I think Envy is the thief of Joy where we run into problems is when we stop admiring those people and we start wanting what they have or feeling like I should have gotten what they got organizational psychologist want to bring in bestselling author Wharton's number one Professor Adam Grant I think that's people saying I'm stuck I feel like my life isn't going anywhere I feel
like I'm squandering my potential that's a travesty growth is is part of how you feel like you're using your time well the person you're competing with is your past self and the bar you're raising is for your future self before we jump into this episode I'd like to invite you to join this community to hear more interviews that will help you become
happier healthier and more healed all I want you to do is click on the Subscribe button I love your support it's incredible to see all your comments and we're just getting started I can't wait to go on this journey with you thank you so much for subscribing it means the world to me the bestselling author and host the number one Health and Wellness
podcast on purpose with J shett why is getting better important like why is growth important and I know it sounds it may sound like a stupid question it may sound like a a silly thing to talk about especially on a show like this but I find that people I talk to sometimes idolize being average they think it's good enough good enough is good I find that we are wired often to
want things to stay exactly the same we like how they are why should we get better why should anything get better we should be satisfied with what we have and often in the guise of contentment and peace there's a sense of lethargy and complacency that well we don't need to grow because you're just being greedy so I'm presenting a spectrum of ideas
there I'm happy for you to dive into any of those but why does getting better and improving matter at all this is fascinating nobody's ever asked me that before and I frankly I think I've taken for granted that growth is just intrinsically enjoyable and motivating I mean I think you made a case that maybe some people are not motiv by growth I think that where I might push back on
that is to say we live in a world that glorifies performance so you know people feel like if they want to be respected or celebrated they need to win a medal they need to earn a trophy uh they need to get an A+ and I think what we've lost sight of is that what people actually enjoy is a sense of progress feeling like they have forward momentum when I think about what
does it look like to not grow I I don't think for most people that's good enough I think that's stagnation I think that's people saying I'm stuck I feel like my life isn't going anywhere I feel like I'm squandering my potential and I just I think that's a travesty and so I think growth is is part of how you feel like you're using your time well absolutely I
I completely agree with you and I'm glad no one's ever asked you that before because I think I'm like that too I kind of take for granted that I love growth and I love the idea of being better and improving and I can't remember remember I mean it's been said a million times it's a it's like an age-old quote but it goes you know if you're not growing
you're dying and I think that's the point that we are either moving forward or we're moving backward we're either getting faster and smarter or we're getting slower and and not smarter and I think when you recognize that idea that there is no staying the same there is no we're just going to stay on this place and platform forever you start recognizing oh I have to move forward
and the pace at which I move how how have you guided people with that I find like often We compare our pace of growth and our pace of becoming better and that's the hardest one because you're like well they got that body in three months or you know you've been the top rated Professor for seven years like I've only won that once or whatever it may be pace of growth how how have you
thought about pace of growth in your work for a long time I I believed the the saying the Mantra that comparison is the thief of Joy I don't believe it anymore I think Envy is the thief of Joy I think social comparison is invaluable I think we have to look to other people for inspiration I think we look to other people for learning you know not just
what am I capable of but also how do I get there I think where we run into problems is when we stop admiring those people and we start wanting what they have or feeling like I should have gotten what they got and I think there what's probably helpful is to make a different set of comparisons you know part of what you could do is not think
so much about Pace as start um maybe focus more on starting points M so maybe somebody who's growing faster than you actually just started with more advantages than you did and you've traveled a greater distance um I don't think we pay enough attention to that would be one thought I think obviously comparing to ourselves is helpful too and I think that you know so often when
it comes to benchmarking progress I want to tell people okay the person you're competing with is your past self and the bar you're raising is for your future self and if you can focus on that it's a little bit easier to to realize all right yeah everybody has a different starting point everybody has a different pace but if I could tell actually let me
let me say this I think so many people let their expectations rise with their progress and so you set a goal today you achieve it in six months and then by the time it happens it's almost a relief yeah I didn't blow it definitely uh there's there's no joy there's no sense of meaning and purpose um you sort of expected it and you would have been disappointed if it didn't happen I think
the way you avoid that is you get in touch with your past self and you say if you know if six months ago me or five years ago me knew where I would land now how proud would I have been how excited would I have been and if you keep that past self in mind it's much easier to appreciate the I guess the strides that you're making I love that distinction
you made as well between how comparison versus Envy is the thief of Joy I think it's so subtle but it's so nuan and so powerful because you're so right that I always think of it in the same way that you either study someone or you envy them and often the deeper you study someone the less you'll Envy them because you'll actually realize how far they've come and what they had to get
through and challenges they had and you start getting the energy from that study to say oh maybe I have that within me too and maybe I can find that within me too because I have challenges I think for me a really concrete example of that was um I was I was terrified at public speaking when I decided to become a professor like maybe it was the wrong
profession like what are you doing here um but I I remember even being a student and thinking about raising my hand in college and I would start to physically shake and by the time I got called on sometimes I would like I would forget what I was going to say or I'd second guess it or I'd stumble and stammer my way through it and so the idea that I was now going to stand in front of a
whole classroom or on a big stage was extremely daunting so what did I do I went to speakers that I really admired and started studying them thinking this is going to help me and the first one I I picked was MLK great Pig really yeah I me what a great way to get demoralized so I watched his dream speech I tried to take notes on you know on things I could
learn from him you I wanted to know well how did he get there and so I start reading about it he's 34 years old when he gives that speech like I might as well quit I I cannot believe it's greatest speech in American history you know done by somebody who's you know not even close to his Prime and I think if I had stopped there I would have quit and it
would have been easy to walk away from MLK is just an Impossible role model and let's be clear he is an Impossible role model I will never I could work on public speaking for an infinite number of years every minute of every day and never come close to that what was helpful though was then sort of rewinding and realizing we we usually see our role models at their Peak MH and
we don't have the St point we don't have the distance they've traveled so how did MLK get here and turns out he started entering public speaking competitions when he was 15 years old that was two decades of practice the year he did his dream speech he gave over 350 talks and so you know if you think about the the cumulative progress that was made that's
multiple lifetimes you know of effort so I think that's that's the kind of sort of analysis that we need to do and I don't think most of us do that yeah absolutely absolutely I can't believe I can't I can't remember exactly what it was I left to find it but it was I think it was us Bol who said something like I've worked for x amount of hours to run
10 seconds or something like that right like the idea of he's practiced for all these hours or months or years to run something in however long he did it and I forgot the exact number but it's so interesting what you're saying and that that backstory of that Journey that growth the skills development the hours the struggle 300 that year alone is brutal you know it's yeah that's that's
insane and and I think it's fascinating and you talk about this I mean I want to I want to read from the book a bit if you don't mind so there are a couple of things that I picked out so this is page 26 for anyone who's uh listening or watching right now page 26 of hidden potential so character cannot be developed in ease and quiet only through
experiences of trial and suffering can the Soul be strengthened Vision cleared ambition inspired and success achieved according Helen Keller and then you go on to say that summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill the way you were writing in this book was so empowering because it was almost like you were pulling from you know I know of
course everything's highly researched everything's backed with science but you were kind of pulling from a bit of a Martin Luther King's space there like the language in there of like summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill and so you're actually saying what we just talked about with M okay that doing hard things doing uncomfortable things doing difficult
things is actually where so much of this ability for hidden potential comes from but all of us shy away from it you know all of us don't want to do it we're scared of it you becoming a professor that's scary if you don't like public speaking we avoid discomfort we avoid awkwardness we avoid challenges how do we summon the nerve to face discomfort
well clearly what I did was I started by thinking okay writing this book is going to be uncomfortable there are going to be a lot of times when I'm going to get stuck when I'm going to feel like this chapter is not working and then my writing is not working and then I'm not capable of being a writer why did I ever think I could become a writer and then
that just spirals out of control and then the antidote to that is to think you know what Jay shett needs to be empowered and Al I love it I love this image of you getting empowerment I do get empowered I would never think of you as somebody who who is in need of that like you're out empowering lots of other people always in need I guess for me one of the things I learned from the
research that I didn't know before I I think I always understood intuitively the idea that discomfort is key to growth what I didn't understand was that actively seeking discomfort and even amplifying it was one of the ways that you could move toward your idea of progress I kind of saw it as a necessary evil something that happens you know when you're learning and you're
struggling and you're tinkering with new skills and what the I think what the evidence shows is that people who are actually given the goal to intentionally feel uncomfortable um this is done in some cases asking people to go on stage to do improv comedy and literally feel awkward on purpose they they end up growing more from that experience
because they put themselves in situations that challenge them and so I think that's what I had to do with public speaking when I was starting to teach is therapists talk about exposure therapy and they often recommend systematic desensitization to say all right let's start you know little seminar and then you know get to know a group of students well and then you can
kind of build from there I didn't have time for that so I went to the opposite extreme of flooding and said all right I'm just going to volunteer to give guest lectures in front of huge classrooms of hundreds of students um who I've never met before for my friends classes I don't know why they let me in I don't know why they I just volun yeah
they were overly good friends maybe uh they were sacrificing the whole class for for my growth but extremely uncomfortable for me and I remember you know just walking in and feeling like I do not belong here I'm not qualified uh it was a massive case of impostor syndrome but I think one of the things that happened when I put myself in that uncomfortable situation is I realized
it's not really going to go worse than it did today and reading through the you know the comments there were lots of suggestions for improvement and lots of criticisms but there were also you know little compliments about things people liked I was like okay I can build on that I can work on this and um I think you know just coming in with the goal
yeah I should put myself in a deliberately uncomfortable situation um it opened me to a much steeper learning curve then if I'd done the kind of let me dip my toe in the shallow end and then sort of take off the the floaties and learn to swim one step at a time yeah and I feel it's really interesting right do you think there are those two approaches like do you think from the
research you've done and even your own personal experience do you feel like it is e the raw like sometimes you just jump in the deep end and sometimes you should kind of dip your toe in and then walk in or do you think it's it's either raw like or or is wisdom knowing which one to try when I that that's where I was I was going to land I haven't seen a
good comparison of the two and when you should do each but that's that's my intuition as well is I think there's there's a time and a place for both approaches and probably most of the time we want to be somewhere in the middle but to the point that you made earlier I think most of us air too far on the side of avoiding discomfort and so we make
these very small incremental steps and one it feels like we're not making progress which is frustrating and then two we often then don't take enough risks or try enough experiments to really stretch ourselves and move up to the next level yeah definitely one of the things I find that I always do if I get curious about something it could be a sport it could be a subject it could
be a topic whatever it may be I'll kind of cancel everything on the weekend and just obsess about it for a weekend because it gives me a sense of momentum or growth or a sense of yeah that's not my thing and I can very quickly decide whether to invest more time in it whereas if I was to have booked a six- week course or a program on something I may find by week three that this isn't
something I want to study for 6 weeks as opposed to I could have figured that out in 24 hours if I just really obsessed about it or if I'll play a sport and I'm thinking oh I like this sport should I play it more let me play it for a whole weekend every hour of that I'm awake and see whether it fulfills me or whether it's draining and tiring and I feel like
that's kind of what you're saying works as a better experiment yeah I think that kind of immersion is a really efficient way to figure out is is this an area that I want to try to keep growing in I think the one thing I'd want to be careful about there is there's um there's some evidence to suggest that often times we only like things when we
become good at them if you true if you spend a weekend on a skill that you're terrible at you might quit it prematurely because you just haven't built up enough confidence to start to I was just going to say that like the the day I spent I spent swinging a golf club I I've never felt so incapable in my life same um also golf is not a real sport so I had no
problems walking away from that explain that explain that I think I'll offend too many people I think so too uh that's hilar no but I think sometimes you you do have to say all right this this could take me a couple weeks or a couple months where you know I build enough confidence to really experience the joy of it like I I've seen this with um I actually went through this with tennis
um I think I took tennis lessons when you know when I was four or five and I really disliked it and you know ended up convincing my mom that I should quit and then when I picked it up again around 11 or 12 I had better hand eye coordination i' played a bunch of ping pong and like now I was decent enough at a racket sport the tennis was actually fun and I
think that's probably relevant to many skills absolutely absolutely so people always ask me and I'm sure you get asked this question a million times of course you do you have your own book club too like which you've been kindly featured me in the past and people always ask me what should I read and my number one response to that is well what are you
struggling with because I read for what I'm struggling with that's how I choose I always say to people you don't go to the grocery store because your refrigerator is full of milk you go when you're out of milk or you're out of cheese or you're out of bread and you go and stock up and so I'll of of sudden do an audit of my internal unit and go well what am I feeling like I don't have and
I've talked about how a couple of years ago I was building my team and I realized that being a leader and a recruiter were very different skills and recruitment wasn't a strength that I possessed and I almost assumed that because I was good at certain things that I should be good at recruiting and I and I wasn't and I studied Daniel coil's book the culture code which I
love great book yeah it's fantastic and I interviewed him on the show too and looked at his Playbook and everything else and that one book in and of itself made me better at Recruitment and so I always look at it that way but how do people figure out what they're struggling with or what they're not good at or what they need to get better at is
probably the right way to put it because we have so many things we're not good at yeah what do we know what we need to get better at this should have been a chapter in Hidden potential where where were you J shete while I was writing this book that would have been really helpful I um maybe maybe it'll go in the paperback I think my first thought is I
always want to look to my Achilles what's the one thing that's holding me back from a goal that I care about or a value that I'm trying to pursue and then the other is um what's an area of passion or curiosity that you know I'm excited to spend more time investing in and sometimes that's for me because I'm excited about it other times it's because I want to help somebody else and
I think those are reasonable questions to ask I think where a lot of people struggle is they they know the domain already right so they've decided like I want to be a better entrepreneur or I want to be um a better artist or I'm interested in improving my coding skills right and they they've kind of already figured out what part of life they're
trying to improve at but then they don't know what to focus on from there I think the mistake that a lot of us make is we end up asking the people around us that we trust for feedback which is a a perfectly reasonable thing to do except when you ask for feedback you get a lot of cheerleaders and critics the cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self and the critics are
attacking your worst self and the critics leave you often demoralized and the cheerleaders can make you complacent what you want is a coach a good coach is somebody who sees your potential and then helps you become a better version of yourself and so one of the things I learned through uh doing research for the book is that instead of asking for feedback it's often better to seek
advice so feedback leads people to think about what you did right or wrong yesterday advice helps people focus on what you can do better tomorrow so the way I would like to I guess that I apply this personally is when I'm trying to figure out where I need to grow every time I get off stage for for example or every time I finish a podcast interview
I will ask the audience or the host what's the one thing I can do better wow which is enormously helpful because they start to give concrete suggestions but I'm not immediately going to going to focus on the the first thing that I hear what I do is I ask a bunch of different people and then I look for the patterns and I think that what what too many
people do is even if they get to the point of asking for advice rather than feedback they start to hear all these things they need to work on they're like whoa this is this is overload it's too much I I can't handle anymore um I can probably only improve one or two things at a time what I would say to those people is when you feel a little bit overwhelmed by the number of suggestions
you're getting you should actually seek more of them because that will help you find the signal in the noise that will help you sort of figure out what's one person's idiosyncratic taste and what is a bunch of people's you know quality um input so I guess that's my favorite way to figure out where you need to grow ask a bunch of people for advice and then
focus on the common themes yeah the s yeah that makes a lot of sense I'm going to start doing that I'm going to try that out actually try it at your own risk yeah I've not practiced it in that way and and I like that again distinction between advice and feedback and you're so right if someone ask me for feedback your spot on my mind goes into right and
wrong and you know weaknesses and strengths as opposed to reflecting on hey this could work really well or I love this style you have and it could work you know I think that's such a a great way to think about it and it's hard too because we do base so much of where we want to grow on what other people think we need to grow too and I wonder how we can get better at sitting
with our with ourselves and reflecting on our days I always loved that statement from Steve Jobs where he said that every couple of days I would look in the mirror and ask myself or reflect on if this was the life I wanted to live am I doing with my day what I'd want to do and if it wasn't then I knew I needed to make a change and that self-
evaluation I think is such an important need because at the same time as listening to others you need both it's not in either or how have how have you done the self- evaluation part as well from from going to someone who was scared of giving talks to being you know one of Ted's most prolific popular speakers of all time to obviously now you know traveling book tours events
everything else how do you self- evaluate now as you were then that's definitely been a an evolution over the years I think probably the most helpful thing that I learned came from another area where I struggled a lot earlier and probably based on my initial lack of talent should have quit which was uh which was springboard diving so springboard diving right yeah I I
basically ended up diving because I didn't make the middle school basketball team or the high school soccer team and I saw a lifeguard diving at a pool one day and was just mesmerized I want to learn how to do that unfortunately I walked like Frankenstein I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees I could hardly jump uh very little explosive power or Grace
not not cut out to be a diver I was really fortunate to have a coach who who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and and said to me on day one I will never cut a diver who wants to be here and you know I'll put in as much as as you want and as much as you put in and one of the things I really struggled with was knowing when a dive was good
and when it was improving I felt like I needed to always aim for perfect tens and Eric best my coach one day sat me down and he said you know there's no such thing as a perfect 10 wait have the have the Olympic announcers been lying to me what what do you mean the whole point is a of a 10 is perfection that's the appeal of this Sport and he's like
nope if you look at the RO book um a ten is for excellence so even a dive that gets a quote unquote perfect score is flaw wow so then what we started doing was we set targets for each dive and he said okay you know basic dive like a a back dive um we're going to aim for sixes and I think that's within your range right now and then we would level that up over time as I started to learn
harder Dives I remember when I was doing a two and a half somersaults with a full twist um like let's just make the dive if you don't fail it if you don't do it for zeros that'll count and then you know we're aiming for fours and so we have dive specific goals what I've done with that sort of post- diving career is realized I never had somebody like this
in my life I need a judge not just a coach so what I will do is I'll ask people give me a 0o to 10 how did that go and it's very rare for people to say 10 yeah of course yeah uh so then you know whatever they say whether they give me a three and a half or a six I just want to know how can I get closer to 10 that's where I'm I'm really trying to
use other people's reactions as a mirror from there I'll ask for suggestions but to your point I need to make sure I'm also proud of my own progress and I'm focusing on my own principles and so the the last analysis I do after I get the judges ratings and the advice from anybody who's willing to coach me is to say okay let me go back to the version
of me that set this goal in the first place would that version of me be proud and if the answer is no I don't care what score I got yeah how do you navigate this I'd say that I've definitely got it wrong before as well like I've definitely made mistakes in that where I think when I first started out I kind of kept things very secret and I kept things very quiet so I had
started working on creating some content on online and for everyone who doesn't know I had been making content offline for 10 years before that speaking of small groups of 5 to 10 people colleges uh after school clubs universities things like that and my parents forced me to go to public speaking and drama school when I was 11 years old so I
started learning public speaking because I was a shy kid I have a very similar public speaking story to you when I was 11 years old so I wasn't born with a skill it was something that was harnessed and developed except for the accent except for the accent which I was born with yes I can't do anything about that and funnily enough and I always like to clarify this when I see Ted
speakers with American accents I prefer it yes because to me hearing from an authority in America from like you know Warton or Harvard or you know no it has magic it's no this is this is this is like wanting the Beatles to sing with American accents no that's different that's terrible no no you British people always sound smarter we know this go on
I I feel the opposite way honestly true true uh so shame so i' I'd spent I'd spent all these years so I developed a skill that I didn't know what I had use for when I met the monks and studied the G and Eastern wisdom I was like oh wow I have a skill set that was ready to be used for this when I'd never used it I never used public speaking of drama before that for anything meaningful for
me at least and then I'd done that for 10 years and then I made my first piece of content online so I but I made it in quiet because it's some of these things that you talk about here and I'm pointing these out because we can go back to it after I answer your question I was scared of looking stupid I was SC you talk about making more mistakes Theory versus reality in the book this
is page 40 and you talk about looking stupid feeling shame being laughed at and experiencing discomfort I was scared of all of those things because now it was going beyond my community of people like five to 10 people who used to come and hear me speak I had no idea what the online world would bring I had never done that before I didn't have any
friends who'd ever created any online content so I couldn't check in with someone I didn't have a coach and so I was kind of doing it in quiet and I think what was beautiful about that is I got to really construct my own voice that was authentic to who I was and was just genuine to who I was so my earliest videos are half spoken halfs spoken word
because I loved rap music growing up so there's you'll hear lazy Rhymes you'll hear words that Cascade together and it's inspired by what I loved as a teenager the visuals were I've always been into Art and Design and so that was very easy for me I love Aesthetics I love visuals I love feelings and experiences so I edited all my own videos granted the editing was sloppy
because of cuts and sound which I didn't know well but it was still what was natural to me and then when I put out my first piece of video the first people to react were the people I knew and they were all like Jay you talk too fast the music's too loud well we don't think this point is that great and it was all negative feedback and I kept going
because I was getting some Joy from it so in the beginning it was that way I and I think I've tried to hold on to that as much as possible because as the scale grew the plethora of negativity or criticism or judgment got louder as well and I started to look at it more seriously because now you're worried about perception and image and how you think people view you and whether people
see your truth or they don't and you can feel defensive and I think where I've got to now is I still get affected by it I'm so not Beyond getting affected by negative comments or challenging comments or criticisms because my monk training is left me vulnerable at some points because I have created a space in which to always allow advice to come in
because that's seen as that's seen as a mark of wanting to improve and wanting to be better and I've had to learn to balance that with also knowing my intention so what I've accepted is that the only thing I can control is my intention being being aligned and pure to what I believe not pure like in a Godly way I mean pure in what I believe but the way my action is
received will come with advice feedback and criticism and all I can keep doing is keep refining my intention and hope that that will channel the effect of communication externally and no matter how perfect 10 it is it will never be perfect and there there will always be criticism no matter how phenomenal an idea it is or whatever it may be so that's me Meandering around
your question too that's how I'm dealing with it I don't think that's a solution or a or a solve it's how I'm mentally kind of constructing Bridges and walkways to navigate how stressful it is I think it makes a lot of sense it it also leaves me wondering like is there a j shett rap tour coming but but all kidding aside although I I think there would be an
audience for that uh I think one of one of the things that that you're making me think about is there's a spectrum of you know on one hand we have the monk ideal of either I'm open to everything or I'm not going to live in fear of social disapproval correct on the other and I guess we have the monkey reaction like we are we are social primates and uh
anything that could lose status could get us excluded and this is really problematic I don't think either is really real istic for for us as humans I think we're always going to care about what other people think and I think my goal is to say I want to care enough about other people's reactions to learn from them but not so much that I feel pressured to conform to them it's
powerful wow the way that I've tried to get to that is to say well I'm always going to be disappointing somebody so let me decide whose opinions actually matter to me and then include myself in that group and say it's better to let down a bunch of strangers or a bunch of people whose standards are not the same as mine or whose taste doesn't match
mine than it is to let down the people I care about and myself too mhm what you inspired for me also with that Conformity idea is how I'm willing to be open enough to improve but not see something as a reflection of my identity and I think that's where it's we all struggle where it's like when someone says when someone laughs at you you feel like they're laughing at you not at that
particular event and moment and day or evening or improv or whatever it was you feel you are someone who should feel shameful as opposed to that was a moment where I made a mistake and I think that's where I think you struggle when you hear feedback or advice that you start attaching to your identity I think that's it's a huge problem and I think
one of the most reassuring bodies of research that I guess speaks to this from the book is um is the overblown implications effect the idea that when people see you make a mistake they don't actually attribute that to your incompetence or your lack of character like you think they do so you know you you watch somebody um you know take a really crappy photo and their thumb is
in the frame and you don't immediately think that person is incapable of being a decent photographer like that was a bad photo right it was literally a bad snapshot um and it's a snapshot of a bad snapshot so it's a meta bad snapshot you know I think somebody you know is is trying to cook and they they burn whatever is in the oven you don't immediately think they're a bad cook you
think oh they they got distracted or they you know didn't have the right recipe or this is the first time they're trying that and I think we're really good at recognizing that in others we we we don't sort of leap to conclusions that they're inescapably hopelessly flawed and that their failing makes them a failure but I think in our own selft
talk and self assessment um we do so much of that like I screwed this up I am a screw up and everyone else is going to know it that yeah so true and it's and it gets it gets really dark it gets really really dark I'm so glad we went there and thank you for asking me to reflect on that too because it's I'm always trying to find better Pathways
mentally to to deal with these things that you have to navigate on a daily basis I think we all are and I don't think you need to thank me for wanting to learn well let's talk about that I love this diagram that you put in the book about how we think Learning Happens versus how it actually happens and I think that idea of so how we think learning happens I'll explain that and
then you can explain the how learning happens from your words uh Adam shows in the book this diagram that says knowledge leads to comfort leads to practice leads to progress which is how we think learning happens and I think so many of our beliefs around learning do come from school and do come from even for me learning happens in that I learn
something now I know it fully and now that rule stands forever and I think modern day learning isn't that at all like I don't know any rules that have completely stood forever and apart from obviously certain mathematical or scientific rules of course but most rules in business most rules in marketing most rules in sales most rules in even a relationship they they change
they they mold they they grow and so I think that fixed approach is hard to shake because you were always told at the end of it well you got the wrong answer so it was always about the answer and it was always about well if you knew the rule you would have got the right answer and today we feel I'm not getting the right answer so I must not know the right rule but that we're not finding
that so how everyone reflect on that and then guide us through the the principle you're right that we have a kind of have this idea in our heads that I'm going to reach Mastery and then I'm done yes it's a version of what tal Ben Shahara is called the arrival fallacy uh that you know I'll hit my destination and then everything will have changed and the
reality is when you reach Mastery you don't freeze at that moment you have to keep evolving your Knowledge and Skills as the world around you evolves and I think what that leads a lot of people to do is to spend far too much time trying to get to the point of Mastery before they ever really try something you know from the book I saw this really clearly
in examples of language Learners I mean how many people do you know that just concluded in high school that they're incapable of mastering a foreign language you yeah what what languages did you take so we did uh French and German from year 7even so 11 years old till like 14 and if we did well at those I got to do Russian so I actually studied Russian for a year and I could
read write and speak for a whole year it was really great learning and then I never got to practice any of those languages and so they all fell away and then when I went by the time I went to college I had already lost touch with all of them so French German and Russian were the ones I studied the most yeah and so it sounds like you actually did
experience some progress but then it didn't stick and you weren't able to keep it up yes exactly yeah so I I think that's pretty common I think maybe even more common is the like I don't have the genes for this like I'm missing the langu the foreign language gene or I like I miss my critical window if only I had you know if my parents had raised me bilingual or if I had started an
immersion when I was four everything would be different I met two amazing language Learners when I was uh when I was doing research for the book Sarah Maria hasbun and Benny Lewis and they both concluded After High School that they were incapable of learning a foreign language um Sarah and Maria could not make it through Spanish um and her father speaks fluent Spanish
Benny I think uh just had a disastrous experience with German also with Irish and what's amazing about the two of them is that combined they can speak a dozen languages fluently today wow a dozen languages fluently conversationally even more um so they're polyglots they people who not only talk but think in multiple languages they're
effectively self-taught and they've picked it all up in their 20s 30s Beyond so what I wanted to know is what can we learn from them not just about language learning because but about any kind of learning because they are professional Learners and my biggest takeaway from you know talking to them and also ju supposing what they do with the evidence
is that language classes are broken in a lot of schools because basically what happens is um you you learn a vocabulary um and a bunch of you know rules of grammar and then you're taught to more or less just write it down and very few schools do extensive practice in speaking which means that you never learn to actually talk in the language which means you're not using the
language and you don't practice enough to really Master it what Sarah Maria and Benny recommend is start speaking from day one literally the first day you're picking up a language you start talking in it and what will happen as you do that is you're going to make lots of mistakes but through using it you're going to start to internalize it and in
fact one of the things we know from the research is when you make a mistake you're more likely to remember the correct answer because it really sticks you're like oh wait I screwed that up last time let me now change it so I think the the broader lesson here is that to go all the way back to the diagram I think a lot of people want to wait to use their knowledge until
they've acquired it oh wow it's not how Learning Happens the way Learning Happens is you got to use your knowledge as you're acquiring it and that's how you build it and that's a that's a virtuous cycle oh my God that you know it's so interesting I don't think I've ever heard that put that way I I feel like I've just and it's resonated so strongly with me because as soon as I
met gangas who's the monk that I spent time with as soon as I met him I had no qualification but I went back to college and started telling everyone about what I'd learned and then I'd go back and spend time with them and go learn more and then come back and just teach whatever I'd learned and there was no I didn't have any qualification to teach I
didn't I didn't understand it fully but it was like it was so much more fun that way and I allowed myself I gave myself the permission to say I'm just going to teach what I learn I'm going to teach what I learn up until now I don't have to speak beyond my level of realization or reflection but but I'm learning this I'm fascinated by it let me share it yeah I mean that's that's a higher level
version of you know of learning by doing it's learning by teaching yeah and so often people like to say well those who can't do teach and I would I would edit that and say no those who can't do can learn by teaching because exactly as you found uh when you explain something to someone else you remember it better and you also understand it better and I I
actually think anything you want to learn um a lot of people are trying to figure out like what is generative AI yeah you you could go and take a class in it you could go Tinker with it I would say go teach a class in it or get a group of people together who are also interested in learning it and each of you take a module to teach to the rest
of the group and that's when you're really going to internalize it and start to master it yeah you I love that I I I'll butcher it now trying to say as well as you did but yeah cuz you always hurt for eloquence no no but that idea you put so wonderful Jay shett bad talker is a is a common I that's actually a meme I don't know if if it's if it's made it on your
radar but like this guy's incoherent we never understand a word he says he's just babbling constantly no but that particular statement I I I honest I love that idea of how we're always waiting till we've mastered something until the end of something to feel like we can play share do and and there's a so there's a few that is well put yeah that's exactly right I'm like I'm trying
to get to the end of the line and then I'm like I will have made it and now I can demo it and now I can teach it yeah and and I think that making something public is so horrifying because the reason why we struggle to go teach a class on AI is because we're scared we're going to be asked questions that we don't know the answer to and actually your spot on that
is exactly the best way to learn because you'll be able to say to all those people hey I don't know but I'll find out for next time or I'll email you the answer whatever it may be and I find that but we haven't created space for it to be okay to not know no I think that's right and there's actually some work on this in Psychology which shows that when
an expert expresses uncertainty they actually end up becoming more believable um in part because people are surprised and then they listen more carefully uh and realize wow this person does know what they're talking about I don't think that permission should only be granted to experts I think in fact the less you know the quicker you should be to say I
have no idea and it's really ironic that only the people who know the most often get to the point of feeling secure in that knowledge to be able to say yeah I have no clue but let me let me do some research on that and come back to you yeah yeah and I I mean I felt this as a teacher I felt like especially in the you know the major public speaking anxiety days early career I I felt like
I had to be able to regurgitate a study for every single question that came up I can imagine yeah I like I thought that was my job and I I was really missing out on the joy that that students get and also that I get of saying I've never seen anyone explore that before I think that would make a great dissertation have you ever thought about coming to a
PhD program totally um and I don't know I think part of the joy of learning is that every answer raises at least nine new questions yeah um and I think that we close that off when when we expect people to always have an answer yeah you've mentioned a few times that and even in your diving example the need for a coach you know I feel like therapy
culture has and is still slowly penetrating like we I think if you're in the circle you think of it as like really accessible and easy and it's a big deal in and not stigmatized correct and the truth is it isn't across the board it's getting there it's slowly becoming destigmatized I think the idea of finding a coach is is so unless you're an athlete it seems so far as an
idea or as a thought process of how you approach things I know exe there are executive coaches that have definitely kind of got into the Zeitgeist but still finding a coach is quite an alien approach I find that people have there's stigma there there's confusion there there's a a lack of understanding of what is a coach how do how have you thought about it seeing as you've
mention it a bunch of times in yeah in the book and today well I think I think we're actually comfortable with it in certain domains right so no one would ever hesitate to say all right I want my kid to learn the piano they need a piano teacher so I think when it comes to you know to hobbies and you know kind of skills early in life um everybody knows
they need a coach to learn the basics and then move toward intermediate and then hopefully you know figure out if if this is something they want to pursue further I think where it starts to become a little uncomfortable is when you're an adult and you think that you should be able to teach yourself everything or you want to be self-reliant not dependent on someone
else and I think that's that's a broken mental model of a coach um a coach is actually I think a good coach is trying to work him or herself out of a job and say obviously I'm going to give you lots of advice and I'm going to try to help you improve but at some point you should internalize the way that I look at your performance the way that I think about
helping you make progress to the degree that you can you could figure out what would I say like after this and then apply that advice and at that point you're probably ready for a new coach who has different Knowledge and Skills to share with you and I think that's where I would start is I would say coaches are all around us you know going
back to the the asking for advice idea right you ask people for advice you start to turn them into your coaches and there's no reason why you can't formalize this um a lot of and you're familiar with this a lot of writers have writing groups where somebody's working on a manuscript and then you know four or five other writers are basically coaching them and trying to help them
improve it um I don't think that should be limited to you know it has to be my job or it has to be the hobby I'm trying to improve at I think anything you want to you want to get better at you could just ask for somebody to give you informal coaching and then you learn really quickly is this person perspective helpful to me in this domain absolutely absolutely yeah I do you have
a coach I I'm looking for one right now funnily enough that's why I asked you uh and I think for me at the moment now we know why you were asking how do I figure out what to grow on yeah exactly and uh I think there's that feeling for me about I'd say if I really worded it accurately and clearly it would be I'm reintegrating and re renewing and
refining my values because my life has changed so drastically and so there were times when I felt like I had kept up with the pace of my external growth and then all of a sudden I was like oh no this is way bigger than I thought it was and this is so different from how I lived just 10 to 15 years ago and I want to realign and reconnect with that if that makes sense
it does and so I think that is something which I've given myself personal time to do regularly to refine to realign to reconnect but to do it with someone else who can see beyond and and and maybe has had experience of two very Opposite Worlds and has has Traverse those paths may be really helpful and so I think that's that's what I would be looking
for and so coaching would be the right modality for that I I think it could be I think it's interesting there are two levels of that that I I think could be fruitful the first one is exactly the way framed it which is uh let me take a step back and figure out what my values are and how my core principles in life have changed should change moving
forward that's what it is yeah but I think the other layer of it is saying maybe the values are the same but your opportunity set has evolved so what does it mean to live your values now given those opportunities correct absolutely absolutely there we go get I've got a few candidates for you I'll uh I'll suggest them off please I'd love I genuinely love that yeah no and that's
that's definitely been where my head's been at probably the most most recently and it's and and again I usually sit with something like this and let it simmer and let it clarify and it's nice in a form like this to be able to vocalize it in an articulate way and that's another beautiful thing about talking to someone else about it if you keep going around it in your own head
chances are you won't say it as articulately as you would say it to someone else because you want it to make sense to them that's one of my favorite things about conversation uh there was a a biographer once um it was em forer's biographer she used this beautiful phrase called inverse Charisma which was the idea she said Forester had had this
ability to ask you such insightful questions with such sincere interest that he brought out a more insightful more Charming version of yourself then existed I'm like that's part of what a good coach is I actually think great coaches are filled with inverse Charisma they're not giving the rousing halftime speech all the time or the pep talk um they're not oh is necessarily kicking
you in the butt to try to you know to get you to to work harder or persist longer I think what they're doing is um is posing challenges and ideas for you that bring out a better version of you yes yes I cann't agree more and I think that is what hidden potential is I mean it's someone is not planting potential it's not uh manufactured potential it's
not Inception potential it's hidden potential it's it's there and someone's helping ask the question so you can keep revealing it and peeling away the layers and I think that is exactly what a good coach does good coach is not telling you who you are or telling you the answer or telling you who you could be it's allowing you to discover that for yourself which is needed for someone
else to do that because otherwise you're just stuck in your head saying I'm not that I remember I had a coach years ago when I'd left the monaster I was working at Accenture in London and he'd always say to me you're an entrepreneur just from watching you I can observe that you're an entrepreneur and I'd be like no I'm not an entrepreneur I don't want
to be an entrepreneur and I said I would fight and debate that with him I would give him all the reasons and he said Jay one day you'll see and now I look back and I think wow I was that is exactly who I was not in the in the way that it may be seen in the world but the autonomy the the wanting of being artistic being a leader wanting to create wanting to produce without uh
with freedom and without restraint like all of that quality of an entrepreneur I think language is so limiting too it is yeah right yeah you're right if you if you had def entrepreneurship back then is is being someone who sees opportunities and then creates a vision and then builds around that without giving up a ton of Freedom like yeah of course that's who I am and instead
you're like I gotta be I don't run a stop like that's that's what in my head I was like I don't want to manage people like I don't you know yeah I got to be pitching a Scrub Daddy on Shark Tank yeah yeah yeah that's what you yeah I don't want to start business like that's not you know that's not what I want to do with my life and so yeah it's
fascinating how language limits us and I was I was going to ask you that about that like how do you feel comfortable and this is chapter three of your book the Imp imperfectionists finding The Sweet Spot between flaa and Flawless how do you allow yourself to release anything when you know it's going to be flawed and imperfect because I think that that's the challenge right with the
book especially with social media less so it's it's short form and short term so there's it's easier to get to what you want to get to but with a book with a talk with a obviously as a professor I mean everything you're teaching you know people are going to practice it for years potentially how do you feel comfortable putting something out that's
imperfect and incomplete this is a little embarrassing but I I have to say so I after writing the book I said all right I want to I want to use some of the the psychometric tools that we were training in to create a fun quiz for people to identify what their greatest character strength is among those and then also an area for growth so I finished the quiz I sent it out to a
bunch of people to Pilot it and then it was time for me to take it and after writing this whole chapter about what I've learned about being an imperfectionist my lowest score was imperfection ISM so I am not fully recovered from perfectionism and it's sometimes hard for me to release things I think what's helped me is a couple things one the calibration of saying
okay if it's something as big as a book I a I'm I'm aiming for a nine like this I'm going to pour a lot of time into it it hopefully a lot of people are going to engage with it and so I really wanted to be as good as I'm capable of doing at that moment in my life if it's a a social media post like I'm content with a six and some people might get angry at
me some people might misunderstand me I'm definitely going to learn something and it's better to put out a bunch of potential sixes and and hit some eights than to post once a year as somebody who cares a lot about both sharing knowledge and learning from other people's reactions to those you know those posts I think that's been really and I guess
what I've realized through that is if you never put anything out into the world then you're actually limiting your contribution M and I think when when psychologists study regret it's pretty clear that in the short run people are afraid of failing but in the long run they're more afraid of failing to try and that's that's kind of where I've I've come down is i' I'd rather fail
than fail to try at all it's really fascinating you said something there which which I really resonate with is this idea that part of the learning is in the sharing and seeing reactions and I think we underestimate like I could honestly sit down and think I know everything about a subject and keep quizzing myself and think I know everything but the moment I share it
with someone else and they ask a question I'll be like oh I should have in you know that that was missing I didn't think of that and so sharing it in some form even if it's not the complete form but sharing a talk based on one of the chapters or sharing it I often do that with podcasts like when I have an idea I'm like oh let me just
record a podcast episode about that and see what people have to think about it and it's a great way of just experimenting and testing and seeing what part of it I didn't consider yes because someone will consider it and we don't we don't see that as part of the growth process we see it as separate we see as I'm going to make something complete people going to have exactly
the reaction I want to it and that will be the success of it yeah I think that's right I think um the medium also matters so podcasting is a much more forgiving medium I think than book writing 100% um because nobody expects you to have said everything exactly right in the moment whereas yeah you say something wrong in a book it's like well shouldn't you have
done your research why didn't you fact check that yeah one of the things I see a lot of people hold back on when it comes to sharing anything they've created is so many people limit themselves by saying I don't want to self-promote I'm so glad we're going here let's go there this this is not about me I'm like good because there is a huge difference between self-promotion
and idea promotion promoting yourself is saying look at me look at how great I am I'm special uh you're sharing the awards You've Won you're posting a lot of selfies you're in the spotlight I think idea promotion is really different which is to say I made something I'm proud of I hope it's valuable to you I hope you get some joy out of it if you don't put
that out in the world you're depriving people of benefiting from what you poured your heart into and that that to me seems like a mistake yeah did you always feel like that or was something you had to wrap your head around because that's something I definitely had to wrap my head around so I'm intrigued no I because as a professor I just don't imagine putting a book out and promoting
like that doesn't come naturally like that doesn't feel not at all no I remember a few weeks after I got tenure a colleague wrote and and said hey I'm thinking about writing a book about motivation you've done a lot of research in this area do you want to co-author it I wow I love I loved working with this collaborator um huge admirer of his work
this is a great honor and I've always wanted to to figure out if there's a way I could share my ideas more broadly than just with the students I happen to meet in in the classroom I immediately I had a lab meeting later that day with a group of um of undergraduates and I told them I was going to do this and they had a mutiny like no you cannot you cannot
write a book about somebody else's ideas you need to write your own book like nope can't do it I cannot do that this is like I don't feel comfortable doing I I hardly even teach my own research in the classroom I want to I want to share with you the knowledge that I've found most useful like I don't I think my research is like the most important thing for me to teach you and they push
back really hard and they said look you have a responsibility if you've invested a lot of of your own time and energy and you know in the work that you do um to share that more broadly and get it out there and see what people think of it and they basically held me hostage they said you're not leaving this lab meeting until you agree you will write your own
book before you help somebody else do theirs and eventually they logic bullied me into into into ageing and I I kind of came around and said okay this is what we do we don't create knowledge for it to collect dust in academic journals or for it to only be available to students who are lucky enough to get into an IV League school like that's not right um I believe in
democratizing knowledge so yeah I'm going to do this book came out uh a little bit beforehand I sent an email to my network just saying hey you know I wrote this book if you find it interesting or useful would be really grateful if you would help spread the word the responses were so lovely but I got one email that kind of crushed me in
the moment and it was from an academic colleague who said Dear Adam love the book hate the self-promotion this was my fear and I thought about it and I ruminated about it and then it hit me this is not self-promotion it's idea promotion this is about the knowledge contained in the book I went out of my way to site a bunch of um you know a long list of researchers later I was
told too many I was trying to synthesize a body of knowledge and get it out there and we have to be to a certain degree in the spotlight in order to promote our work and I think you know people want to connect to the the author the narrator um and so there's I think an amount of self-disclosure that's required but self-promotion that does not have to
happen and and I looked at the book and I said okay the main things I've shared about myself are mistakes I made times I failed and what I learned from those so I feel okay saying this was idea promotion not self-promotion and that's for me the litmus test ever since so that I guess that's how I landed at that distinction it's such a interesting
thing for any artist any creative any academic any any person who feels that they've come across something worth sharing and that's why I've always been a fan of anyone who has anything worth sharing because there are so many I think isn't Ted's what's Ted's tagline or at one point sprad is worth spreading like I like sharing better yeah I don't
want to assume that every idea should be spread but share it with someone and let's find out yeah sharing and and I think we all have ideas worth sharing we have insights worth sharing of some kind and especially if you're an artist Creator academic and I think for me it was it was very very similar journey to yours and it's so interesting to hear that academic circles and spiritual
circles can often have the same habits of behavior and for me when I wrote Think like a monk which was my first book book the biggest thing I was trying to do and what I learned in my second book which I if I would have known in my first book I would have done this is kind of explain this thought process where I tried to do it intuitively in
how I shared it as opposed to explicitly spelled it out whereas now I'm much better at explicitly spelling out what I'm doing I did that to honor all monk Traditions so I studied lots of different monk Traditions I spoke to lots of different monks and so it wasn't just the tradition I studied studied in so that was very important to me because I believed that there were Traditions
Beyond mine that would have values to share and important messages to share the other thing that I tried to do in the book was I definitely have always wanted to make ancient wisdom accessible practical and relevant that has always been my mission because I'm trying to speak to the 18-year-old kid that I was in London before I got into spirituality
and meditation and mindfulness not trying to speak to the person I am now or someone who's already learned a ton and so to me to make it simple and accessible and relevant was my biggest call and always has been and that can often come with the critique of you're watering it down you're oversimplifying it this isn't the truth um in the way it should be shared and the other thing was
similar to you and I love that you said that too I never shared an enlightened experience in the book all the experiences and mistakes there when meditation went wrong there me being envious there me judging people they're me wanting to get what the monks have without having done the work like all the stories of the the The Human Experience of a kid from London who
doesn't have the qualification to be where he is in this space trying to make sense of it and and and so the book was it wasn't think like me like that was in the book it was called think like a monk like I'm not a monk anymore and I want to show us how we can think like monks but not live like monks and I think it was really interesting to me just our
again it comes from our pre conceive Notions on ideas language having baggage and thoughts where people were just like oh but you're not a monk anymore so how do you teach that and this isn't your life and it was so interesting to me that we couldn't learn from things that were things I'd learned and gained as opposed to if you're not exactly that
thing anymore then you can't teach it I I think there are things you could study that you don't have to share if you were just really fascinated by um painting or Rare Coins um you could say this is a personal interest of mine and it's just it's my own curiosity I think you and choosing to be a monk me in choosing to be a psychologist we chose to take a deep dive into the mind and human
behavior if we gain knowledge from that it feels like it's selfish not to share it like why would you keep that to yourself why should the wisdom of monks only be accessible to monks AB doesn't seem right yeah it doesn't seem right at all it feels like taking away uh it feels selfish and and also to honor those people to me the book was honoring
these amazing people that have done it for their whole lives and studies of people whove meditated for 40 years and you know that's not me and and I just found it interesting that yeah it's fascinating and there's a great book by Austin Cleon called show your work yes and I really like it and I recommend that to anyone who's struggling with showing their work because it's exact
and I love the way you've differentiate between self-promotion and idea promotion and I really hope that that stays with people who are listening and watching because if you have an idea that you believe is worth sharing and worth helping people and supporting people please don't hold on to it like please don't hide it from the world because I worry for us to only be
exposed to the same three ideas that everyone's exposed to because we hide away from all these other new ones sometimes I hear people hold back for another reason which is they're afraid somebody's going to steal their idea and Austin Cleon wrote about this and Ste like an artist another book of his that I found very thought-provoking my my response to that
is you know what it is possible that somebody will steal your idea most of the time that won't be intentional um but what what psychologists have sometimes called klep Amnesia where you misremember an idea as your own and forget the source um that can happen inadvertently you hear an idea um you know you don't necessarily track where you learned it um and then you know it
kind of bubbles up a month later and you think you thought of it I think that can happen ideas can get stolen on purpose they can get stolen by accident what I always want to say to people who are afraid of their ideas getting stolen is if you have one big idea and you're afraid of putting it out there because you think someone else is going to steal
it you don't have a lot of ideas and people who generally succeed with ideas are people who are constantly generating ideas and so what you should do is you should generate a whole portfolio of ideas and then you you're not identified with any one of them you don't feel attached to just one of them and then the risk goes way down yeah there's there's so many blocks that we could
talk about whether it's and I mean one's the ego right so the the self-promotion is almost like an inverse ego so it's almost like we think we're better because we're not promoting an idea it's like we're we're we're doing right this yeah like that is ironic yeah right like it's like I think I'm better because I'm not monetizing or democratizing or
popularizing and publicizing yes yeah popularizing or izing an idea makes it better to not do that you talk about the ego differently but let's talk about in that category first of all like it's it's interesting how that scen as are holier than thou kind of approach and I don't think either is Holier I I just think that one's compassionate and and
to me that's more what it is like I think when someone shares an idea about an experience that I could never have to me that's just compassion it's their compassion to share with me I mean there's never reason why people can't have multiple motives behind their behavior of course I actually I mean almost always do all of us yeah me included I think it's very rare that
people are conscious of all their motives uh or willing to admit to all of them but I I actually think the most sustainable route to to unlocking people's hidden potential is to try to align their you know their personal aspirations um with social good and I don't think there's anything wrong with saying yeah I want to promote this idea both because I want it to help other
people and because I appreciate people respecting my knowledge and considering me a credible Source like I actually think it would be problematic if you're like yep I care nothing about my own reputation whatsoever like only Character Matters to me and even if people think I'm an idiot and I'm dishonest and I lack Integrity like as long as I know I'm a good person that's
good like that's just not functional in the social world and so I think we should give people this is another we need to give people the space to to say yes like I do I do want to be valued and appreciated for things that I think are important and I want to add value to other people too oh I'm so glad you went there yeah it's so important it's so
important to allow ourselves that too like yeah do I like it when someone leaves me a nice review on the podcast or the book of course I do yeah I love it it feels great and do I do things because they make me feel good yes I do and and and at the same time it comes from a place of wanting to do good in the world and to spread ideas that will help people and serve people and support
people and hopefully help them transform their own lives uh and it comes from both of those places I want to do things that make me feel good and do good in the world like I I think that's I don't know any other way actually I don't either yeah and I don't know how to live in a world if I only tried to do good to others I would automatically feel good
from that anyway but if I was only to do things that were only good for me I don't think I'd be satisfied either no I mean you you'd lack the purpose that so much of your work concentrates on what was the thing you found most surprising when writing hidden potential about hidden potential specifically that kind of you were like oh wow I didn't I never
thought I'd find this I think the first one was was the idea that learning character skills can be more powerful than learning cognitive skills assuming that you have a foundation in you know in in thinking skills um that like learning to embrace discomfort and become more of a sponge and accept the right imperfections like that that could
fuel more growth than you know if you're an entrepreneur like learning finance and marketing stunning and that you can learn those skills in your 40s and 50s as opposed to thinking that those character skills are set when you're young um that that I found liberating um and encouraging so that was a surprise I think that maybe a bigger surprise though just as I I think through the
insights that I picked up as I was I was investigating I think I had this image of people who you know not just achieve greater things but achieve the greatest things I had this image that they just figured out how to make the Daily Grind just tolerable I think about Steph Curry just you know drilling over and over again to shoot as well as he does I assumed that
he just figured out how to not mind the monotony and the boredom and the exhaustion and he would just power through it and he had a a superhuman ability to tolerate extreme amounts of discomfort light bulb um while reading the research on deliberate practice was like it's not that motivating for a lot of people to just do the same activity repetitively over and over
again if you're Steph Curry shooting is fun like doing Wind Sprints and then trying to make baskets when you can hardly breathe and doing that over and over again like not anybody's IDE like not my idea of joy and I don't I don't think it's Steps either and through the the research I read and through spending time with um with his trainer who designed this set of routines that had
really elevated his game I realized the deliberate play is a huge part of practice and we don't give it enough credit that you know if you're step like you play a game to see how many baskets you can make in a minute and a half and then you've got a Target to shoot for and you're competing against yourself or you're competing against a clock and all
of a sudden that that supercharges your motivation especially in the summer when nobody's you know when you're not actually playing basketball games that really count and I looked at that and thought why do we have to turn the Daily Grind into such a grind like yes there are times when we all have to push ourselves but pushing yourself day after
day is not a sustainable routine and what we want to do is try to figure out how to redesign practice and skill development so that there are you could break skills down into these enjoyable pieces and then make them more playful you you mentioned an Coyle um I love the culture code and one of my favorite ideas that he wrote about was the difference between shallow fun and deep
fun MH I think shallow fun is gamification it's tricking people into enjoying practice even though they don't really like it because there's a carrot that's being dangled at the end I think the Deep fun is is about saying we want to actually take the process of learning itself and make it enjoyable and so you know the Steph example is a great one um
but it's easy to think about that in basketball Evelyn Glenny a percussionist saying like let me figure out if I could harmonize Bach on a snare drum like what a cool way to make learning percussion playful and I think that that was a big aha for me I think that I I had come to see play as a reward for finishing my too list and mastering a skill and now I
realize it's got to be on the to-do list and it's got to be part of learning a skill that resonates so strongly as well again it's like yeah the the process has to be fun meaningful and fulfilling in and of itself not just the reward trying to think about an activity that I've done that with that just felt impossible to do it with have you have you was what
was the thought experiment that you did there was I was wondering this this had to I I feel like monks are often misunderstood as complete denial of any Earthly Joy yes and I I don't I don't see how a human could ever function in that environment so I guess question is you had to do a lot of hard stuff yeah as as a monk especially I imagine in training MH like how did you make that
playful you made it playful by laughing at yourself like it was it was right so I the thing that came to mind was often we'd walk down a path and we'd be asked to find a new stone and the goal was to find something in be really present with it and you know be aware of it its colors its texture its shape everything you'd want to practice through a
mindfulness practice and what the mind would do is I'd find a stone for today and I'd find a stone for tomorrow so that I didn't have to do the same activity tomorrow because we want to make things easier mentally and we're always trying to cheat the system or or you know break the game so my mind would do that very naturally I'd find two stones all right saw that one where that
is behind that tree to today I'll pick this one tomorrow I found one anyway and then we'd get to the next day and the teacher would say all right today we're trying to find a petal like and they just switch it up on you and you'd laugh at your own mind like you'd find it hilarious that your mind was trying to game the system but the monks were too you know they already were one step
ahead they already one step ahead of you they already know that the cheat codes are already built exactly and so I think things like that where learning to laugh at yourself brought play when you saw the monkey mind as you mentioned earlier you laughed at it you didn't you went harsh on yourself you didn't if you saw a monkey and I've seen monkeys do this
in IND steal people's sunglasses cut bags if you're holding it to grab fruit diet coke yeah Diet Coke stealing I've seen them steal credit cards like out of people's hands if they're paying for something you don't look at that and go what an idiot like what's wrong with you you just think oh monkeys and you just laugh and and that's partly what the mind is like
like it's it's funny to watch the flawed mind uh and not take it so seriously and recognize that it's just how it's built and how it's How it acts I I like that a lot it it seems that's what came to mind yeah I mean I think the idea of you know of taking your your goals and your growth seriously but not your self and your ego that seriously is obviously
powerful there it also sounds like your teachers really appreciated the importance of of novelty and variety absolutely and saying all right like we got to switch up stones for pedals just to keep making this interesting and and make sure you don't lose your curiosity yeah and just recognizing that you were going to you know I remember saying to
one of my teachers once I was like I was like oh you know I'm just really struggling with my ego I don't think it's ever going to go away it's so big it's so hard to deal with I see it come up in so many scenarios and they just be like relax just you know it's okay like your ego will always be there just do your service like it wasn't seen with as much like kind of pain and stress
because they understood it's hard they get that like they know what the mind is going to do and so why would they react to it with this like very serious and kind of imprisoned undertone rather than yeah it's going to be there just do it anyway I I like that idea of just just do it anyway it's going to be there do it anyway like okay so you might feel
you have too much of an ego to give a give a talk do it anyway and be aware of it right be aware of something and do it anyway is far better than wait till you overcome your ego to do something like that you'll be waiting for the rest of your life it will never disappear and that's just ego it could be anything obviously like Envy or any of the things
you mentioned I don't know that it's realistic to expect it to disappear altogether I think what you want is for it to be you want it to be in the rearview mirror so that it's not your primary focus but you're you're checking in on it every once in a while exactly Adam there are so many things in Hidden potential we could talk for hours and hours and I don't I want people to
actually read the book I want people to pick it up I want you to go and grab a copy of hidden potential the science of achieving greater things as we've talked about today there's such a need for Progress there's such a need for growth I think this book breaks it down makes it simple in a way that I love and I admire but on top of all of that it's
packed with great stories case studies science and research to back it all up and in Adam's signature style of making it fun uh the natural humor that always comes through but thank you for doing this and I wanted to ask you Adam is there anything you haven't shared either from the book or that's come in your mind and heart that you're like Jay I
really want people to know this or share this and it may not be but I want to give you the floor Ah that's well you as always too kind um no I mean I the only thing is I'm second guessing I'm like was that the most surprising thing should there have been a more surprising thing I am right now failing my imperfectionist test it doesn't matter which one I picked because no one knows
what the Alternatives were but I am curious uh so we talked about deliberate play being you know potentially as important or more important than deliberate practice for growth the other two that I was just starting to think about were um that when you get stuck you often have to move back to move forward that before people leap in a skill they they have to dip that that
was aha that I did not have before yeah that it's better you were talking about climbing the mountain the idea of like yeah yeah like that it's better if you're stuck not just to stand there but to walk backwards to kind of find a new rout or a better method actually most of us don't move backwards to move forwards we' remained stuck because we're too
embarrassed to move backwards or we feel too like we've reached somewhere to move backwards like there's a comfort I don't want to give up the gains that I made yes yes that's exactly and so like why would I start over when I've already put so much time into to getting where I got that sun cost bias is uh that was huge for me I remember learning about that in
like a level economics like 18 years 17 18 years old and thinking what a great concept to understand that and I kind of gave that up very naturally but I saw that As I Grew Older people who'd studied something especially some I had friends who would become lawyers or doctors but then didn't enjoy it or didn't see that as their path directly even and having to Pivot from that was
so hard because you work so hard to achieve something that is rare and hard and difficult yeah one of one of the things I I would like to remind my students of when they they they come to office hours and they're in tunnel vision like I have to do the prescribed thing like my parents want me to be a doctor or everyone in my family went to law school I always want to say to them
listen I I understand that you're already down this path like you've done the Premed thing or you're already like you know you're already in the program but what's worse realizing that you wasted the last two years or going on to waste the next 20 M it's not a hard C calculus and so I think maybe the antidote to Sun cost is opportunity cost
to say yeah you know what you have already invested a whole bunch in this but think about all the growth and all the joy that you're giving up on if you don't shift gears yeah yeah I think I mean I think about that all the time in my own life and it's hard because you never know it then and it's the old Steve Jobs quote of you can't connect
the dots moving forwards you only backward yeah only backwards and it's hard to remind people almost as their future self and I I think that is the activity that's what I did I I fast forwarded when I was working in the corporate world I fast forwarded 20 years and I asked myself would I be happy doing what I see other people doing 20 years ahead of me and the
answer was no and so I was like well then anything will be better than this because if the answer is no and it's not that they had bad jobs or they weren't happy it's that I wouldn't be happy doing what they were doing 20 years from then and so if you're not then you can't keep following the same path Adam I actually have two more questions from you that I just saw my notes that I I
actually don't want to miss asking these to you this comes from part three systems of opportunity opening doors and windows and I had these two questions that I think are really interesting we talked about certain challenges of our school system and what we find wrong but this was the interesting part for me do you believe children should be able to
choose what they study um I think that's a really fascinating concept one of my friends runs schools where kids do get to shoes uh it's private and uh I'm always fascinated by this idea of we've gone from living in a world that kids had no choice we naturally swing to the other side of the pendulum where we want to give kids all Choice what what did you discover I think this is really
complicated so the the research on the Paradox of choice suggests that there is such a thing as too much Choice first of all there's a lot of debate about how pervasive that is um it's much worse to have no choice than too much much worse uh so it's easier to manage the problem of too many options than it is to create Freedom where it's absent I think that's
clear the second thing is we can we can think about bundling and sort of bucketing choices in a way that um maybe gets the best of both worlds so um I think it's potentially helpful for students to have choices within constraints um for example so you ask if you're an elementary school teacher you ask kids to read 30 minutes a night but they get to pick the book I think that's
the kind of choice we're looking for early on I think later probably in high school every kid should take some math but I don't think everyone needs to take trig trigonometry has never been useful in my life in a heartbeat I would I would throw out the trig curriculum and replace it with uh statistics which I think actually is useful for how people
think and what they do in the world but not everyone feel there's no cognitive benefits of doing trig either like are there no because I often think about things not being as literal and think oh wait is my brain developing by thinking in that ways I have never seen a randomized controlled experiment saying that learning trigonometry will teach
you a set of thinking skills that's invaluable like I don't think there's anything about sign and cosine that you would get that you can't get through geometry would be my would be my hunch as a psychologist but I have not done that experiment or that series of experiments I think but what I would say is like within I mean colleges are much better at this right saying there's a
math requirement but we give you a menu of options and you can choose within that um nobody wants to go to a restaurant and have a menu with a thousand options um but if they kind of know what they like they can say I can look at that category and I can choose within it and I think that's where I would want choice to land for um for kids at different levels yeah and it's
so hard to you know hidden potential as a kid and as we grow is so difficult because if I was asked what I liked growing up now I can easily say that I think I was naturally drawn towards the arts and design and philosophy and I can see it even more clearly now but it would have been really hard for someone I don't know how how would you be better
at spotting hidden potential in schools and in young people earlier on so that we can kind of hopefully better guide and Coach people as opposed to have them become preds or or can complete a career and then having a pivot well I think the the person who's best suited to see your hidden potential is often the one who knows you best and I don't think we give
teachers enough opportunity to get to know kids I love the research um un looping that I wrote about uh in the chapter on um on what we can learn from countries like Finland and Estonia but even even here in the US um there's strong evidence from multiple states with millions of students in elementary and middle school that if they just happen to have the same teacher for two
years in a row they achieve more gains in math and reading which is remarkable MH and I know there are tons of parents who are afraid of this idea like what if my kid gets stuck with Professor Snape for two years instead of one that's the end of the world it turns out that not only is it good for kids to have the same teacher for multiple years but that
when kids are struggling and teachers are struggling they actually benefit more from the extended relationship and I don't think it's hard to unpack why this is I think when you know when when a teacher moves up with a student they don't lose all this information in the handoff from one to the next um they understand the students strengths and
opportunities for growth they also have seen this the distance that the student has traveled and so instead of just saying well like a new teacher well that student didn't shine in math to say wow that student would was really behind in math and now is right on track with the class I think there's some hidden potential there I think every school on
Earth should let kids have the same teacher for multiple years and um I think it's not a huge effect in the data but I think it's a meaningful one it is one of the biggest I mean even in spiritual education and and teaching and guidance it's that's the only way it works like the the practices that my monk teachers created for me were very different from what they created for
other students because it was all about specific learning and specific growth and so some of the practices I did were not normal for others and some of the practices other people did were not normal for me because you trusted that your teacher was getting to know you better and therefore would create plans whether some of that included travel for example I would be asked to travel back
more to London to teach while I was a monk uh because they saw that that would be a useful skill set for me that would be a useful experience for me of me going back to the country I was from and having to connect there and that wasn't part of everyone else's training and so I've always been a fan since my training in that way of having the same teacher
and even till this day I still go back to the same monk teacher who knows me much better and now he has like so much data on me because he known me since I was 18 years old and so he has 18 years of insight of knowing me and many of those years living together where the his ability to say oh my gosh do you remember when you used to be like this
and this challenge would trip you up and look at you now like you you know and just that context is so useful to hear from a student uh like you're saying like whether it was hey you know you were struggling with math last year and last year you got a C and this year you got B but I actually noticed that you know whatever I I think it's huge I actually think it's huge and that that's
a great Coda to the earlier point about you want a coach to work themsel out of a job but then you want to be able to go back to that coach at inflection points yes for a fresh perspective or for somebody who has that continuity yeah and so I think over time the hope is that you don't rely on that person day-to-day anymore of course um as a crutch but they are the person who I
guess has the most accurate mirror yeah absolutely and that's at least from a Eastern philosophy point of view education was always meant to be the the guru as it would have been called at the time and and a small enough glass for the guru to get to know the class well enough in order to spot hidden potential and their psychophysical nature and
their Dharma word for purpose in order to ignite that spark deeper and that requires a lot of training for the guru and and an openness from the students as well but yeah you're right it's not just Choice as well it's not just like hey choose what you want yeah it's it's beautiful thank you so much Adam this has been amazing it's thank you always a
joy I love how our conversations go from what's wrong with the school system to why we're not idea promoting enough all the way through to you know how do we choose what we need to work on what is a weakness what are imperfections and again it's all inside this book called hidden potential uh the science of achieving greater things highly recommend it from Adam we'll put the
link in the comments and the caption for you to get it uh thank you so much Adam for doing this I appreciate you thank you Jay it's been uh it's been a joy and also a privilege and I think we've never spoken other than when we're recorded yes we uh we need to do a little bit more of this I think I would love that and appreciate it and welcome it thank
you so much thank you thanks if you love this episode you will enjoy my interview with Dr Daniel aan on how to change your life by changing your brain if we want a healthy mind it actually starts with a healthy brain you know I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers and their brains are very damaged