0:00

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantan.

0:04

We've all heard the urban legend of the

0:06

mother, who upon finding her child trapped under

0:08

a car, is able to

0:10

summon superhuman strength to lift the vehicle

0:12

from the ground and save her child.

0:16

It turns out, there's truth to the legend.

0:19

In 1982, Angela Cavallo's son

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was working on a Chevy Impala when it fell

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on top of him. Angela

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0:28

that two neighbours could pull her son to

0:30

safety. A similar

0:32

event happened in 2019, when an Ohio

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teen lifted a car to save his

0:37

neighbour's life. In 2006,

0:40

a Canadian woman saved a group of children,

0:42

including her own two sons, by

0:45

fighting off a polar bear. It's

0:48

unclear, biologically, how people can

0:50

summon god-like strength in scenarios

0:52

like these. But

0:54

it raises an interesting question. Are

0:57

we all capable of more than we think? You

1:03

often hear echoes of this theme in the

1:05

biographies of famous people. At

1:08

21, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with

1:10

ALS and given only a few

1:12

years to live. He

1:14

not only defied the odds and lived to the age of

1:16

76, he also

1:18

went on to become one of the most

1:20

brilliant theoretical physicists of all time. Bethany

1:23

Hamilton was 13 when

1:25

a shark bit off her left arm. She

1:28

went on to become a professional surfer

1:30

who has won multiple championships. It

1:34

makes you think, doesn't it? What

1:36

can I accomplish if I really set my mind

1:38

and heart to it? What

1:40

am I keeping myself from accomplishing by

1:43

believing it to be impossible? The

1:46

science of human potential and

1:49

psychological insights on how to discover

1:51

our potential. This week

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For pricing, visit Tresto. There's the old

4:00

joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice,

4:13

practice, practice. What

4:16

keeps us from reaching our true potential in life?

4:19

Well, that's easy. We should figure out what

4:21

we ought to do and then do it. But

4:24

like that joke about Carnegie Hall, the devil is

4:26

in the details. At

4:28

the University of Pennsylvania, organizational

4:31

psychologist Adam Grant has studied

4:33

how, when, and why our

4:35

minds get bogged down by obstacles.

4:38

In his book, Hidden Potential, Adam

4:41

explores the psychology of how we can

4:43

become the best versions of ourselves. Adam

4:46

Grant, welcome back to Hidden Brain. So

4:49

glad to be back, Shankar. Thanks for having me. Adam,

4:52

many years ago, you were starting college

4:55

and you knew you had an interest

4:57

in psychology, but you were also really

4:59

interested in physics. You signed up for

5:02

a class with a very eminent astrophysicist.

5:05

Tell me what class this was and how it went. It

5:09

was a cosmology class, and it

5:11

was about understanding the universe. I

5:13

remember there was a shopping period where we got

5:15

to sample all the classes we were interested in

5:18

before they officially started. And

5:20

I went to the intro to Astrophysics Day,

5:23

and this professor seemed so dynamic.

5:25

He loved physics. He

5:28

was clearly an expert. He'd won

5:30

tons of awards. He had many

5:32

publications. And I walked

5:34

into class and thought, this is going to

5:36

continue to ignite my interest in physics.

5:39

And it did not go as I hoped. I

5:43

didn't understand it at all. I

5:45

felt like an idiot, and I gave up on

5:47

physics. The

5:51

first reason we fail to reach our potential

5:53

is the obvious one. We

5:55

never get started. Something

5:57

knocks us off course at the beginning of a journey.

6:00

and we don't go down that road. Years

6:02

later, we look back and ask, what

6:05

if? Then

6:07

there are situations where we do get started,

6:10

but quickly get stuck. This

6:12

happened to Adam, believe it or not, as he was

6:14

writing the chapter in his book on

6:17

how to get unstuck. It's

6:19

ironic, isn't it? I'm

6:21

writing a whole chapter about how to get unstuck,

6:24

and I just completely

6:26

stalled in the middle of it. I

6:29

cycled through so many different metaphors for

6:32

getting unstuck. Some

6:34

of them were embarrassingly bad. Getting

6:37

unstuck is like having to demolish and

6:39

renovate a building. Then

6:41

it was going to be, you have to uproot

6:44

a plant. At

6:46

one point, I was digging a tunnel. Then

6:49

there was a wall that you're trying to break through. These

6:52

metaphors were really forced. I

6:55

spent weeks and weeks spinning my wheels on this. Finally,

6:57

I just gave up and I said, I have to

6:59

put this chapter away and move on

7:01

to something else because this is not moving forward, and

7:03

I'm driving myself mad. I

7:06

understand that you spent a lot of time watching

7:08

the TV show Friends during this period? Yeah,

7:10

I was definitely chilling with Monica

7:12

and Chandler, which mostly happened late

7:14

at night.

7:18

I was definitely guilty of what's

7:20

been called revenge bedtime procrastination. I

7:25

was getting off going to sleep because

7:27

I had a

7:30

really miserable, monotonous day, and

7:33

now I'm going to get revenge and do something fun,

7:35

and it did no good

7:38

whatsoever. The

7:40

feeling of being stuck comes with a

7:42

psychological cost. It's not just

7:45

that you are making no progress. You

7:47

are acutely aware you are making no

7:49

progress. Everything was first

7:51

defined by the sociologist Corey Keys, but

7:54

immortalized by everyone's favorite philosopher,

7:56

Mariah Carey. language

8:00

is a sense of emptiness and stagnation.

8:03

Most of us would say, I feel meh

8:05

or blah. You're

8:08

not burned out. You still have some energy, but

8:11

you're not at peak motivation. You

8:14

don't have a full sense of purpose

8:16

and progress. It's

8:18

a bit of a vicious cycle because

8:20

when you're languishing, you feel like

8:22

you're stuck, but then it

8:24

keeps you stuck. If you look

8:27

at the evidence, one of the challenges

8:29

of languishing is that it disrupts focus

8:32

and dulls motivation. So

8:35

in my case, I stopped trying new

8:38

ideas. I stopped writing,

8:40

and then I just stay stuck. I

8:49

want to talk about a final way we

8:51

create mental blocks for ourselves. Let's

8:53

say you do accomplish something big. You manage

8:55

to push through obstacles. You reach a goal.

8:58

Once you get to what feels like a top, it

9:01

can be all too easy to go sliding down.

9:04

Let's talk about an athlete, Adam. In high

9:06

school, R.A. Dickey was making a

9:08

name for himself as a highly skilled baseball

9:11

player. He looked like he was headed somewhere.

9:13

Tell me his story. R.A. Dickey was

9:16

a phenom. I think he gets through his

9:18

sophomore year of high school, and

9:20

there are already pro scouts showing up at

9:22

his games. He

9:25

gets to college, and he wins

9:27

an Olympic bronze medal. He's a

9:29

starting pitcher for Team USA. He

9:31

gets drafted in the first round by

9:33

the Texas Rangers. He's offered a signing bonus

9:36

of nearly a million dollars, and

9:38

he knows he's going somewhere. He's going to start

9:40

off at the very top of their minor league system,

9:42

and then give it a year or two, and

9:44

he'll make the major leagues. He

9:47

shows up to sign his contract in

9:49

1996, and

9:51

a team trainer notices something odd

9:54

about an X-ray. Tell me what he

9:56

found. Well, the trainer notices

9:58

that his arm is it

10:00

hangs at a strange angle. They

10:03

do the x-ray and they discover that RA

10:06

is actually missing a ligament in his right

10:08

elbow. He's born without it,

10:10

he never knew, and it

10:12

didn't seem to hold him back up until that

10:14

point. But if

10:17

you want to throw a blazing fastball, that

10:19

ligament turns out to be pretty important. And

10:22

it seems to put a ceiling on his potential, that

10:25

he's never gonna hit a hundred miles an hour. And

10:27

the difference between throwing in the low 90s and 100 is

10:31

a huge deal for a major league pitcher. Did

10:33

he still get his million dollar signing bonus? No,

10:36

he did not. They cut it to

10:38

less than $80,000 and they sent

10:41

him to the bottom rungs of the

10:43

minor league system. So clearly this is

10:46

someone who again felt like he was,

10:48

you know, going somewhere, real spark, you

10:50

know, sort of had caught lightning in

10:52

a bottle and then suddenly feels like

10:54

he's sliding back down the

10:56

mountain. In his late 20s,

10:58

RA gets a break. The Rangers bring

11:01

him up to the majors full-time and

11:03

it looks again like he had achieved

11:05

his dream. Tell me what happens this

11:07

time around. Well, this is after

11:09

seven years of toiling away in the minors,

11:12

trying to figure out, all right, if I can't throw as

11:14

fast as I want to go, I'm gonna mix up speed

11:16

and spin and, you know, I'm

11:18

just gonna trick batters and

11:20

that's gonna be my competitive advantage. So

11:23

he gets called up, he's in his late 20s, this is

11:25

supposed to be the prime of his career and

11:28

he just bombs. If

11:32

you read the coverage of his performance at the

11:34

time and also his potential, people say

11:37

he's mediocre, he loses

11:39

more games than he wins, people

11:41

start calling him a has-been and

11:43

worse yet, I never

11:45

was. Hmm. At some point his

11:48

manager is bringing men for a tough conversation,

11:50

how does that unfold at him? It

11:52

doesn't go well for him. They

11:54

say to him, look, you're going nowhere

11:57

and he agrees with it, he realizes,

11:59

you know, This is

12:01

not penning out for me. They

12:03

send him back down to the miners. And

12:06

I think it looks to a lot of people like

12:08

his dream is over. What happens next?

12:11

Well, our addict is a

12:14

determined human being. He's

12:16

full of grit. So he spends

12:18

his entire off season throwing pitches against

12:21

cinder blocks. He actually

12:23

drives around in his car with

12:25

a baseball in his right hand so he can practice

12:27

his grip. He pushes

12:30

himself harder than he's ever pushed himself in

12:32

his life. And

12:34

the next season, he gets another shot. His

12:37

first game back in the majors, he

12:39

ties a major league record. But

12:41

Chunker, it's not the kind of record that you want. He

12:45

gives up six home runs in three

12:47

innings. And over a century

12:50

of baseball, no pitcher has ever done

12:52

worse. He gets booed right out of

12:54

the game and sent back to the

12:56

miners again, which feels to

12:59

him like strike three, you're out.

13:05

Most of us are not professional athletes, but many

13:07

of us have had this feeling. We

13:10

catch a break, accomplish something, but then it seems

13:12

like there's nowhere else to go but down. But

13:15

it turns out there was more to RA's story

13:18

as there is to yours. When we

13:20

come back, the most common strategies we all

13:22

use to reach our potential and

13:24

the science of whether they work. You're

13:27

listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

13:36

Support for Hidden Brain comes from BetterHelp. How

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would you do gift giving this holiday if it was

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gifts are your thing. But

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is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. What

15:02

are your wildest dreams? Do you want

15:04

to write a book someday? Run a

15:06

marathon? Maybe you've always wanted

15:08

to climb Mount Everest. Sometimes

15:11

our dreams seem so outlandish, we don't

15:13

even voice them. They seem grandiose.

15:17

Of course, dismissing a goal before we get

15:19

started on it is a surefire

15:21

way to never achieving that goal. But

15:24

when we do decide to work on an ambitious

15:26

goal, there are common strategies most of us turn

15:28

to. Psychologist Adam Grant

15:30

says these solutions often don't work

15:33

the way we think they work. Adam,

15:37

when you were a freshman in high school, you

15:39

played a lot of video games. One

15:42

summer, your mom drags you to the

15:44

local swimming pool. Tell me what

15:46

happened that day. I

15:49

saw a lifeguard on his break get up on

15:51

the diving board. I

15:53

remember watching him leap off the

15:55

board and do a front

15:57

two and a half, two flips and then a dive.

16:00

and then just vanish into the water. I

16:03

guess I'd seen diving on TV in the

16:05

Olympics a few times. I'd

16:08

never seen it up close and I was mesmerized.

16:12

And I said, I want to learn how to do that. So

16:15

you spent the rest of the summer learning some

16:17

basic dives and then you show up at

16:19

fall tryouts for the diving team. Your

16:22

coach has both good news and bad news for

16:24

you. Why don't we start with

16:27

the bad news? He basically told

16:29

me that I lacked a lot of the

16:31

things that you would normally look for in

16:33

a diver. I

16:35

walked like Frankenstein. I

16:37

couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. I

16:41

couldn't jump high at all. I

16:45

basically lacked the explosive

16:47

power, flexibility and grace

16:50

that you expect in a diver. So

16:53

what's the good news here? That's

16:55

what I was wondering. I was like, wait, is there good news? And

17:00

the coach Eric Best said to me, listen,

17:02

diving is a nerd sport. It

17:04

attracts the people who weren't quick

17:06

enough for basketball or strong enough

17:09

for football or fast enough for

17:11

track. If you work

17:13

hard at this, by the time you're a senior, you

17:15

can be a state finalist. All

17:18

right. So you said there's a path for me here.

17:20

I might not have the natural athletic

17:23

skills, but I have the grit and

17:25

the determination. Tell me

17:27

what happened next. Did you apply yourself and learn to become

17:29

a diver? I

17:32

spent a lot of time walking down the

17:34

board. I would do my

17:37

approach. I would jump to the end of the

17:39

board and I'd feel like I was off balance or it wasn't

17:41

going quite right. So I'd stop and turn around

17:43

and start over. And I probably wasted at least half of

17:46

every practice. Not

17:50

ever taking off. I

17:53

would bock on a basic front dive pike. Like

17:57

I would still stop and start over because as I

17:59

look at the board, learn later, I was

18:01

a perfectionist. Hmm.

18:05

Tell me about that you were trying to perfect aspects

18:08

of your dive as opposed to sort

18:10

of the overall, your overall ability to

18:12

dive. Yeah. Like once

18:14

I realized I was a perfectionist, I thought it was going

18:16

to be an asset in diving because it would help

18:18

me work toward perfect tense. But what

18:21

it did was it led me to stop

18:23

every time my approach wasn't perfect. It

18:26

also led me to focus on the wrong things. I

18:29

focused on the things that I actually

18:31

could perfect, like taking

18:34

my already good rip entry, where

18:36

I would hit the water and

18:38

go and disappear without

18:40

a splash. And instead of

18:42

working on getting better at harder dives, I

18:45

was just obsessed with perfecting

18:47

the tiny details of my

18:49

existing easy dive. Yeah. So in other words, you didn't

18:51

have a very high vertical leap, for

18:53

example, and you could have spent time working on that

18:56

and that could have helped you with any number of

18:58

dives, but that's not what you were focused on. No,

19:01

I should have spent a lot of

19:03

time improving my vertical leap, stretching to

19:05

increase my flexibility, working on

19:07

the big flaws in my diving, as opposed to

19:09

taking the skills that I was

19:11

already pretty good at and refining those. You

19:17

say there are three things that perfectionists often

19:19

get wrong that in some ways, get in

19:21

the way of people accomplishing their potential. What

19:23

are those three things that the

19:25

first mistake that perfectionists make is they

19:28

obsess about tiny details that don't matter.

19:30

And they miss out on the big picture. Second

19:33

challenge is that perfectionists

19:36

end up narrowing

19:38

their areas of growth. I

19:41

think if perfectionism was medication, it would

19:44

actually come with a warning label. Warning

19:47

may cause stunted growth. If

19:51

you're a perfectionist, you want to be flawless.

19:54

And that means if you're

19:56

not going to be good at something initially, you

19:59

don't want to try. Because

20:01

you might fail. And that means

20:03

you stay within your comfort zone, you don't

20:05

stretch beyond your strengths, and

20:08

you don't take on new challenges. And

20:11

then the third issue is that

20:13

perfectionists are master ruminators, constantly

20:17

berating themselves for their past mistakes.

20:20

What they forget is that beating

20:22

yourself up doesn't make

20:24

you better, it leaves you bruised. So

20:30

besides perfectionism, Adam, a second thing we

20:32

do when we're trying to unlock our

20:35

potential is to turn to experts

20:37

for advice. And in some ways, the reasoning is

20:39

obvious when we're interested in a subject but not

20:41

sure where to start. You know,

20:43

why not seek out people at the top of their

20:45

game and learn from them? It makes intuitive sense. Does

20:48

it work, Adam? Not as

20:50

well as I expected. The

20:53

research that really blew my mind on this

20:55

was looking at students

20:57

at Northwestern, I think it

20:59

was about a decade and a half, looking

21:02

at students in every possible subject,

21:05

taking an intro class. And

21:07

the question is, what happens to their grades

21:10

in their next class in that subject based

21:13

on whether they learn from an expert? If

21:16

you had a tenured or tenure-track professor

21:18

for your intro class, you

21:21

do worse in your next class than

21:23

if you have a teacher who's less

21:25

of an expert, a lecturer or an

21:27

adjunct instructor. That seems very surprising, doesn't

21:29

it? Because the person, you're saying the

21:31

person who actually knows more has

21:34

a worse effect on you than the person who knows

21:36

less? I think that's what

21:38

the evidence suggests. And I think Einstein

21:40

was a great example of this. Einstein

21:43

obviously was brilliant, but

21:46

he really struggled to teach elementary

21:49

physics. In fact, he

21:51

only attracted a few students for one of

21:53

his early courses and then was

21:55

forced to cancel the class the next semester when

21:58

he couldn't recruit enough to fill the the

22:00

room. He came across

22:02

as disorganized to his students because he knew

22:04

too much. And

22:06

all the dots connected in his head,

22:08

and he could not relate as

22:11

a genius and an expert to what it was

22:13

like to be a beginner. And

22:16

Shankar, I think that's part of what happened

22:18

to me in my intro astrophysics class in

22:20

college. I

22:22

showed up, there's this very knowledgeable expert

22:24

teacher, and he's

22:27

great at teaching PhD seminars,

22:31

but not so skilled when it comes

22:33

to freshman astrophysics when we've never seen

22:35

any of this material before because it's

22:38

been for him 40 years since

22:40

he knew what it was like to

22:43

not know. So

22:48

we've talked about the downsides of perfectionism and

22:50

the downsides of seeking out experts. I want

22:52

to talk about a third thing that many

22:54

of us do when we try to

22:56

achieve our potential. We tell ourselves

22:58

that we should push through roadblocks by

23:01

becoming our own drill surgeons. You've

23:03

actually put this question to people. What did they tell

23:05

you, Adam? I've

23:08

heard time and time again that if you

23:10

want to reach your potential, it's all about

23:12

the daily grind. You have to

23:14

push yourself as hard as you can. Yeah. Did

23:16

you try and do this while you were getting

23:19

stuck on your book when you found yourself

23:21

procrastinating? Did you say the way to do

23:23

this is to essentially whip myself and

23:27

try to finish up? I did. Yeah,

23:29

I thought, okay, what I need to do

23:31

is I need to focus all my attention

23:33

and energy on the stuck

23:35

chapter and get unstuck and

23:38

block out distractions. Maybe

23:40

the problem is divided attention. I'm doing

23:42

too many projects right now. Let me

23:44

clear the deck. Let me just focus on this one

23:46

thing. You know what happened?

23:48

I'm sitting there looking at the

23:50

blinking cursor and it kind of feels

23:52

like staring into the sun. Why

23:55

do you think this doesn't work? Why do you

23:57

think that being harsh on ourselves and saying I'm

24:00

going to be single-minded in what I'm doing, why

24:02

do you think it doesn't have the effects that

24:04

we think it's going to have? I

24:06

think there are a couple of reasons it

24:08

can fail or even backfire. One

24:11

is burnout. You just exhaust

24:13

yourself at some point. Two

24:15

is what psychologists call bore-out.

24:18

You're literally bored out of your mind by

24:20

doing the same task over and over. And

24:24

three is that you're not opening

24:26

yourself up to fresh perspectives

24:29

and new ideas. If

24:31

you just keep staring ahead, you're never

24:33

going to see things through a different

24:35

lens. There's a

24:37

fourth error that you talk about that people often

24:40

fall into when they try and achieve their goals,

24:42

and this one is rather subtle. People

24:44

imagine that the path to their goals

24:47

is linear. What do you mean by this, Adam?

24:50

I think that most people think about success as

24:52

a straight line, and they

24:54

think, okay, I've got to go

24:57

through the following steps, and then I'll

24:59

land where I'd like to be. But

25:02

if you look at the evidence, success is

25:05

much more likely to be circular than linear.

25:08

We often go in loops to get

25:10

where we want to go. It's much

25:12

more of a squiggly or jagged line

25:14

than it is a direct path, which

25:17

is frustrating. But as you recognize

25:19

that, it becomes a little bit easier to

25:21

accept the fact that not every

25:23

step is going to take you forward.

25:26

Sometimes you actually need to go one

25:28

step backward to go two steps ahead.

25:31

There was a study by the cognitive

25:33

scientist Wayne Gray and John Linstead called

25:35

plateaus, dips, and leaps. Tell me what

25:37

it found. I

25:39

think this is such an encouraging pattern for anybody

25:42

who's ever plateaued or gotten stuck. They

25:45

find this pattern across people trying to improve in

25:47

all kinds of skills. What

25:50

they show is that when people get stuck and then

25:52

they end up making a leap, usually

25:55

there's a dip before the leap. In

25:57

other words, they get worse before they get better.

26:02

And I think an easy illustration of this is

26:04

typing. If you

26:06

want to get faster at typing, if

26:09

you like to hunt and peck, you're probably going

26:11

to max out around 30 to 40 words a minute.

26:14

You can keep practicing, but you're going

26:16

to run into a wall because that

26:18

method is only so good. If

26:21

you want to get faster, you have

26:23

to backtrack and learn a different method, which is you're going

26:25

to type by touch. You have to learn the home keys

26:29

and not look at your fingers, not

26:31

look at the keyboard. And what's

26:33

frustrating to a lot of people about that is it's

26:35

going to take you a little while to get comfortable with

26:37

that method. And in order to

26:39

speed up, you actually have to slow down. And

26:43

that's, I think, an illustration of what happens in

26:45

so many tasks is you get

26:47

stuck not because you've maxed out on your potential,

26:49

not because you've hit your peak, but

26:52

because you've reached the limits of the method that

26:54

you're using. And

26:56

you need to go back to the drawing board and

26:58

learn a new method to get better. When

27:05

we want to accomplish big goals and reach our

27:07

potential, we usually think we need to do certain

27:09

things to get there. Pull

27:11

ourselves up, focus on the task, and

27:13

seek expert advice. It

27:16

turns out those strategies are not as

27:18

effective as we might think. So

27:21

what does work? When

27:23

we come back, better techniques for tapping

27:25

into our potential. You're listening to

27:27

Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

27:53

We have a personality profiling task. to

28:00

getting happier changed. So let's get

28:02

happier. This is Build the Life

28:04

You Want, the podcast. Hey

28:07

there, Shankar here. I wanted to let

28:10

you know about a new project we're launching at Hidden

28:12

Brain. We're calling it FaceFinder,

28:14

and it's a game on the new

28:16

Hidden Brain app. FaceFinder

28:18

is designed to help you improve

28:20

your facial recognition skills. Reading

28:23

faces can help you navigate your

28:25

social and professional life with greater

28:27

skill. As I've played the

28:29

game, I find I have started paying closer attention

28:32

to the faces around me. We

28:34

are hoping that FaceFinder might be the

28:36

first of other games and exercises designed

28:38

to sharpen your mind, test your wits, and

28:41

have some fun. As you

28:43

start to play, you can share your results with

28:45

friends and family and see how you stack up

28:47

against others. The Hidden

28:49

Brain app is currently available for

28:52

iPhone, iPad, or other iOS devices.

28:55

To download it, find Hidden Brain in the

28:57

App Store. When it comes

28:59

to spotting a face, are you an

29:01

amateur or a genius? Try

29:03

our daily challenge on the Hidden Brain app

29:06

to find out. This

29:18

is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantan. We've

29:21

all encountered them. Overachievers.

29:24

The students who score near-perfect SATs.

29:27

Colleagues who consistently knock their milestones out

29:29

of the park. Athletes

29:31

and entrepreneurs who start out looking no different

29:33

from us, but end up looking

29:36

very different. At

29:39

the Wharton School, psychologist Adam Grand says

29:41

there's less separating us from these

29:43

high achievers than we might think. In

29:47

his book, Hidden Potential, The Science

29:49

of Achieving Greater Things, Adam

29:51

offers a number of strategies that can help

29:53

us get where we want to go. Adam,

29:58

when you were writing the book, you told me that you You felt

30:00

like you were languishing. You were

30:02

bored and the project felt stagnant. You found

30:04

it very easy to get distracted. We

30:07

talked earlier about how most people think

30:09

the solution to this is to just

30:11

block out those distractions and power through,

30:13

but you learned a different lesson from

30:16

playing Scrabble? I did.

30:18

I was actually playing Words with Friends. At

30:21

some point, I just threw

30:24

my hands up and said, I cannot make

30:26

progress on this chapter right now. And

30:29

I picked up my phone and I

30:31

went into a Words with Friends game. And

30:33

then I remember I had a bunch of

30:36

letters. I

30:38

think it spelled out ROUGNOY if

30:40

I remember correctly. And

30:43

I realized if I rearranged those letters,

30:46

if I could find an open eye on the board, I

30:48

could make the word original. And I did it.

30:50

There was an eye and I scored this bingo.

30:54

And all of a sudden, I got this jolt

30:56

of, wait a minute, I'm not completely incompetent.

31:00

I'm not incapable of everything. I feel like I just

31:02

made a little progress there. How do

31:04

you know this was not just more procrastination at all? I

31:07

don't. It might have been.

31:09

But I found in my research with Ji He

31:11

Shin that sometimes

31:13

there are unexpected benefits of procrastinating.

31:16

A lot of people think that procrastination is

31:19

caused by laziness. And

31:21

you feel like, well, I'm not motivated

31:23

enough or I'm just not willing to

31:26

work hard enough and you berate yourself

31:28

for that. But

31:30

psychologists like Fuchsia Serwa have found that

31:33

procrastination is actually not caused

31:36

by laziness. You're

31:38

not afraid of hard work. What

31:40

you're avoiding are negative emotions that a task serves up.

31:44

In some situations, it's boredom. In

31:47

others, it's confusion. For

31:49

many people, it's fear and anxiety. I don't know if I can

31:51

do this. For me, it was

31:53

frustration and confusion in that moment. I

31:55

feel like I've hit a wall. I don't know where to go.

31:58

I can't figure this out. You

32:02

cite research that shows that when

32:04

people take on serious hobbies, their

32:07

confidence climbs at work, but only

32:09

if the hobbies are in

32:11

a different area from their jobs. Can you talk

32:13

about this work, Adam? Yeah.

32:16

If you take a detour to try

32:18

to master something completely unrelated to your

32:20

job, it tends to build your

32:22

sense of self-efficacy. This

32:24

is exactly what happened to me playing Words with Friends.

32:27

You come away thinking, all right, I can do

32:29

that. And so it's

32:31

a completely different task that gives you a chance

32:34

to sort of recharge your confidence and

32:36

reboot your motivation. And

32:39

in some ways, is this really about feeling like you

32:41

can notch some wins in

32:43

some domains? So even if you're stuck in

32:45

a primary domain that you care about, being

32:48

able to notch a win in a secondary

32:50

domain tells you, sort of sends you, gives

32:52

you a little psychological jolt and maybe helps

32:54

you when you come back to the primary domain. It

32:57

does. A sense of progress in one part of your

32:59

life really reinforces your belief in

33:02

your own capability in other parts of your

33:04

life. You

33:06

once ran a study that

33:08

looked at the relationship between

33:10

procrastination and creativity. Tell

33:12

me what you found. We basically found

33:15

that there's a sweet spot of procrastination for

33:17

creativity, that people

33:20

who didn't procrastinate were less

33:22

creative than people who would put

33:24

things off a little bit. And

33:28

then when Jihei first showed me those

33:30

results, I remember asking her, like, what

33:32

about the chronic procrastinators who put things

33:34

off a lot? And she was

33:36

like, I don't know, they didn't fill out

33:38

my survey. No,

33:42

they didn't fill out the survey eventually. And

33:45

they were less creative too. Interesting. As

33:47

rated by their supervisors. And I think what's

33:49

going on here, we designed

33:51

a series of experiments to get to the bottom of

33:53

this. What's going on here is

33:56

that if you dive right in,

33:58

you're rushing ahead with your first idea. as

34:00

opposed to waiting for your best idea. If

34:04

you wait till the last minute, you're also

34:06

rushing, because you now have to implement your

34:08

easiest idea, as opposed to

34:10

your best idea. And the sweet

34:12

spot in the middle is where you have time

34:14

to incubate. You're more

34:16

likely to reframe the problems. You're more

34:19

likely to access some unexpected ideas and

34:22

take some random walks and maybe have

34:24

a eureka moment. But you still have

34:26

the time to really work out the

34:28

most promising idea. But

34:31

there's a really important caveat here, which is that a

34:33

little bit of procrastination only contributed

34:36

to creativity when people were

34:38

intrinsically motivated by

34:40

the problem they were putting off. So

34:42

if you're just completely bored by the task,

34:45

guess what? It's not gonna be active in the back

34:47

of your mind when you're procrastinating. It's

34:49

only if you're interested in the problem and you're

34:51

putting it off because it's hard, or you haven't

34:53

figured it out yet, that you

34:56

do the subconscious processing that can

34:58

be helpful with unlocking a solution.

35:02

You know, I'm reminded of a story

35:04

involving the late, great psychologist

35:06

Amos Tversky when he and

35:08

Danny Kahneman were developing the

35:11

foundations of what would become

35:13

behavioral economics. You

35:15

know, Amos and Danny would spend a lot of time

35:17

just sort of chatting and joking. And people would say,

35:19

how come you guys are not writing papers? You just

35:22

seem to be having a good time. And

35:24

Amos said that people sometimes

35:26

waste years because they're not

35:29

willing to waste days. And I

35:31

might be paraphrasing what he said. But basically the

35:33

point is, in their zeal to sort

35:35

of jump in and get stuff done very quickly,

35:37

people sometimes are not giving themselves the room to

35:39

actually figure out what it is that they should

35:42

actually be working on. And yes, you might be

35:44

making progress in the short run, but in fact,

35:46

that progress comes at the cost of how far

35:48

you can get in the long run. It's

35:51

a really wise observation. And there's actually a term for

35:53

it now. It's called the plunging in bias. My

35:57

collaborator, Reb Rebele, I thought had

35:59

a great. way of capturing how to

36:01

overcome that. He said, you can still be

36:03

quick to start, but make

36:05

sure you're not too quick to finish. So

36:10

I want to go back to the topic of perfectionism

36:12

that we talked about earlier. We think of highly

36:14

skilled people as perfectionists, but this

36:17

is not always the case. You say

36:19

that elite musicians, for example, are

36:21

less driven by an obsessive compulsion

36:23

to be perfect and more fueled

36:26

by something that you call harmonious

36:28

passion. What do you mean by

36:30

this, Dormant? When

36:32

psychologists talk about harmonious passion, they're

36:34

basically talking about having

36:36

the task in harmony with your own

36:39

level of interest. So

36:41

you're not pushing yourself to do it because you have to.

36:44

You're not an obsessive compulsive

36:46

workaholic. You're

36:48

doing it because you love it because

36:51

you enjoy challenging yourself at it because

36:53

you want to get better at it.

36:56

In other words, it's not just that you're

36:58

playing the music and saying, I want the

37:00

music to be perfect, but at some level,

37:02

you're actually enjoying the music, which at

37:05

one level seems sort of self-evident. How can

37:07

you be a musician if you don't enjoy

37:09

the music? But I suspect there are probably

37:11

many musicians who are no longer enjoying the

37:13

music because they're just going through the technical

37:15

act of producing the music. Yeah,

37:18

or they're focused on the outcome and

37:20

they're less likely to get absorbed in the

37:22

task. They don't find flow. It's

37:25

like there's a shadow

37:27

over them of constantly feeling

37:29

like, well, I should be practicing

37:31

more. I should be

37:34

studying as opposed to, I want

37:37

to study. I feel like practicing. This

37:39

is exciting. One

37:41

of the insights you talk about is that

37:44

we're all looking for roadmaps to success,

37:46

but you say the right tool might

37:48

not actually be a map, but a

37:50

compass. What do you mean by this, Adam? I

37:53

think that so many people, when they

37:55

look to an expert guide or a mentor, they

37:57

think they're going to get a set of... directions.

38:01

But you can't follow somebody

38:04

else's map, because no one is

38:06

starting from the same place that you are. None

38:09

of the the experts or mentors that you look to

38:12

for guidance, began their journey

38:14

on the exact same starting

38:16

point that you did. They

38:18

just have different skills, different strengths,

38:21

different challenges. And that means

38:23

their map is not going to be tailored for you. There's

38:26

also the issue that they may

38:28

not have all the directions. They may not remember

38:30

them. They may not know them. So

38:33

I think what we're looking for is a compass, not

38:36

to give you directions, but to give

38:38

you direction. A good

38:41

compass tells you whether you're on

38:43

the right heading. And that's what I

38:45

think you want from a mentor to guide you. We

38:52

talked earlier about the story of R.A.

38:54

Dickey, the rising baseball star who had

38:57

not just one fall from grace, but three

38:59

falls from grace. So it looked

39:01

like his career was over. You know,

39:03

after the third time, he got relegated

39:05

to the minor leagues. But then he

39:07

got some advice from pitching coaches that

39:09

acted as a sort of compass. What

39:12

did they tell him about? Well,

39:16

they basically set him down and said, this

39:18

career is not going to work for you.

39:21

You don't

39:23

have the physical ability that

39:25

you need to succeed. And if they had

39:27

stopped there, he might

39:30

have just retired. But

39:33

he was lucky to have some pitching coaches who gave him a compass. They

39:38

said, look, you're going in the wrong direction. You're not going to make

39:40

it back to the major

39:42

leagues on the course that you're taking

39:44

right now. But there might be another path for

39:48

you. They

39:50

said, you know, we've seen you throw this pitch.

39:53

It was a strange looking pitch, but the pitching

39:55

coaches recognized that he was holding the

39:57

ball very similar to the other side.

40:00

to the way that you would grip if you were going

40:02

to throw a knuckleball. And for a

40:04

non-baseball fans, what is a knuckleball, Adam? So

40:07

a knuckleball is where instead of holding the

40:09

ball in the palm of your hand with

40:11

all your fingers wrapped around it, you

40:14

take your index and your middle finger

40:16

and you actually dig your fingernails right

40:19

into the ball. So

40:21

it almost looks like your hand is a

40:23

part claw and you're holding the ball with

40:25

your two knuckles, your first and second finger

40:27

knuckles sticking up in the air. And

40:31

the knuckleball is a rare pitch. There are not a

40:33

lot of pitchers who have used it successfully. But

40:36

it can be pretty deadly because the

40:39

way that you grip it stops it

40:41

from spinning. It actually flies

40:43

pretty flat. And that means it's

40:45

going to go slower, but it can

40:47

also zigzag and just

40:49

confuse the heck out of batters. And

40:52

they said to RA, because the knuckleball is a

40:54

slower pitch, it's pretty well aligned

40:56

with your arm strength. And because

40:58

you've thrown this thing, you have a

41:01

little bit of a feel for the way that you would

41:03

release a knuckleball. And maybe

41:05

you can master this pitch and maybe it could salvage

41:07

your career. So

41:09

did he decide to take that advice? He

41:12

decided to give it a shot, but

41:15

he did not know where to start. None of

41:17

his pitching coaches had any experience working with a

41:19

knuckleballer. All they could

41:21

do was give him a compass and say, general

41:24

direction, if you want to make it back

41:26

to the majors, learn how to throw this

41:28

pitch that does not spin. And

41:30

he decides to go for it. So

41:38

at one point, he pictures himself

41:41

standing in a doorway and executing

41:43

the entire throw without letting

41:45

his body touch the doorframe. So

41:48

what I find interesting here is he's not just learning

41:51

to throw this knuckleball, he's actually

41:53

developing a system that

41:55

can teach him to throw the knuckleball.

41:59

That's right. It feels completely wrong

42:01

to him. You know, it reminds

42:03

me of something that my diving coach Eric Best always said

42:05

to me. He would say, Adam, make

42:08

it feel wrong. I

42:10

don't want to make it feel wrong. I'm trying to do it right. Yeah.

42:13

But if you always do it in

42:16

a way that feels right, then you're going

42:18

to undercorrect. You're not going to make a big enough

42:20

change. Make it feel wrong.

42:23

Overcorrect. And that's how you get it right. And

42:26

that's what RA had to do. So he's

42:28

picturing himself standing in a doorway. And

42:31

basically, that means he's almost pinning his

42:33

elbow to his body when he throws.

42:36

So he kind of looks like a T-Rex. By

42:40

making those radical adjustments, he's able to unlearn

42:42

the way he's always pitched, which is to

42:44

try to maximize spin and

42:46

learn to take the spin off the ball. But it's

42:49

a long road. So

42:51

you interviewed RA for your book. Tell

42:54

me what how the story turned out. What happened

42:56

after he learned to throw this knuckleball? Well,

43:00

he went in circles for years,

43:02

basically three years. You know,

43:04

he's backtracking. He's undoing all of the things

43:07

that have made him good enough to be

43:09

a minor league pitcher. And

43:11

he feels like he's getting worse and worse

43:13

at many steps along the way. But

43:17

after all this effort, all this going

43:19

backward and having to learn a new

43:22

method and kind

43:24

of reinvent his entire technique to

43:26

pick up a different skill, he

43:28

ends up moving forward. He

43:32

spent the vast majority of 14 years

43:34

toiling away in the minor leagues and

43:37

he gets called back to the majors again. And

43:40

that year, his earned run

43:42

average makes him one

43:44

of the 10 best pitchers in all of baseball. And

43:47

he signs a multi-million dollar multi-year

43:50

contract with the Mets. And

43:52

what's crazy about this shocker is that in

43:55

the year he was drafted, there were nine pitchers picked

43:57

ahead of him. Eight

44:00

of them have already retired, and the

44:02

ninth is never coming back to the majors.

44:06

But RA is kind of just scratching the surface

44:09

of his prospects, and at 35, he's beginning

44:12

to unlock his hidden potential. He

44:16

ends up with a very, very

44:18

triumphant finish. 2012,

44:20

he's 37 years old. He

44:24

makes his first All-Star game. He

44:27

sets a Mets franchise record for pitching 32

44:30

scoreless innings in a row. He

44:32

leads the whole league in strikeouts, and

44:35

he becomes the first knuckleballer in major

44:37

league baseball history to win the Cy

44:39

Young Award for being the best

44:41

pitcher in the whole league. One

44:44

of the things that he did that's very striking

44:46

is that he didn't go to one expert, one

44:48

guru, and basically say, teach me how to do

44:50

this magical thing, which is, I think, what many

44:52

of us do. He went to

44:54

many people and tried to learn many things

44:57

from many people. Some years

44:59

ago, there was a study by Monica

45:01

Higgins at Harvard who looked at the

45:03

career paths of lawyers who were navigating

45:05

the path to partner. That

45:08

study found something very similar to the path

45:10

that RA Dickey took. Tell me about

45:12

that study, Adam. Yeah,

45:14

it turned out that if you wanted

45:16

to predict which lawyers would get promoted

45:18

to partner, getting guidance from a single

45:20

mentor didn't predict.

45:24

In other words, if you had one mentor in

45:26

your court, that was not enough

45:28

to increase your odds of getting promoted to

45:30

partner. If you

45:32

wanted to get promoted to partner, you

45:35

actually wanted to have multiple

45:37

mentors guiding you. Different

45:41

mentors are going to give you

45:43

different directions. They

45:46

all have different maps. If

45:49

you even had two or three mentors, you were more

45:51

likely to make the climb to partner instead

45:54

of seeing your career stall. That seems

45:56

to be because, in part, multiple

45:59

mentors... are able to point

46:02

out different landmarks, different turns

46:04

along the path, and then you

46:07

can cobble their suggestions

46:09

together into your own map that

46:11

works for you. I

46:18

want to talk about how having a sense of

46:20

purpose can also inspire us to

46:22

accomplish great things. You

46:24

tell the story of Alison Levine, who

46:26

grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. At

46:29

an early age, she got

46:31

interested in climbing mountains, very

46:33

cold mountains, but it

46:35

didn't really look like a mountain climbing career

46:37

was really on the cards for her. Tell

46:39

me her story, Adam. Well,

46:42

Alison was born with a hole in her heart, and

46:45

she would, as a teenager, just pass out

46:47

and have to go to the emergency

46:49

room. And after a series

46:51

of surgeries, the hole was closed, and she

46:53

got the thumbs up that she could climb,

46:56

but she also had a circulatory disorder. Where

46:59

in freezing weather, basically her

47:01

arteries would stop sending blood to her

47:04

toes and fingers. She would

47:06

go numb, and her risk of frostbite

47:08

was heightened. So

47:11

in 2002, Adam, Alison's dream

47:13

comes true. She

47:16

overcomes many of the physical hurdles that she

47:18

was born with. She's named

47:20

captain of the first expedition by a group

47:23

of American women to climb Mount Everest. Tell

47:26

me what happens during the climb. It's

47:29

a very treacherous climb. There's

47:31

one part where they're stuck at the Kumbu

47:33

Icefall. So she has 2,000 vertical

47:35

feet of ice above her, and

47:40

they've got to go really fast, because

47:43

as the sun comes

47:45

out and it starts

47:47

to melt, there's a possible ice crack.

47:49

There might be an avalanche. They've got

47:51

to move quickly. And

47:55

Alison is not able to go

47:57

fast because of her physical disabilities.

48:00

There's actually a guy behind her as she's putting her

48:02

foot on the ladder who says,

48:04

you're never going to make it at this pace.

48:07

If you can't go faster, you shouldn't be here. Maybe

48:10

you should quit and go home. She

48:12

keeps going slowly. Eventually

48:15

they get past the icefall. And

48:17

not long after that, a section ends

48:19

up actually collapsing in an avalanche

48:21

and another climber almost dies. But

48:26

after almost two months, they get to

48:28

the final stretch. They're in the death zone.

48:31

That's the altitude where most

48:33

people can't actually absorb enough oxygen

48:35

to live. So they have

48:37

supplemental oxygen. But Alison, because of

48:40

her condition, has to take five

48:42

or maybe 10 breaths just

48:44

to take one step. And

48:47

so they're still moving slowly. They can see the peak

48:49

and then they run into another problem. Storm

48:52

blows in. So

48:56

they've spent two months getting to this point.

48:58

I understand at this point they're less than

49:00

300 feet from the summit and

49:03

that's when the storm blows in. Yeah. And

49:06

they've got to wait out. The winds are extremely heavy.

49:09

It's so dangerous that not only can they not

49:11

go forward, they can't even wait it out. They

49:13

have to turn around and go back down the

49:16

mountain. So they end up climbing nearly

49:18

29,000 feet, looking

49:20

at the summit and having to quit

49:22

less than 300 feet from the top. Alison

49:29

swore she was done with Everest, but

49:32

a close friend urged her not to give

49:34

up. Her friend Meg kept

49:37

telling her to try again and Alison said to

49:39

her, I'll only do it if you go with

49:41

me, but knew that Meg

49:43

couldn't do it because she'd had

49:46

lymphoma and her lungs were damaged. And

49:50

then sadly in 2009, Meg

49:53

had a lung infection and died.

49:56

And Alison wanted to try to honor her

49:58

memory. and extend

50:00

her legacy. And she

50:02

said, all right, I'm going back to

50:04

Everest. I'm going to climb it in Meg's memory.

50:09

She carved Meg's name on her ice axe. She

50:13

flew to Nepal and picked

50:16

up as part of an expedition with a bunch of

50:18

mountaineers who were complete strangers. She

50:22

ended up getting to the point where

50:25

she had had to turn around before, and she was starting

50:27

to doubt herself. And she

50:29

heard a voice behind her. It

50:32

was a guide from another expedition. His name's Mike

50:34

Horst. And he'd actually stayed behind

50:36

to give her some encouragement.

50:38

And he said, promise me you're going

50:40

to go farther than this. And

50:45

she felt like, all right,

50:47

Mike summited Everest a bunch of times. If he

50:49

thinks I can do it, I can do it.

50:52

And she keeps going, and she reaches

50:54

the top. But that's

50:57

actually not all she accomplishes there.

50:59

So she's summited the

51:01

tallest mountain on Earth. But

51:03

this is also the last step for Alison

51:05

in completing what's called the Adventurers Grand Slam,

51:07

where she's one of

51:10

a few dozen people on Earth who's not

51:12

only climbed the tallest peak on all seven

51:14

continents, but she's also skied to both

51:16

the North Pole and the South Pole. Wow.

51:21

So she's made it to the top of

51:23

Mount Everest. I mean, it's seemingly an impossible

51:25

goal, given that she had many

51:28

health conditions as a child. She

51:30

faced down obstacles in reaching this goal.

51:32

She doubted herself. Other people doubted her.

51:35

The odds were stacked against her. At one point,

51:37

she quite literally got stuck. Looking

51:40

back, she says that her proudest moment

51:42

was not reaching the summit. It

51:44

was the distance she traveled from Everest before

51:46

she got back to the spot where she

51:48

had to turn around. What

51:50

does she mean by this, Adam? Well,

51:53

I think it's so easy to think

51:55

that climbing a mountain, and this is true for any goal,

51:58

is about reaching the destination. So

52:01

she had a target of getting to the peak, and

52:04

she thinks the most meaningful thing that she could

52:06

do is get there as a climber. But

52:09

she realizes after going back to Everest

52:11

a second time that this

52:14

challenge is not about performance, it's

52:17

about progress. And

52:19

I think we misunderstand progress. Most

52:21

people think about progress as moving forward. I

52:24

think sometimes it's about bouncing back. So

52:27

it's not just the peaks you reach, it's

52:29

also the valleys you cross. And

52:32

Chunker, I've come to believe that resilience is actually

52:34

a kind of growth. That when

52:37

you run into an obstacle like Alison did,

52:39

and you have to turn around, that

52:42

progress is actually reflected in the fact that she

52:44

was able to get back on the mountain and

52:47

get right back to the place where she had to

52:49

turn around. Just

52:56

Adam Grant works at the University of

52:58

Pennsylvania. His book is

53:01

called Hidden Potential, the Science of

53:03

Achieving Greater Things. Adam,

53:05

thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Honored

53:07

to be here. I think Hidden Potential clearly

53:10

needed to be on Hidden Brain. Do

53:22

you have follow-up questions for Adam Grant about achieving

53:24

your goals? If you'd be

53:26

willing to share those questions with a

53:28

Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice

53:31

memo on your phone and email it

53:33

to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use

53:36

the subject line potential. That

53:39

email address again is ideas at

53:42

hiddenbrain.org. Hidden

53:47

Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our

53:50

audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy,

53:53

Annie Murphy-Paugh, Christian Wong,

53:55

Laura Correll, Ryan Katz,

53:57

Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick,

53:59

and and Nick Woodbury. Tara

54:01

Boyle is our executive producer. I'm

54:04

Hidden Brain's executive editor. As

54:08

we approach the final days of the year, we

54:10

wanted to say thank you for making Hidden Brain

54:12

part of your life in 2023. We

54:15

know your time is a valuable asset and

54:17

we really appreciate that you chose to spend

54:19

it with us. We're looking

54:22

forward to bringing you many more interesting

54:24

ideas and conversations in 2024. I'm

54:27

Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Support

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