there is a difference between doubting yourself and doubting your skills right you're never saying i think i'm an idiot or i think i'm completely incapable of being a good entrepreneur or a great investor or a successful content creator you're just saying i don't know if i'm there yet i think i
have work to do i have knowledge to pick up i have expertise to gain and i think what that is is basically just having confidence in yourself as a learner as opposed to as an expert or a master [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the
world thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen learn and grow now i know that we talk a lot about learning we talk a lot about growing we talk a lot about thinking differently but today we're actually talking about unlearning we're talking about all the things that
we need to reflect on and maybe rewire and renew our thoughts about because i'm speaking with the one and only adam grant an organizational psychologist at wharton who's been recognized as one of the world's 10 most influential management thinkers he's also a new york times best-selling author
who has sold millions of copies of his books on generosity driving success non-conformist moving the world and building resilience after adversity he currently writes for the new york times about work and psychology and host work life a podcast on how to make work not suck his latest book think
again is the topic of our conversation today this book seems to cover so many of today's biggest challenges and mindsets that we're all struggling with uh challenges that we're all having in our lives tell me why you thought now's the time to write think again based on obviously
all the years of study that you've done for it but why was now the right time to get people to think again i actually didn't realize it was when i started working on think again it was i think it was three years ago that i i started writing it and it just grew out of my frustration with
people who were clinging to knowledge that was no longer accurate for a world that had changed a lot or who were stuck to opinions that clearly it was time to question and maybe complicate a little bit and i felt like okay this is a great time to say i have spent my career as an organizational psychologist thinking again
right my job is to rethink how we work how we lead how we live our lives but i never really explored the process of thinking again and done a deep dive into the question of how do we update our own opinions and assumptions how do we open other people's minds and how do we build cultures of learning
so i set out to write this book and then the pandemic hits when i'm about halfway through writing it and suddenly we are all forced to rethink all these things that we've taken for granted most of our lives even something as basic as can i hung my grandparents or can i go and eat in an indoor
restaurant or will there be live sports on tv and given all the rethinking that we've had to do because of the pandemic it seemed like the right time to try to give people a general framework for how to think about it yeah asking people to think again is is quite a bold thing to do
because we feel so safe in our regurgitated pattern-oriented thoughts like i feel that even now a lot of what i hear is or when are things going to go back right i'm still hearing that and we hear things like well when are things going to be normal again and there feels like it feels like we have such a
stronghold as humans on safety security stability certainty and and this idea of things staying the same that when you say think again it's like well actually that's a lot of work like it's almost like we're scared of that so tell me about what you found and why are we so obsessed with things staying
the same and and having that same thought and where where's the root of that jay it's ironic that you're asking me this question right as a monk you specialize in helping people understand and accept impermanence so let me ask you why do you think we're so attached to our ideas and opinions
as opposed to being willing to question them look at you switching switching the interview over already getting everyone to think again how they should structure their interview questions uh never to allow for this uh from from a very monk spiritual perspective the idea would be is that we are all wired for
spontaneity for growth for ever expansion but through our education through our parenting through the conditioning of what we've experienced in this material world we've become safer or feel safer in this false safety net of stability and from a spiritual point of view the idea would be that there is
no such thing as stability there is no security everything from the cells in our body through to our minds through to every part of us in this material world is constantly changing and so the idea of holding on to something the root of that is because we feel or we've been trained to believe that
that's how you survive that's how you that's how you're happy that's how you you're scared of almost taking a risk of what may happen if i let go of this when actually when you live in a spiritually abundant life you already know that movement and growth and expansion is the only way that you feel happiness
so from a very spiritual point of view i could answer in many different ways but from a very spiritual point of view that would be seen as the root that tracks very closely with what we would say in psychology which is i first of all there's there's just a basic ego threat
that comes from admitting that your opinions have changed because that means you're saying you know what i was wrong and for a lot of people that makes them question their intelligence it makes them worry that everyone else is going to find out that they're a fraud and it it plays into imposter syndrome
and then there's also a challenge of unpredictability that if i need to change my opinions every day or every hour or even every week or month then how do i make sense of a world that is not standing still under my feet and i think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that idea and they
like to maintain a sense of control by saying look if i stick to the comfort of conviction and avoid the discomfort of doubt then i can feel like i have a grip on the world around me and then i think there's a social piece of this too which is belonging right if if i am willing to rethink some
of my views i'm putting myself at risk for being expelled from my group right i might be in some ways challenging my tribe and that sense of exclusion that risk of loneliness is obviously something that's easier to steer clear of yeah so where do you draw the line between thinking again and being
stable and feeling like you're in a safe space like how do you how do you kind of draw that line because i feel like from your studies i'm sure you found places where it was good to not think again or or you know good to not question and almost sometimes over questioning leads to overthinking and
over analyzing and procrastination tell us about that boundary yeah i think it's very tricky it's probably a tightrope walk for a lot of people but my reading the evidence is that when people start to make their opinions their identity they get in trouble so you believe a bunch of things and you
say well that's who i am and i just i would love for people to imagine rewinding the clock half a century or a century or more and say okay if you made your opinions or your beliefs your identity and let's say you're a teacher you might have seen yourself as a corporal punisher right whose job it is
to discipline students or if you were a doctor you would have said all right i'm a professional lobotomist and what i do is i you know i solve all kinds of medical problems by taking out part of the frontal lobe or if you're a police officer you might have seen yourself more recently as a
stop and frisker and the problem with all these identities is they're attached to policies and practices that we now know are counterproductive i think what we want is to build our identities around our values and that's where we're looking for a little bit more stability and crowdedness
so i want to go to the doctor who says my values are around protecting and promoting health and i'm open to rethinking what are the best procedures to do that right i want to go to the police officer who says i'm here to promote justice and safety and i'm not sure what the best ways to
do that are but i'm going to look at the data and i definitely want to send my kids to the teacher who says i'm here to help kids learn first and foremost and i'm not going to commit to any one way of doing that and i i don't know that we should always freeze our values right i think they should evolve too but
it's a lot easier for me to say my core values are generosity excellence integrity and freedom and i'm going to be pretty flexible about learning the most effective ways to live by those values what do you think about that i think that's such a great distinction i i've never heard it put that way but i
really appreciate that for me that's been really clarifying about how your values as you said they don't need to be frozen they can they can evolve as well but the idea is that you have a set of values but you're flexible and adaptable about how they come to life at different times in your life and and
i often say to people like i love the books that i studied uh living as a monk and and i got so much value from them and i obviously share them but i'm always open to discovering something some new spiritual truth that i'm not accustomed to or aware of when i'm speaking to someone because
i just want to be a seeker of the truth and and i think that allows me to have this very uh deep affinity for the work that i've done but not a sentimental attachment to them if that makes sense and i think that's what i was getting from you is that often we create this sentimental attachment
to our beliefs because we feel they define us as opposed to feeling well i have this very strong loyalty but i'm still able to peruse and and search and discover i i think you nailed it attachment is such a barrier for so many people to rethinking opinions and ideas that are
no longer serving them well and this this isn't just true with the things we believe about the world right it's also true for the plans that we make so you mentioned a lot of people are asking when are we going back and obviously i think you and i would both say well actually let's just try to move forward
yes but it's so common for people to to get attached to early images that they formed of how they wanted to live their lives and who they wanted to be right anybody who ever was asked the question as a kid what do you want to be when you grow up and had an answer like well i'm going to be a lawyer or i'm going to be a doctor
and then 20 or 30 years later still locked into that plan never really questioning does that make sense for me there's a there's a term in psychology for that it's called identity foreclosure and it's the idea of sort of seizing and freezing too early on a sense of who you want to be before
you've really explored alternatives and i think the danger of that is what you want what you value what you're looking for in life is going to evolve over time and i think we need our identities to evolve with that yeah absolutely i couldn't agree more and i and i guess people struggle with thinking again
because we're almost like where do we start like what what value do you start on what part of your life do you start on in in your studies where did you find a good place to start thinking again like because i feel like you're opening up like a can of worms of like childhood trauma
you know it's like people people don't know where to start so where did you start yeah i i honestly don't know the answer to that question because i think it's going to be a little different for everyone but let's just let's continue on the the plan path for a second and say okay
a lot of people have career regrets right they they started down a path and then they they fell victim to escalation of commitment to a losing course of action which is where you you invest time and energy and money in in a path and then you discover you know what this isn't quite what i wanted
it to be and instead of cutting your losses you double down economists will say that's because of sunk costs right you don't want to admit that you've wasted all that time and money but the psychological factors are even more important ego and image i don't want to look in the mirror and
admit to myself that i made a stupid decision and i want to prove to everybody else that i made a smart one and so i get caught in this self-justification spiral where i'm rationalizing my past choices as opposed to rethinking them and what i've advised my students to do for years is to say look you know what
you go to the doctor or the dentist when you're healthy a couple times a year just for a checkup maybe we should have career checkups put a reminder on your calendar twice a year to ask yourself have i reached a learning plateau in my job or a lifestyle plateau for that matter have i learned something new
about what my strengths are or my values are and is it possible that this culture is no longer serving those and i think having that kind of checkpoint is a great way to keep yourself honest and make sure that you do some rethinking about what your plans are and i don't think it has to be limited to
career right i think we could do occasional marriage checkups we could do all kinds of life decision checkups i think a lot of people have done this during the pandemic saying wait a minute where in the world do i want to live i don't need to be tethered to the city that i've been for the last eight years
that's such a practical uh piece of advice and and i love that one and we're almost scared of asking that i want to talk to you a bit about that fear of addressing that because we're scared of asking that question because of the idea of what if i hate my job and then now
from tomorrow i know i hate my job and then i'm just going to be depressed or if i ask that question about my partner then maybe we need to get a divorce or maybe we need to break up how do we curb our fear of even asking that question and thinking again because that seems to be
one of the biggest blocks to even getting to that point of doing that checkup i think a lot of this is about regret in the long run the decisions that we tend to regret are not our actions they're our inactions they're the chances that we didn't take and i think in a lot of cases right rebooting your career or
rethinking a relationship is scary you know it's even scarier never even considering that possibility in the first place and so look i think everybody's afraid of taking a risk or failing at some level what we want to do is remember that we should be even more afraid of failing to try
um yeah i i think regrets is is such a big one uh that i that i've often thought about a lot and has helped me so much in my life i remember even even before i started creating content it was i i remember asking myself would i regret not trying because obviously when you start something i'm sure you felt this
when you started studying or when you became an author for the first time it's almost like will i regret not trying because you don't know if it's going to work and and you're so right that now i look back and i think wow i would have had massive regrets not because you know where things can go but
to be in that same place again and again and again and again and again and and i think that's what we don't remember is that we're always worried about what if the next step doesn't work out not realizing that this step around right now isn't feeling great either i think there's so much wisdom in that and
a funny place that you can see it is with students who are taking tests yeah where you you see that students are really reluctant once they've come up with an answer to change their response even though the data show that on average if you're you're willing to override your first instinct
you actually improve your score and hilariously when we tell students this they still are reluctant to rethink their answers and i think regret is a huge factor here because imagine the pain of saying i had the right answer and i undid it yeah as opposed to if i just stick to my gut
and i don't rethink it well it doesn't seem like i was ever going gonna get it right in the first place and i think if we're not careful that can obviously steer us in the wrong direction that's crazy that even when you tell people students in that example that they still don't change like
why why is it that how many times do we have to hear something to know that it works out have you figured this out like like what do we need what is needed to genuinely change like what is needed to genuinely think again and and act on that thinking i think probably the most relevant date i've seen is
uh from studies of leaders introducing organizational changes and trying to bring a new vision into a team or into a company and on average in the classic data leaders under communicated their visions by a multiple of eight eight times less often than people needed to hear the vision they explained it and i think a lot of
that is because once you come up with the vision it makes perfect sense to you it's crystal clear in your head right you've spent days or weeks or months or maybe years thinking through this and so the first time you say it you assume everyone else gets it but obviously they don't the first time
you explain it and i don't know for any person whether that multiple is under communicating by 3 or 17 but i think on average we we probably underdo it for the most part and what i often tell leaders is the moment you'll know that you've really gotten through to people is when they say okay
enough already i get it i'm tired of hearing it and that's when you know you've you've really gotten your point across yeah it's almost like you don't know [Music] every time you feel you've oversaid it you haven't until that person thinks you've oversaid it until i i guess until you feel your
team or your partner can complete your sentence right it's almost it's almost like looking at google like google can auto complete because it knows what most of us are asking all of the time and the idea that if i was going to say something and you could complete my sentence chances are i've said it
way too much it's like it's like that feeling of when your friend or your partner says something like yeah you've told me that story like 72 times like i know exactly what you're i know exactly what your mom does in that scenario whatever it may be uh that that's a good checking system i
like that i really like that i think i think i undervalue that too you we assume everyone thinks like us we do and i would say the most the most powerful form of persuasion is self-persuasion and that means that instead of having to repeat your vision over and over again you explain it once or twice
and then you ask people to articulate it in their own words and what they often think they're doing is is trying to get other people fired up about it but really what they're doing is they're internalizing it and convincing themselves that this is a good idea yeah absolutely you you mentioned in your
book that people tend to slip into three well there's there's a few but there's one more but the mindsets of three different professions when they think and talk and i love this i really really like this she said preacher politician and prosecutor tell us a bit about those and give us
some examples of those so that we can understand and everyone who's listening and watching what i want you to do is reflect on when you fall into one of these because we all fall into them at different times in our life so if you're listening right now or watching please reflect on as adam's guiding us through when in
your life you do one of these things so adam such a fun direction to go i i'm i hardly even know where to start in part because when i think about my life as an organizational psychologist it is incredibly peculiar to me that although i've never worked as a preacher a prosecutor or a politician
somehow all of those occupations managed to waltz into my mind during my daily life and i think that's true for all of us so the the original idea comes from a brilliant paper that my colleague phil tatlock wrote and the idea is that we are social creatures right that we're very concerned with
our standing in the world and what other people think of us and that a lot of times a lot of the time we think we're making rational decisions we're actually paying a ton of attention to where we fit into a social hierarchy when we're in preacher mode we believe that we have found the truth
and our job is to go out and proselytize our sacred sacred beliefs and get other people on board with them prosecutor mode is sort of the reverse that's about saying you know what i've got to win an argument you are wrong and then politician mode is essentially campaigning for the approval of an
audience right trying to lobby to get a tribe on board with what whatever you think they want to hear or trying to earn their admiration in some way and i think the the thing that i worry most about is if you're in preacher prosecutor mode you don't do enough rethinking because you already believe you're right
and everyone else is wrong so why would you ever change your mind and in politician mode we see more flexibility but it kind of looks like flip-flopping right i don't i don't really believe what i'm saying i'm just trying to appease my audience and cater to what they want to hear
and so you know it looks like i'm i'm rethinking at the wrong times and maybe for the wrong reasons jay i'm curious if these three modes which one is your biggest advice which one is my biggest vice it would it would definitely ha for years i would say it's the preacher one for sure like i think i think for
years uh and and i find that especially when you're in an early stage formative stage of a set of beliefs preach is very natural so i remember when i first uh started getting involved in spiritual teachings it was like i was preaching to my parents i'm like preaching to all my
friends and you're like here's how you should have raised me yeah exactly and you like push everyone in your life away from you because you think you've figured it out and you forget that this person has a bit more age they have a bit more maturity they have there's things that come and come with
life and time and experience and so i think for long parts of my life especially in early stages of anything i think i've naturally shifted into that and then slowly tried to move away from that as much as i can hopefully into the fourth mindset which we'll talk about but yes in answer to your question
i'd say my biggest advice has definitely been the preacher mode that's so interesting it it i i've thought about this over the years and whenever i encounter somebody who i think is is pretty frequently in preacher mode i just think okay you know what highly effective for appealing to their existing
followers right because there's a group of people who are already drinking that kool-aid and it's very inspiring and it gives you a sense that you've you've found some kind of enlightenment but to everybody else like why are you trying to force feed me your wisdom right i didn't sign up for
this back off and so i think the more resistant or skeptical an audience is the more likely that preaching is to backfire yes i i couldn't agree with you more and i think that's that's where i started to realize and it was it was more so it was luckily i i feel like i caught it early where i was just
like well actually i i only want to you know i just want to discover more and hence the podcast has been phenomenal for that because i'm sitting with people who can share ideas and insights that may be different to what i've grown up with or challenging sometimes and sometimes even
sparking debate in a positive sense and so i i think that's why sitting down with people from different i mean me and you didn't grow up in the same area we didn't grow up around the same group of people and we we don't even stay in fascinated in necessarily the same types of thought on a daily
basis and therefore this conversation allows me to do that and and that's why i think the podcast or the idea of sitting down with someone is so powerful it is even though one of us is having a very bad hair life or a great one or a great one you know or a great one so um but the fourth mindset which you say
is almost like the best mindset to be in or one that you encourage uh is the mindset of the scientist uh tell us about how we shouldn't just look at that as like oh i have to be like a scientist but what that mindset actually means yeah i'm not suggesting that anybody has
to go and become einstein or bill nye the science guy right the thought is you don't have to work in a lab you don't have to wear a white coat or carry around test tubes i think about being a scientist as as a way of seeing the world and the way of navigating your life i think that what scientists value
is truth right trying to get closer to truth even if if they might never really find it and that means whatever opinions they form are tentative right they're they're hunches they might be hypotheses and what i need to do as a scientist is when i have a an idea i want to go out in the world and explore
whether it's true and better yet when it's true that means i might run some little experiments i might do observations i might interview people right if i were going to go into sort of anthropologist mode and the hope is that i'm going to discover sometimes that i was wrong and i'm going to discover information
that challenges my beliefs not just that affirms my beliefs and after all i think that's what learning is about jay right evolving our beliefs not just validating what we already think is true and i i'm actually starting to rethink this a little bit because uh i think the the data the data are
really compelling so you know there's there's an incredible experiment with italian founders where some of them are randomly assigned these are these are entrepreneurs who are pre-revenue and there's a control group who basically takes a couple month entrepreneurship course
and then there's another group that gets the same education in how to start a business only they're taught to think like scientists and this is a little bit foreign for business people right but they're they're encouraged to just say look you know what your your strategy that's just a theory
about a future state of the world and how your company can succeed in it your customer interviews those are ways to develop hypotheses about where your theory would be successful and then you build a minimum viable product that is an experiment to run and then what data do you need to find out if
your experiment worked or didn't so the control group over the next year makes less than 300 us dollars in revenue on average per startup the scientist group makes over 12 000 us dollars in that year on average per startup it's a staggering effect yeah driven by the fact that the the
scientists are more willing to pivot that when they're encouraged to think like scientists they say you know what my my strategy might have been bad my hypotheses might have been wrong i'm willing to change gears and so i stopped there and said wow if we can teach business people to think more like scientists if we can
teach entrepreneurs to be a little bit more disciplined that way and experimental in their approach that's actually good for their success and growth and i was excited there but i have a hunch that you know why i'm rethinking this now what what do you think is is maybe missing from this
perspective that's interesting i i wasn't thinking along those lines i was i was agreeing with you and now that you're asking me that question yeah yeah i was agreeing with you i i felt i felt like that makes a lot of sense um what's missing from that interesting uh i'd love to reflect on that for a
moment give me a second let me let me think yeah let me think about what do i think's missing from that i was in agreement with you because i found in my life and and even as a you know even as simply as a content creator which isn't what i am as a total but if i look at that part
of my life that rule holds so true is that if you just say oh i only want to make this and i'm going to put it out people may never watch it or connect it or communicate with it engage with it so what is missing i wonder whether the the missing layer is the idea of and and i could be totally
wrong the only the only thing i can think of is the idea of discovery and then commitment like when when do you actually finally commit rather than continually testing testing testings testing and that could just go on forever that's the only thing that came to mind and that may be way off but but that's
what came to mind that that's one of the couple things that have been on my list right now i guess one of two to be more specific so yeah i think there's there's a risk that if you're a scientist you're always rethinking you're always questioning you never believe that you found the truth you've just
you ruled out a bunch of hypotheses that were wrong but you know you only have a model and it's just an approximation of reality i think the best antidote that i've come across to that is something that bob sutton has said for years which is in his view an attitude of wisdom
is acting on the best information you have while constantly doubting what you know yeah and i think a good scientist probably does that the other thing that that i i've been questioning a little bit is is is the scientist mindset pushing people too much toward sort of formal quantitative inquiry right saying
you can only arrive at knowledge through rigorous a b testing and i think you're you're such a great person to you know to toss this around with because i think if i were to broaden maybe what i really mean is you want to be in the mindset of a scholar right somebody who has the humility and the curiosity
to know what they don't know and always be searching for new insights and of course science is one of the tools to do that but as you've discovered in your life there are also more spiritual paths to that kind of inquiry right and so i wonder what your take is on the scientist versus the scholar
i try and approach my life and and i haven't used these terms before it's how i see myself but in the way you're discussing it of like a spiritual scientist and what i mean by that is i feel like to get things done you have to have the scientific approach but i love looking at insight with
intuition or like data with the dynamic nature of spirituality and i love trying to find that almost like the middle of the venn diagram of where that collides because that's where i find like real creativity is found that's where i find like energies created it's almost like i never feel satisfied
if i'm only seeking internally if i don't test that externally or if we're just testing loads of stuff accidentally but it's not inspired from within and so to me i love the juxtaposition of of both of those elements like the scholar and the scientist and as you said because i feel like too many of us
and this is part of thinking again too many of us are trying to be just one thing and and i often get the feedback of like jay you used to be a monk how can you be in media now like how can you be on social media yeah it usually goes the other direction right yeah exactly and and i just opened my heart and i'm
honest i'm literally just experimenting with what feels right to me like i it felt right to me but to become a monk when i was 22. and i'm 33 now and at this age it feels really right to be doing what i'm doing now and i'm allowing myself to grow and evolve and not have a simplified identity and so i feel that
the scholar and the scientist together or the spiritual scientists together can be a really fascinating place for people to live that venn diagram is such an exciting thing when you're able to see the overlap uh there's actually an example that jumped out at me when i was writing think again
we had a doctoral student danielle tussing who is now a professor at suny buffalo and danielle decided she was going to rethink the importance of ambition and leadership and she said you know i wonder if there's something to being a little bit reluctant as a leader to having some hesitations about
taking the helm you might be concerned about the implications for work-life balance you might be daunted by the responsibility and worried about being racked with guilt you might just be concerned that you're not qualified and she ended up it was it was hard to study this because there aren't that
many people who rise to leadership roles that said no i don't want it keep me out of here no thank you but she ended up studying charged nurses in hospitals who get rotated and whether they seek the leadership role or not uh on every every so well a certain number of shifts will go by and then it's
basically your turn and so she was able to measure how reluctant they felt about leading and she found that a little bit of reluctance actually predicted higher leadership effectiveness as rated by the the people they worked with and that was in part because the reluctant leaders were more willing to
empower the people around them they were less likely to assume i know all the answers they were more likely to seek out second opinions and i thought this was such a cool finding and then we were talking about this and we started thinking through okay where else has this idea appeared and it
turns out that plato had this insight right so ancient greek wisdom was you know what the person that we want to elect to a leadership role is the one who was very hesitant to be in charge and then douglas adams wrote about it in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy right that the only person we should
want as a president is the one who had no interest in doing the job and that's that's one of those moments where the venn diagram comes together and you say okay if one of the great ancient greek philosophers one of the great modern british sci-fi writers and empirical evidence are converging
there might be something here yeah yeah i love those examples i'm so glad you shared those uh because that is it's such a refreshing way of thinking i think we always believe that the person who should get it is the person who puts themselves forward the person who's confident about it it's you know it has
that kind of self-belief that they were meant to be that person and i'm guessing there's truth in that too sometimes the the best athletes in the field are people who believe that they were going to be the best athletes of all time but at the same time when you look at leadership and business and
even spiritual traditions i mean that's very true of that's very true of monk culture and and looking at spiritual rankings that the person who went on to be the the master the master teacher would rarely be the person who thought they were the master teacher it would always be
almost like humility was the the key to the door of of that person not feeling they were worthy allowed them to be the best and caring leader wow we could use a lot more of that humility in the world right now i think a lot of people write it off and they misunderstand humility as having low self-esteem
or having just a low opinion of yourself and if you go back to the latin root of humility it's actually being grounded it means from the earth right and so humility is about recognizing hey we're all human we're fallible we're flawed we have limitations and weaknesses and i think if you see it that way it
becomes a source of strength because if you can see your weaknesses more clearly then you can figure out how to overcome them what we reward we repeat and so we're seeing people always rewarded for not being vulnerable or not being honest and transparent and you know i remember looking at some you
know basic studies on uh how men and women approach um job specifications and job descriptions and it was showing how women look at a job description be like oh i can only do 25 of that and whereas a man would look and be like oh i can do over 50 of that and so it's like they feel
confident based on what they can do whereas a woman may not and so what i was finding fascinating about that the overamplification in one's beliefs is almost rewarded in a job interview uh how do you start to reconstruct that foreign and even me as an employer and you work with some of the biggest
employers in the on the planet how do you reconstruct that in a healthy way so that it's you are hiring the right person eventually because there's there's a bit of that there's a bit of a dichotomy there there is i i think the place i would start is to say we've got to stop confusing confidence
for competence right the fact that somebody believes they can do something is not a good proxy for their actual ability to do it and in fact you're familiar with the dunning-kruger effect in psychology the finding is that the people who have the lowest emotional intelligence scores
and also the poorest logiological reasoning abilities are the most likely to overestimate their abilities and you could just say okay some of that's ego but some of it is also if you have no idea what emotional intelligence looks like then it's really hard for you to judge whether you have it or not
right and the same thing is true for logical reasoning skills and i think in a job interview context the place i like to start is to ask people to to demonstrate what they're bringing to the table right i'll give them a try out i'll let them do a little bit of an experiment
to show me their skills i also though have started betting on people who underestimate themselves a little bit there was uh there was a great study at google a few years back of engineers and this this speaks to the gender differences you were just highlighting it turned out that when you looked at
self ratings of of how great you are as an engineer on a one to five scale in order for women to make it at google they had to give themselves a five they had to have this unassailable confidence to say look i know i'm one of the best engineers in the world otherwise they were just constantly
feeling discouraged and probably facing more gender bias than than anybody should the most successful male engineers gave themselves a four not a five the fives were arrogant like i'm the best and they closed their minds to learning and i think i think the fours were like the experts that you and i would both
admire they didn't boast about how much they knew they were constantly marveling at how much more they had to learn and i i would love to live in a world where everybody who self rates as a four is more successful and i think we have a lot of work to do there to to remove some of those barriers that
women face absolutely and i'm really glad you shared that with me in a small way i i found even with my own teams we always did a self-assessment and then uh a manager assessment of of the individual and i always found that i always rated people higher the people that i rated higher and they rated
themselves lower were always my top performers so i actually saw them as better than they saw themselves and and that was such a beautiful thing where i'm like well i think your score is like 45 out of 50 and they're like i see myself as like a 38 and i'm like what like that's amazing
you're hired yeah and and then the opposite was true also where i saw people as like a 38 or a 35 and they saw themselves as a 50 and i was just like okay well this there's something wrong here and and you're so right about that we could probably add a few other explanations to that puzzle
one is angela duckworth has shown with grit that the grittiest people often rate themselves more in the four range than the five range because they have much higher standards for what counts as having real passion and perseverance and they never feel like they've made it yeah and then another factor is we had
another student besima who's now an mit professor and she studied how often people have impostor thoughts feeling like you know other people might find out that i'm a fraud that i'm not as good as you know as they think i am that i don't deserve my successes and a lot of people see if you had incr
chronic imposter syndrome they see that as debilitating and it can be if you're just plagued by those doubts but the more ordinary imposter thoughts that we all feel occasionally you know gee i wonder if i'm good enough or i wonder if i've lost it and i'm no longer at my peak people who
had those thoughts more often actually were motivated to perform better they didn't get complacent they didn't fall victim to what's often called a fat cat syndrome they said you know what i might not be that good i've got to work that much harder i've got to learn that much more in order to make it
and that's why i know you talk about this that imposter syndrome actually has some benefits like it can actually be used and i feel like now when we feel impostor syndrome we often think of like i don't want to feel that way anymore someone i'd love for you to talk a bit more about more of the benefits of
imposter syndrome i think that could really benefit our community because that's been a really hot topic an important topic for us i know for me imposter syndrome has always showed me my skills gap so so i've never seen imposter syndrome as a identity issue or uh issue of like my self-confidence
or esteem it showed me a skills gap so if i feel i don't know how to it was it was the first time i think i sat at a table with investors or whatever it was and i was like oh i've never invested i don't know what this means like you know and all of a sudden you feel this sense of imposter syndrome
and and i realized it was just a skills gap every time and i love using it as a signal of asking myself is that a skill i want to learn and sometimes it's like no i don't care and sometimes it's like yeah i'd love to learn that so tell us a bit more about the benefits of imposter syndrome
i think you just framed that so beautifully and i think it probably calls to mind a caveat before we go into how did how to build on that which is the response you're describing besema finds is more common for men than women when men experience those imposter thoughts we've had the often the luxury of going
through our lives with other people assuming that we were competent right so people hear you speak and they hear how eloquent you are and they say you know what this guy clearly knows what he's doing and so it doesn't end up really crushing your motivation when you question yourself whereas i
think in a lot of places women you know especially if they've been raised in a male dominated world or a less egalitarian or more paternalistic culture are more likely to to have these ongoing fears about well am i worthy do people really think i can make it and they haven't had these constant
jolts of confidence that that maybe even were unearned in a lot of cases and so it's that response is rarer among women than men but we see it across the board with all genders and i think the the starting point is to say look there is a difference between doubting yourself
and doubting your skills and that's why i love how you described your skills gap right you're never saying i think i'm an idiot or i think i'm completely incapable of being a good entrepreneur or a great investor or a successful content creator you're just saying i don't know if i'm there yet i think i
have work to do i have knowledge to pick up i have expertise to gain and i think what that is is basically just having confidence in yourself as a learner as opposed to as an expert or a master i love what you just said the idea of having confidence in yourself as a learner and you develop that when you learn how
to learn things like it's almost like that feeling of like i know that if i wanted to i could learn this how do we develop the ability to learn because i and unlearn of course is part of that because i feel like that's what's missing we did we don't believe that even if we had the
time and even if we made the effort that we'd quite get there because we've never been taught how to learn we've never been taught how to pick something up and roll with it uh where do you start in that process well in the growth mindset research there's a simple exercise that really seems to help
people and it's one that i've used in some of my own experiments and been surprised by how effective it is what you ask people to do is just reflect on a time when they started out terrible at something and then got halfway decent or even good and you say look you know what you've been learning your whole life whether
you realize it or not and if you analyze some of your own moments of progress and improvement you're probably going to pick up patterns and so in some cases what people notice then is okay i learned through observation and you know i was i had a role model that i was able to watch closely or
i found the right videos on youtube and i was able to pick this up other people will say you know what those the pattern behind my moments of growth is i had a coach who was in my corner and who saw more potential in me than i saw on myself and so now i need to find that person to to raise my aspirations
and then for other people it's as simple as saying you know what when i learned best when i was most motivated to grow was when i i had a curiosity gap i really wanted to understand something and it almost hurt i wanted to scratch that itch so badly and i couldn't stop myself from then
going and digging deeply into that phenomenon and i think there's obviously there are dozens and probably hundreds and thousands of possible stories that come out that way but i think reflecting on your own moments of learning is probably the best way to figure out where your confidence in learning should
come from yeah for sure because it could go back is i i remember like if someone asked me what was the first time i felt like i was learning something i was probably in grade four i had the best teacher of all time i'll never for his name was mr foxwell and i'll never
forget him because it was he just made learning so fun and i was probably like what i don't know eight nine years old maybe and so you know super young and not necessarily thinking about being a learner or thinking i'd be sitting talking to you about learning but i remember that really strongly and i
remember it was being with someone who made learning so infectious and now if i think back to anything that i've learned in my life coaching has been the number one part of it like being around someone who is energy is contagious and infectious because they love this thing so much whatever it may
be and i think that's what it's been i haven't just been around experts i've been people who re i've been around lucky to be around people who love what they did and were very compassionate with it and i think those two qualities are so beautiful because when you learn just from an expert it's
different from learning from a compassionate expert like that has some very special pass-ons i feel so there's a classic study by benjamin bloom where he looked at people who had been a lead across a lot of different fields he looked at olympic swimmers world-class tennis players
scientists musicians chess players and he wanted to know what in their upbringing was common and he found that they were rarely the most talented in even even in their city when they were in you know when they were 12 13 years old but one of the distinguishing factors that set them apart from their peers
was they had a first teacher or a first coach who made learning fun which is exactly what you're getting at where you know all the deliberate practice all the hard work that a lot of people would say you know what it's a grind it's not going to be pleasant they they actually learned to experience that as
rewarding and that motivated them to keep going and it sounds like you had that experience too i'm curious what did what did mr foxwell do that made learning so fun i think he was one of the first people that that introduced a lot of games at school as part of the learning
process so i can't remember what we're learning in grade four but the idea of everything was gamified i didn't know what that word was then but it was it was this opportunity where everything was uh everything was play i think that was a big part of it he was also extremely animated and charismatic and he would
he was providing a lot of energy in what he was sharing and teaching uh and and i'd say at the same time he was able to change the classroom he was one of the first teachers we had that would and this is you know i'm talking about if we're talking about like 25 years ago he was taking classrooms outdoors
he was you know taking the class in the playground he was taking on the lawn he wasn't trying to keep us cooped up in this uh in this building and so i felt like he was he was quite a visionary for you know a small class in a small suburb in london like he was he was really taking risks and
trying new things i guess he sounds a lot like this incredible teacher that i got to know while i was working on think again ron berger uh ron of of all the teachers i've met since since i finished school he's probably the person i most regret not getting to be in a classroom with
uh he for years taught in rural massachusetts uh in a tiny town where today his uh his nurse and his firefighter and his plumber are all his former students and ron was interested in teaching students an ethic of excellence and he's sort of a he's a do it yourself kind of guy he's very crafty
and he decided that he was going to do exactly what mr foxwell did which was he would take students out into the world to learn and so when they were trying to learn about about gas and radon they actually went and did measurements in local communities when they were trying to understand scientific
classification and taxonomies of animals he had the students come up with their own taxonomies and you know some people sorted animals by size others did it by whether they had sharp teeth others did it by color or habitat and they realized oh they're all these interesting choices that scientists make and
those are always open to being rethought my favorite round burger practice is teaching students to recognize that rethinking and revising your work is actually an enjoyable opportunity as opposed to a chore and what he would do is he would send first graders even off to draw a house
and then instead of saying draw a house he says we're gonna do four different versions of a house and they they accept that their first draft is just a work in progress and a lot of people told him don't do this because you're gonna you're gonna leave students frustrated they're gonna get discouraged very
easily how many first graders want to do the same drawing four times and he said you have no idea after they do the first draft they can see problems in their drawings and they are so excited to rethink them and refine them and his students will often then after that experience insist on doing seven or eight different
drafts before they turn something in and i was just blown away by this and i i had our kids try it and our uh our nine-year-old daughter and our six-year-old son were working on some art and i said okay you know what you can draw whatever you want and then we're gonna try a second and a third
and they just lit up and then the next day they said i'm gonna do a few different drafts and i don't want you to frame the first one and i think teaching that joy of rethinking is something we should all be lucky to be part of yeah because the truth is most of us get it right
on after a couple of goes anyway and the idea that you had to get it right the first time is actually what's that's actually what's created this whole issue is we've been trained to believe you had to get it right the first time and that was the only way that you got the reward and then you got the mark and
you're reminding me actually of of my art teacher so i loved art at uh at high school and i was always very good at graphic design and and digital and digital art or uh collages as opposed to fine art i'm i can i'm terrible at painting uh but but i i had that and my teacher would always always ask me
why i did that like why i put that color next to that color or why i put this image next to this image and if i couldn't explain to him coherently why i did that he wouldn't want to grade that piece so he wouldn't give me a bad grade he would just delay the grade until i could explain to him or come up
with a real reason for why it was done and it's so fascinating that when i think about where did i develop the mindset to act intentionally it all came from him saying to me why did you do that why did you do that why did you do that and the idea of having to explain it and rethink why i did it
was the only way that he was satisfied as opposed to how it looked or how it appeared that's very powerful and i i'm wondering if part of what happens then is you know he's going to ask you and so you actually think through your choices up front the next time yeah and then he would still do it he
would ask about he would ask about a part that i would and it would annoy me like i would be really frustrated because someone else in the class would get a good grade and you know mine would be delayed grading and whatever and i'd be like well mine looks better and you know you'd have all those thoughts
and he was he would just keep challenging me and i think that was such a it was such an important important piece of teaching that i you know that that has stayed with me for so long but i wanted to move forward in a few other topics that you talk about in the book one of the big ones you talk about is
uh charged conflicted debate level conversations and these exist in the workplace they exist at home when i think about this i think about relationships and marriage and in families where we constantly argue and i think that's one of the places where we do the least unlearning because we have such strong
views about our family and our upbringing versus our partners or other people in our family that it's so hard to let go of it tell us a bit about what you learned about these about depolarizing a charged conversation or a debate where you just keep arguing the same point every week
which is very common yeah this uh this i feel like this is happening everywhere now and the world has just gotten more polarized uh one of one of the funnier studies i came across uh during the research for the book was that a third of women said that their pets were better listeners than their partners
that's brilliant i mean i guess all your pet can really do is listen so maybe i don't know our cat has an advantage right because she can't talk back but i think we talk a lot about the importance of listening i don't think that we actually really build skills in how to do it well my favorite
my favorite approach to listening that i i came across is this idea called motivational interviewing comes out of counseling psychology and the premise is that it's very hard to change somebody else's mind but it's more likely that you could help them find their own motivation
to change their mind and what that means is let's say you know you've got an uncle who you think has a really hateful set of beliefs instead of telling him here's what you should believe and prosecuting him for being wrong and preaching about why you're right what you should do is say you know i i
was really interested in how you landed at this set of views and i was curious about you know what the pros are of having that viewpoint if you've ever experienced any negative consequences of that and can you just walk me through that because i i actually don't understand your perspective that well
and then you listen and what most people do when they're asked to talk about the pros and cons of some stance they have is they'll give you a little bit of both and then your job is to hold up a mirror and help them see that they might be a little more ambivalent than they thought that there's more
nuance in their own views than they saw before and then you might just elaborate on there are two kinds of talk that you hear here um this one is called sustain talk which is basically a bunch of reasons why they would they would stick with the status quo change talk is here are some rationales for my
why i might want to make a shift in my beliefs or my behaviors and when you hear change talk the recommendation is not to manipulate people not to try to influence them but to say you know it actually sounds like you've you've considered revisiting this view i was curious you know what do you think
would be the consequences of of making a shift and what if you wanted to do that what might your plan look like and i've tried this in a bunch of conversations recently and it is shocking how much less friction it creates and how much more openness not only the other person brings
but how much openness it creates in me because i'm not here to give you answers i am here to learn from you and i guess that's part of the scientists or scholar mindset in action yeah yeah i i i i completely value that because i feel that that's what where you become a mediator in your own conversation
yes and and you become an observer in your own conversation of rather than looking at it as like this is my ego versus this person's ego and and you talk a bit about i wanted you to mention this because i love this uh you talk a bit about how it's better to bring up only one or two reasons for
your viewpoint in a debate rather than providing a lot of reasons tell us about that because we often think like we have to reel off 10 reasons why this person's wrong but actually you're telling us to limit that tell us a bit about that yeah i'm tempted to pile on too many
studies to support this point which i'll try to avoid but i will say uh studies of expert negotiators compared to average negotiators show that the experts use fewer reasons on average because they're afraid of deluding their argument and they know look jay if i give you nine reasons why
my proposal is fair and compelling and you don't like it then you're just gonna pick the least compelling reason and ignore the other eight i just give you my one or two strongest reasons you're a lot more likely than to take them seriously and i think the number of reasons obviously matters there's also the
question of how the reasons fit together and i'd done an experiment at a university a while back where we were trying to get non-donors who'd never given a cent in their lives to their alma mater to think about making a small gift and we sent them letters and the big test was is it better to appeal to the
more egoistic or the more altruistic reasons for giving so some people are told look alumni say giving feels good others are told alumni really appreciate the opportunity to do good through giving and we found that both reasons were equally effective we were able to get over over six
percent of alums who had never given often in 30 40 50 years to write a check which was exciting then we said all right two reasons are better than one let's put them together and the giving rate dropped in half wow there was a little bit of a conflict between hey this is going to make you feel good
and hey this is going to do good and help a lot of people and when we gave these conflicting or sort of mixed reasons people were more likely to realize that a persuasive attempt was happening and they put their guard up and they said wait a minute you can't influence me and i think that that just strengthens
the case to say look you want to be careful not to dilute your argument you also want to make sure there's some clarity and consistency in the perspective you're bringing to the table i love that and and i would say that for anyone who's listening or watching that's a great takeaway
because i feel like when we're trying to create change we try and give way too many reasons and way too many ideas and options and and actually when you really believe something's an issue and there's a challenge and you just speak about it with passion and empathy and you focus in the other person actually gets more
clarity so i often find like when you're talking to someone the reason it's hard for them to listen is because you're making it harder for them to listen by by speaking about far too many things when actually most of our minds can't focus on more than three things i guess that
bringing up any more than the two or three you suggested just goes over people's heads and they don't actually understand what you're trying to say yeah it's it's amazing how many times i have to relearn that you cannot bully people into agreeing with you they'll either fight or they'll choose flight and i think
if if you've if you have to watch out for preacher mode my my biggest challenge is prosecutor mode i think that there's just there's something about my personality my values and also my training as a social scientist that says if somebody believes something that's inconsistent with rigorous
evidence i feel like it's my responsibility to try to correct their view yeah and i can't remember the last time that went well yeah yeah absolutely well that's why those those three the preacher the prosecutor and the politician are such great reminders uh anytime we feel we've got one of
those hats on we can we can politely take it off and and go back to being the scientist and and that's the one that gives you so much joy in the long term you learn more about your partner you learn more about your colleagues you you learn more about and when you learn more about someone you know how to
approach them every time and whereas when you don't learn about them you approach them in the same way every time and you get the same result i think there's there's so much truth to that and in fact i've i've seen it recently in that i've started telling people that you
know i've i've increasingly noticed myself this is a great example of self-persuasion right i wrote a whole book about how we need to watch out for slipping into these other mindsets and i have a habit of going into prosecutor mode when i'm exploring ideas and if somebody believes one thing the
way that i i really try to understand it is i argue the exact opposite and i know that drives people crazy sometimes so i started telling people you know i occasionally and and then i have to stop and say okay more often than not when i'm in a disagreement i become a prosecutor and if you ever catch me doing that
please feel free to call me out and i've had people do it i've also had some early readers of the book now say hey you know that uh that lawyer thing that you wrote about you're doing it right now it's a great it's a great sort of check yourself moment to say okay i just caught a glimpse of my reflection
in the mirror i do not like the person who's staring back at me right now that's not who i want to be i love that adam adam we end every episode of on purpose as you know with a segment called the final five which you have to answer in one word to one sentence maximum uh this is
your final five are you ready i'm ready let's start with this question uh what's something you wish you had rethought earlier i wish i had rethought my decision not to study abroad in college i wish i had studied abroad in college okay but yeah yeah that's clear because you
rethought it and therefore you didn't go i sorry i to be to be actually clear this time i decided not to study abroad and i wish i had rethought that yeah okay interesting why tell us i'd love to hear that one i think i i felt extraordinarily fortunate to get into harvard and i had a massive case of fomo before
i even knew that there was such a thing as a fear of missing out how could you take a semester away from this incredible learning opportunity and it just it seemed like i would be giving up too much and of course what i didn't see was all the things i gave up by not immersing myself in a new culture
and a different education education system and a set of norms and values that might have been pretty foreign to me what's the time when you rethought something where you realized your original thought was actually right uh i actually the title for think again oh there's an example on this
i the title clicked for me one day think again the power of knowing what you don't know i love it that's the book i want to write and then i gave an early draft to my challenge network uh the group of readers who who brought a lot of criticism and some of them said well don't you
want a different title like what if what if the book was called i might be wrong or unlearning and i rethought it a bunch and i said well i'm actually pretty excited about those titles and i think they're really novel and compelling and every time i explained the book to people there was just something sticky about
saying you know what whatever you think about that you might want to think again and i realize that's a phrase i use all the time and it captures something that i stand for and i couldn't let it go i love it i i love think again i think it's a great title and uh it's interesting i went through the same
thing with think like a monk so i i had pretty much every publisher an imprint that i went to meet tell me they didn't think the book should be called think like a monk are you serious that is one of the best book titles i've ever seen no seriously honestly and i was so insecure about it for a long time but
even up until the day before we launched it because i'd heard that from like i met 17 imprints and i heard that from like 14 to 15 of the imprints uh that they believe that we should change the title they were just like well jay who wants to be a monk uh what does a monk mean to people and i and i was struggling with
alternatives because this was the only true thing that the book was trying to do yeah and and i felt was was my unique offering in the world that i'm i'm trying to you know pass along and so it's so hard and and you know i i'm glad that we stuck with it uh but i've rethought it a million times
you know so it was it was very i was very scared up until like the day we got like results in and all the last rest of it i was so scared well it sounds like the imprints you met you met with were not your target audience but i i actually think it's an ingenious title for
the exact reason that they're highlighting which is i don't think most people want to be monks but we all aspire to have the wisdom and also the equanimity that that you model and so the idea that i could even if i i don't have the patience or the discipline to immerse myself in a spiritual tradition
like that that i could learn to think more like one that's that's right at my fingertips right yeah well you're my target adam you're always gonna be my target from now on no i love that title i think that anybody who told you to rethink it clearly should rethink their role in titling books
i love that well thank you thank you for that all right question number three we've been spending so long on these it's great but i love it sorry uh no no no it's great question number three is what's the worst piece of advice you've ever received the worst piece of advice that i ever received was
not to give credit to undergraduate co-authors on a paper i was writing because they were just research assistants and everyone has them wow interesting that's a great one thank you for sharing that what's the worst piece of advice you've ever given someone the worst piece of advice i've ever
given someone is probably don't go back to school ah interesting okay i i should talk to you about that i've been thinking of going back to school so it's interesting for what that's a big question which i could go into all the there's like three different areas that i'm fascinated by and i think i don't
know enough again i don't know enough about what i would end up studying if i end up choosing any of the three um you know broad terms neurosciences is definitely one of them i'm i'm fascinated by my passion's always been to find the the juxtaposition or the intersection between timeless wisdom and
modern science and so for me i'm always trying to find like i love reading studies about how meditation impacts the brain how a lot of my old monk practices affect the brain and so neuroscience is definitely one of the big ones i'm i'm behavioral economic economics books have just been my
my passion forever and so anything around human behavior but but wanting to know what to study so i'm still exploring it but it i shared it with you prematurely but it's definitely been something i've been considering so it's good to hear you say that so i like that i like that a lot uh this is a longer
conversation but when you have a moment look up a colleague of mine named michael platt okay he's uh he's an economic neuroscientist and he basically he uses brain imaging to understand behavioral economics oh wow there are a few others like him and i wonder if that's a synthesis of your interests oh that's
great well thank you for sharing i will definitely pick your brain properly when when please do i look forward to that i thank you so much i really appreciate that and and fifth and final question uh what is something that you don't know about yet that you're fascinated to learn about
this is such a long list i think one one thing that is just a total i'll give you a macro and a micro one and you can pick on the micro side i really want to know why it is that you can't tickle yourself that's genius i i everyone's trying it right now at home right like everyone's they're all i've i've i've asked
neuroscientists i've run google searches cannot get to the bottom of this one so that's the next book tickle tickle something yeah maybe the best i'm not sure i'm the person to write that book but i definitely want to read it the the best answer i heard was well you can't surprise yourself and you
know if you go to tickle yourself your brain already knows it's going to happen wow it took me about four seconds to debunk that because i said you know what jay i'm going to tickle you right now did you still laugh you would have right and so even if you know it's coming
doesn't seem to matter yeah anyway that's one thing i would love to understand better should we do a macro one two yeah tell us macro too i love that that's a great answer there it's fun bigger picture i think one of the things i'm curious about is how we how we can establish
some common ground across very partisan divides for example you know take any political leader that you think is great or terrible today the moment that you try to point out flaws in their character or shortcomings in their competence people accuse you of being partisan yeah and i would like to have an
independent standard where we say look this is what we mean by leadership skill this is how we judge values so that we could try to get on the same page i love that and i hope you're going to create what that is and and then we start using that i think that's such a not just noble approach but but it's
what's needed right now the the idea to look at things objectively without sentimentality without attachment without you know to be really approach something and go well what is best for everyone uh and and to approach conversations like that in that in in a way driven through data but but also through
intuition that would be amazing so i think it would be fun we need to ask you jay before we wrap yeah one thing that i'm adding to my list as i as i do the the book tour is i would love to know something you think that i should be rethinking oh okay that's that's that's fascinating
uh what do i think you should be rethinking this is hard do you know why this is hard because i agree with you on so many things well that's a mistake yeah that's you need to rethink it's like i've read i've read all your books and like i i find them so fascinating and i agree with you and so much stuff i i think
i don't know this is interesting and it's because i don't know this about you so so you may this may open up a whole other conversation because you're so open to so many things i would love to know how open or how much you've allowed spiritual thought to match your scientist mind into your life because
i think someone who's as open as you and maybe you already have and you're like yeah i've already done that and that's why you are who you are but it would i would i would be fascinated because i just think that your i think your thoughts are already so spiritually evolved and if that's what
you've got from studying organizational psychology and behavior then i'm fascinated to see what you'll go on to achieve with with that added to it so yeah that would be my my addition and thank you for asking it's a it's a it's a gaping hole in my learning in my and my really in my training too
right which is anytime i came across spiritual ideas i would either you know look for evidence or i would say well how do you know and it's only more recently that i've recognized how many of the fundamental principles of psychology that have resonated with me do have these roots and very ancient
religious traditions in philosophical wisdom and i think i have a lot to learn on that front no i love that you're you're extremely uh humble modest and and kind and so i love all the time we ever get to spend together adam i i recommend to everyone to please go and grab a copy of the book
think again you will not regret it i i do believe that it's a skill that everyone needs right now and we need desperately in our careers relationships family the world you know leaders uh it's such a big need and i'm so glad that you're uh helping us think again so adam thank you so much is there anything
else you want to share that you're like jay i have to share this and you haven't let me share it i'm open to that so no jay this has just been such a thrill i i will say since you raised the politician prosecutor preacher scientists i put together a little questionnaire
that people could take to figure out where they stand and which of those modes they fall into most often so if anybody wants to take it it's just at adamgrant.net oh i love that yeah definitely i i love finding out more about myself so that that's great adamgrant.net if you want to go and figure out which
of the prosecutor preacher politician or scientist you are so please go and we'll put that in the show notes as well adam thank you so much for tuning in uh and and so grateful to spend this time with you as always and excited for lunch or dinner next time i can't wait thank you so much for having
me thank you so much if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today