judgment. Maybe. Yes. I thoroughly enjoyed this and it took a lot of willpower to not just nerd out in the book, the entire conversation. This was just a blast for me. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you so much. I think the point to underscore here is that the most important consequence of success is not accolades or fame, but the freedom to do what you want to do next. I actually think that should push us to rethink the very meaning of success. I think the most important measure of success is not status or power or wealth. It's how much freedom you have. And true success is the freedom to stop caring about anyone else's definition of success. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the Ted Audio Collective. In 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 Hans Dielstue and Alison Layton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Van Buncheng, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rogers. I think the whole enterprise of writing novels actually revolves around the depicting of humans. I said like a robot. The depicting of humans. It's a great sentence. Yeah. Or the depiction. Well, the world revised to that. It's even better anyway. Even more robotic. We've all heard that social media is taking away kids' childhoods, giving them social anxiety and increasing rates of teen depression. Social media has been labeled the culprit. But what if it's not? What has been really shocking to me as I've stood here and kind of watched this debate unfold and seen how things are translated to the broader public is that there's just this massive gap between what evidence has been generated today and rigorous studies have found and expert panels have concluded, which is essentially that there's very tiny correlations between social media and mental health. That was developmental psychologist Candace Ajers who joined us for a special interview to unearth the research that debunks social media as the cause of the mental health decline for our teens. What else is causing it and what are the solutions for a path forward? Find out in the full episode of Ted Talks Daily, wherever you listen to podcasts.