You're going to fail if your plan is to rely on natural talent or mindlessly clocking 10,000 hours. If you want an outrageous amount of success, you're going to have to throw away most of what you know and build a real path to mastery. There is a reason that most of you will die with your potential still trapped inside of you, but I'm joined today by best-selling author and celebrated professor Adam Grant and our goal is to map out the exact path you can walk, to be the odds, and be celebrated in Valhalla. Somehow, the growth mindset has become controversial because despite how many of us preach it, people are still struggling.
So what is it that all of us are getting wrong about self-help? I actually studied this with Amy Rznezky and Justin Berg. We did an experiment at Tech Company where we tried to teach people growth mindset and have them think about what skills do you want to develop, take maybe some talents that you thought were fixed, we'll get you to reframe them as flexible. And we found that that alone didn't change their happiness and it didn't boost their job performance.
We needed to do something extra for them, which is have them change the environment around them. So there was a group of people who got randomly assigned not only to think about themselves as malleable, but also their jobs as malleable. So think about your job as basically a set of tasks and interactions. Those are building blocks.
They probably weren't designed for you, right? It's a job description that was written by somebody else. But you could change the size of those blocks. You can make some of them bigger.
You can make some of them smaller. You could bring in strengths that maybe weren't designed into your job and try to do what Amy and Jane.n have called job crafting, where you become an active architect to your job and you actually customize it to try to better suit your capabilities that you have and the ones you want to develop. And it turns out that if we give you that growth mindset about your job as well as your skills, you see a sustainable boost in your happiness over the next six months at work. There's no cost to your performance and there might even be some gains.
And so I think the idea here is to say let's not just look inward at changing ourselves. We also need to alter our context to better fit where we're trying to grow. So I'll take a slightly different read on that as somebody that my all of my success is predicated on the adoption of a growth mindset. What I realized was when I didn't think I could get better, it had a radical impact on all of my downstream behaviors.
So ultimately only your behaviors matter. So you can do the right thing for the wrong reason. You're still going to get the right result. But if you understand that all of those behaviors are downstream of the things you believe to be true, then you realize, okay, the thing I actually need to tackle is it is an internal job as far as I can tell that because if I don't believe that I can get better at something or I don't believe that I can shape my job, then I won't try to self-fuliprocify.
Exactly. When I think about, okay, how do we make lasting change in somebody that wants to change? That's the first thing I go to. You have to adopt the only belief that matters.
You have to believe if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you will actually get better. And it's interesting. You're actually making me rethink because I always say that, that if you put time and energy into getting better, you'll get better. But there is a secondary part that I think you're getting at here, which is I have to believe that I can shape things to my will.
Now, the interesting thing is that's what I always call power. I don't know how you feel about the word power. That one's also become a little controversial. I didn't grow up in an era where that word was weird.
So like, I'm so comfortable. But to me, that's personal power. You close your eyes. You imagine a world better than this one.
You open your eyes and you acquire the skills necessary to actually go and execute and get the skills you need to do the things you want to do. And so I often remind my team, because the way I came up, I didn't start. I didn't found my first company until I'd worked my way up from a copywriter to partner. And so I'm like, I'm not the CEO.
And that's why I think like this. I became the CEO because I think like this. And so the way that you really get ahead is to just act as if you can completely change everything in front of you. You can change your job.
You can persuade people to see things your way. You're not always going to pull it off. But if you believe it's doable, then you'll behave accordingly. I think that what you're calling power could also be seen as agency, right?
Which is I have the freedom and the leeway to shape my environment. I'm not a sculpture of my context. I'm actually a sculptor of it. And I think we all need that.
I think the other thing is, I think you're making an important distinction that growth mindset is not a magic bullet. It's not a panacea. But the absence of one can be devastating. So if I have a completely fixed mindset, it's really hard to imagine that I'm an operator to try to change my environment because I'm kind of, I believe that I'm stuck with it.
And I think that that's a really reasonable place to land. I wonder, I'm just thinking about it here. We like to think about that. I think you know I like that.
I think you like it too. And I feel like I don't do enough of it because my job as an organizational psychologist is to start with the evidence. And okay, here's what the evidence says. But the evidence always leaves questions unanswered.
And so let's think this throughout loud. So you think about belief as a driver of behavior. I think that's right. I think behavior also can reinforce your beliefs.
And so this can become a virtuous cycle of time. So you start out thinking, I can change my environment. And I can improve myself. Then you act in ways that basically confirm that.
And then you get feedback from your environment that says, wait a minute, that worked. Let me do more of that. And so you might be somebody who feels like opportunity has it knocked. And you realize maybe there's a way I can build a door.
Okay, that is one of the driving forces in the book that you've written hidden potential. As soon as I saw the topic, I was like between the topic and you, this is definitely going to be one that I'm excited to explore. But what I want to know is why does potential remain hidden? Are there myths or BS that people propagate and look, I'm perfectly happy if I'm like telling people something that ultimately doesn't work, then I will immediately get rid of that.
All I care about is creating actual impact on people. So you need not pull punches. So I will, in fact, I will ask for advice. I don't know how much you know about the things I spout.
But what are the misconceptions that people have? What's the bullshit that people are spreading that actually leaves people with the potential dormant? I think the great myth of potential is that you can judge where people will land by where they start. We do this to ourselves.
We do this to others constantly. The assumption is if you're a natural, if you're a prodigy, then you're going to go on to do great things. And if you struggle at first, if a task doesn't come easily to you, then you might as well give up and look elsewhere. I think you're living proof.
That's not true. But there's also a lot of science that backs it up. So one of my favorite studies looked at world-class athletes, scientists, artists, and musicians. Trying to figure out when could you see their potential?
And it turned out that the vast majority of them, people at the very top of every field, did not stand out when they were young. Their teachers did not necessarily think they were anything special. Their coaches didn't. And neither did their own parents in some cases, which I would have a conversation with those parents later.
But it's staggering that when they did stand out, they stood out more for unusual motivation than unusual ability. And I think what that tells us is, yeah, everybody starts at a different place. But ultimately, the question of potential is the distance you can travel, as opposed to, you know, what's the natural level of aptitude that you were born into or that you lucked into. So that, to me, is the starting myth that they get a lot of people in trouble.
Okay. So the one stat that I've heard that seems odd given that is that a lot of times professional athletes end up being, I think we can talk about this in the book, end up being towards the older, bigger in their class. I always thought that the knock-on effect of that is that they're outperforming. They are more confident.
They get more attention from the coaches. But then I would assume that they people would be like, oh, that kid's really got it. But that's not true. At least that's not what you just said.
So I would say it's incomplete. So you can tell that story. And that will explain a bunch of people's trajectories. And those kids weren't at the beginning better, right?
They just had the natural advantage of being older and therefore being bigger and stronger and faster and smarter. I think that there are two wrinkles that you get out of the table. So one is if you look at the hockey data. So it's true that if a hockey player is born in January or February, significantly more likely to become star, make the NHL.
What we don't talk about is the fact that the later you're born as a hockey player, if you do make it, the more successful you become. So the November and December burst at the end of the year, they do have a lower odds of getting there. If they can break through, they have a greater shot at becoming all star caliber players. And I think part of that is some people would say, well, they had to be that much better to begin with to make it.
I think that might be part of the story. But I think there's also a piece of the story that says, you know what, they had to learn to get that much better in order to overcome the obstacles that they were facing. So I think that's one big wrinkle that we don't talk about that overlook group that is overlooked. They're underdogs.
They tend to be a lot of cases later bloomers, but they ultimately make it and sometimes rise to greater heights. I think that's probably the first principle. The second principle is if you look at the brand new data on, this is also McNamara's work, Brooke McNamara, which Shinner colleague shows that the elite junior athletes are less likely to make it to world class. And so there's one group of kids that basically specializes early.
They go all in on a sport. They peak fast and then they burn out. And sometimes they burn out because they're just exhausted mentally. In other cases, they burn out because they literally pound the payments so hard that their bodies can't handle anymore.
Whereas the kids who wait longer to specialize, who delay that focus, they end up rising slower. But ultimately, they're more likely to get to the very top of international competitions. I think there's a case to be made there that what we need is a sampling period, which is we try out a bunch of activities. We figure out where maybe some of our skills lie, but also where our motivation lies.
But also the cross training pays off over time. And so I guess there's a second story that people tell here, which is, okay, if you're not a natural talent believer, then you're a hard work believer. And your story is if you worship the altar of the altar of hustle, if you pray to the high priest of grit, then you're done. Like, no, it's not about how hard you work.
It's about how well you learn. And we've all heard cliches about working smarter, not working harder. But I think the actual skills involved in working smarter get far too little attention. So what do you make up on that?
So you're taking notes. You have multiple reactions. I'm taking notes on things that we will definitely get to. But first, on that particular, I'm going to put it in a work context for a second, which is if you think of business as a sport, which I do, then this will connect directly.
I consider business the only sport that you don't, from a bodily standpoint, you don't have a clock on you. Look at Warren Buffett still going using his 80s, right? So it's really an extraordinary thing. You can play as long as you want to play.
But I think that people need to work long, hard, and smart. And people will inevitably push back on me and they'll say, Tom, if I'm working hard and smart, why do I have to also work long hours? And my answer is because you're going to go up against me and I'm doing all three. And obviously I've read your book, I've heard you talk, so I know some of the punchline is that play is an incredibly important part of this.
And so of course, I agree with you whole heartedly. And so I'll add a fourth thing and say, you need to work long, hard, and smart at something that you are obsessed with. So for me, I've literally structured my life to be as close to play as you're going to get anywhere in your garage right now, right? We are technically in my garage.
I respond violently to that because I don't like cars. So but my thing is, I've really tried to handcraft my life to be the things that I love. So for instance, if I'm playing Minecraft right now, I would be playing it as a way to learn because we're building a video game because that's not an accident. Our video game is done in a style of gaming meets anime.
That's not an accident. Those are the things that I love. We make comics. Why?
Because I read comics, right? We make comics in the style of Monwa. Why? Because I love manga.
Anybody, anybody that understands that connection will get it, but it's like, okay, so my life is really me asking if I didn't have to worry about money, what would I do? And then try to make money off that thing. But I really do feel like if you want to be one of the greats, man, and maybe people don't, and I hear that, but I'm just saying, if you want to be one of the greats, you really are going to have to go that hard. Yeah, I don't think I disagree with that.
I think I think what you're talking about is being an outlier at the very extreme. That's not to be true, but I worry that it is. I mean, I think, look, yeah, if you want to be at the very top of where you're going, there's no question that you're going to have to work hard as part of it. I would say hard work is not enough.
Number one, we know that. And number two, there is such a thing as overworking to the point that you either kill your motivation or you undermine your own creativity. And what you do see, I think we can make a pretty compelling case that there's a tradeoff at some point between quantity and quality. And so the 21st hour that you're putting in the day is probably less valuable than sleep.
That's interesting. So let's map that out. I believe the most important thing. Well, okay, God, I'm going to talk from a behavior standpoint, not from a punchline of life.
The punchline of life is fulfillment. It's love. It's all the beautiful things life has offered. But within the context of, I love how you just made that a disclaimer, by the way, because of course, the things that matter, we're not going to talk about, but let's talk about this.
We will get to those, but just to map the edges of this for a second. So within those confines of knowing I'm talking behaviors right now, sleep is the most important. So I don't want to say sleep's the most important. And then people are like, Oh, fuck you, like loves all the matters.
Yes, I get it. I'm just talking behaviors. If you don't get sleep, you will not optimize your brain. So anytime that I or anybody else starts to diminish their sleep, then I'm like, you have a problem.
Just because you won't be even if your goal is just to work as hard as humanly possible, you will begin to diminish your ability to do that. You will get brain fog. You won't be able to focus. Like I have to imagine though, you'll probably know the science of this, that you can measure a decrease in IQ if you're fatigued.
Oh, easy. Yeah. Although, you know, there are ways to offset that too. So one of my favorite studies that didn't make the book, and this is I think worth a quick D2, or there was a this is a Helmricke at all paper, they did an NASA simulation with flight crews.
And it turned out that flight crews that were exhausted actually made fewer potentially catastrophic errors in their fewer, fewer, if they'd flown together before than a brand new crew with no shared flying experience. Okay. But what about a well rested team that's flown together? That would probably be the best of both worlds.
Okay. That's interesting. So they're saying that the if you don't know each other well enough, that's worse than being tired. Yeah.
And maybe there's a greater loss to collective intelligence that comes from not knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses, not having effective routines, not having norms where you're allowed to challenge each other if you see a problem. But I think 100% with you, I would find the well rested crew that has shared experience. That's really interesting. So go back to sleep.
Sleep is the most important behavior from your perspective. So you don't want to compromise that. Yes, correct. Okay.
But everything else you have a system that's basically laser focused on what your professional goals are. Yes. So I'm huge into whatever's going to optimize my cognition. So I eat, right.
I meditate, I work out all of that stuff, which many of those things I do only because they are good for cognitive optimization. It isn't something that I intrinsically enjoy. I will say meditation is in and of itself. It's pleasurable for me.
So that that when I really like and would do occasionally, even if I didn't think it was moving me forward. But yeah, so that I definitely do all of that stuff to optimize. But then beyond that, I really resonate with somebody like Kobe Bryant who's like, look, if I'm in the gym for six hours a day, and you're only in the gym for two hours a day, I'm going to eat you alive. Like I will just be so far ahead of you, you know, three seasons, four seasons, five seasons in.
I think the same is true of business. Look, I'm only so smart. So if I can't tune my genetic dials, I have to find the other dials that I can tune. And effort is certainly one duration is another.
And then just the steady accumulation of skills since they stack would be another. I think I'm on board with all of that. I think the one thing I worry about is the, I guess, a little bit of a productivity, creativity trade off. So you raise your attention filters, you block out all the things that might be distractions.
Your productivity goes up. You're learning and the core domain goes up. You also lose out on your recomomence and unexpected connections. And so the very thing that seems to interfere with your productivity, the lowering the attention filters, let's unexpected ideas in.
And it sounds like you're designing for some of that by exploring in adjacent areas that you're working in. And I think there's probably a benefit there. But I also wonder, what can you systematize? I think DaVinci probably put it best when he said, I don't know the exact translation, but it was something like, you can't produce a work of genius according to a schedule or an outline.
And maybe you're just comfortable letting go of breakthrough radical innovation and doing kind of more incremental innovation, which actually is probably a more sustainable path to building a successful business. But how do you think about that trade off? Let's talk about money. You're leaving on the table.
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Okay. So two things. There's the Seth Godin response which I love or no actually I can't remember either Seth Godin or Chuck Pollenik those two couldn't be more different but I have no idea why both those neurofession later but they said there is no such thing as writer's block. When you're on the deadline you just have to get it done and I'm yeah I agree with that.
The other thing though I will say is that I really get driven crazy when people say I'm overwhelmed then do less. So I think people ought to be able to I use that word as a moral judgment time realizing they. You hope that people are capable of God. Well no I really do mean not.
They ought to be capable of saying oh I need to stare out the window for a while I need to go for a walk. I'm not feeling creative right now and that they'll create that space. So my thing is when you leave it all out on the field you you're not worried about judging yourself because you know look I show up every day and I play all not every day we all have days where I was lazy today but if you don't lie to yourself and you know that way on balance you really do play your guts out then when it's like you know I really think what I need right now is to stop down and just cuddle my wife for a day. I'm not saying like take 15 minutes.
People need to really think about what do I need to do to optimize myself whether and so if your job has that element of creativity to it and you need to stare out a window or go to the beach or whatever a hundred percent to it but you need if you want to achieve the extraordinary you need to be able to trust yourself to say I will do this until I know I'm now avoiding something else and it's no longer adding up to something and because I have earned that within myself when I need time off I take time off. I would say ideally before you need it right. I don't mind sucking. Yeah you don't want to be the person I mean I've done this literally in a car more times than I have to admit like waiting until it tells you you can go zero miles before you pull off the gas station.
Ideally you're scheduling the quarter tank. Yeah now how do you do that? I think I'm usually trying not to waste time and it wasn't on my plan to stop for gas. Interesting okay but I clearly need to rethink that I had a hit zero and the gas station was not in sight and that was a little terrifying.
Have you a few months ago? I've never had a this is the other problem. Every time I hit zero well I've never run out before that must be lying to me. There must be a little bit more left in the tank and I did not want to push that any farther but yeah I think obviously humans are machines but the idea of scheduling breaks at planned intervals I think is really important.
So what would you say what would you say to a Beethoven who wants to take walks as long as his workday and who only really seemed to do three or four hours of focus work a day. You don't get greater at music than Beethoven. Yeah I mean that would be my answer. So the thing I think everybody should judge themselves by are the results and results that are set by you.
What are you looking for? What is the metric by which you're going to judge success and so I think one of the things people really struggle with is they don't have clarity. They don't know what they want and if you don't know what you want then you're not going to be able to measure whether you're getting there or not. So if somebody knows you're Beethoven you're like this is how many symphonies I want to write this month or this year or whatever and then did you do the things that you needed to do in order to hit that and now we should probably talk what really is the punchline of life which is I think at the highest level it's how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself.
So if you don't like yourself all the money and success in the world your life will still suck and you will be racing towards suicide. So I wouldn't do that. So I would do things that really earn your respect but you have to be careful because you're going to respect yourself based on your beliefs and your values. So be thoughtful about what you build your beliefs and values around.
You talk a lot about this. You need to anchor on something that's real. Like you need to be lathering your hard work and all that around something you actually care about otherwise you're going to be in trouble. But if he loves his life back to Beethoven if he loves his life and he's hitting his goals I don't have any problem with that.
I don't mind if somebody wants to stare at a wall all day. Like I really don't mind that. I want to help people achieve what they want to achieve. I mind that a little.
Lay out from me what ought and I use that word in the moral sense. What ought people strive for? Well I don't think it's my place to determine that. So I'm kind of with you.
Whatever your values are. I want to try to figure out how you can align your goals and your behaviors with those values. But I think we should have a hierarchy of values. I think all else equal if you're doing something that's useful to other people and makes their lives better.
I feel much better than if it's totally self-serving. I think you just touched on something that I have a real issue with in hustle culture and it sounds like you do too. Which is when people turn hard work into a virtue they forget that hard work is actually not in and of itself a morally worthy end. It's a means to an end.
Really? Okay wait so let's talk about this. Read your book. I was like yeah I'm a purist.
I am a child of the purist. Your Protestant revolution. You've internalized the Protestant work at the 100%. I think I did too for a long time and I still subscribe to parts of it.
Like I'm a. Either parts you hate about it. Yeah I mean well look okay so let me do the double short. I'm a beneficiary and maybe also a victim of learned industriousness.
The idea that you get rewarded over and over again for effort which is what Carol Dweck and other growth mindset researchers have long encouraged. And then at some point effort itself starts to take on secondary reward properties. And the feeling of hard work itself is satisfying. I have felt that since at least I was a teenager maybe even earlier and it's propelled a lot of the growth that I've achieved.
At the same time sometimes I work hard at something because you know I internalize the goal of somebody else's and then I realize this doesn't benefit anyone and I don't enjoy it. And so if I'm not working hard on something that I think is worthwhile why am I investing my hard work there and that's the part I would question. Do you object to that? So I've long thought of it in the following way.
I'm always trying to figure out what has evolution optimized us for. So evolution only has two levers pleasure and pain and with those two very blunt instruments it creates an incredible diversity of behavior. And I have a feeling that the following statement is evolutionarily accurate though I don't have hard science to back this up. But when I think about fulfillment being the closest thing to the ideal state that I can steer people towards.
And the reason I steer people towards fulfillment of happiness is very transient. You can't be happy and grieve at the same time. But you can be fulfilled and grieving at the same time. So that just strikes me.
It's a positive state. It's far more resilient. So I started thinking okay what is fulfillment? What is it born of?
I think it's the following though. Somebody has a better definition. I'm here for it. You must work hard to gain a set of skills that you care about for whatever intrinsic reason that allow you to serve not only yourself but others.
I think those are all evolutionary levers that nature had to incentivize. So we're a social creature. So if you're just doing it for yourself you won't feel right unless you're a sociopath. And if somebody came to me and they were like I am profoundly depressed I'd say go serve somebody.
Like but really go serve somebody. And I think that I barring a catastrophic like inability to create serotonin or whatever I don't think you can meaningfully serve others and be depressed. It's a it's a gut instinct. I have not run any tests but that seems pretty relevant.
And then the work hard part to me is evolution from an evolutionary standpoint life was hyper dangerous and very difficult. And if you weren't courageous and willing to work hard then you were going to starve to death effectively. And so that feels like the right cocktail of if you align yourself with those things you'll just feel better. So interesting.
Okay so I've I've thoughts and questions. Let's start on the serving others question for a second. So on the one hand I'm in agreement with you that actually empirically if you look at the effect sizes on average helping other people is about as good for reducing depression and anxiety as taking the best known antidepressants and anti-exciting medications on the market. It's not bigger.
It might be it's I think part of the problem is it's hard to quantify and compare. So you know how many hours of service or generosity do we equate to a given dose? No grams of un-antidopress. You would know more about that than I would but I don't know how to do it from a behavior perspective.
But and this is not to say by the way that I think helping others is a substitute for medication or for therapy. It's just to say it has a really powerful effect. The same way that we would tell someone look the average effects of exercise are huge and you should not overlook those because that's a behavior you can control. On the other hand there is there is good evidence I'm thinking about Helgussin and Fritz among others to suggest that there's a particular kind of service that can be problematic from a depression and anxiety standpoint which is basically self-sacrifice.
They call it unmitigated communion and it's the idea of I care a lot about helping other people and I have zero concern for myself and then I start to sacrifice sleep. I don't work out. I don't spend time doing things that nourish me. I'm all about just responding on other people's needs because I want to be needed.
And I've come to believe that actually being needed could be a little unhealthy. That needed too much or needed full stop. I think that I have a problem with the idea of being needed. That someone else is fully dependent on me.
What I want to be is valued. As a father of three, help me reconcile that. Well look I think maybe there are exceptions to that. I think it's okay for kids to need their parents but also you want to teach your kids to be independent and to be self-sufficient at some point or to rely on others for specific things but not to need one person for everything.
And so I'd much rather be valued than needed in general. I guess I'm thinking about friendships. And you give me when you say value just the other person's like wow I'm glad you're in my life. I think it's I think about it a lot when people ask for help.
I need you to do this versus I would really appreciate it if you could do this. I want anybody who's in a position to seek help to have multiple places to go and to not be solely a real line on one person. And I think it's a great travesty of modern society that a lot of people don't have access to that. Very interesting.
I've not thought about that before. Okay so that makes sense to me. I think it is a big thing that people need to serve themselves as well as others. That's why I think it's really important that whatever you're working hard at is something that for whatever reason that you don't need to justify to people.
You're just into that thing. Like I have known for a very long time that the way that I would contribute to others was through storytelling. It may not be the most effective though. I do think it's pretty potent.
But the reality is I'm not pursuing it because I think it's the best. I'm pursuing it because that's my passion. And so finding something that you love being unapologetic about it but finding a way that you can leverage that to lift somebody else up make them smile whatever. I don't go play guitar but have a sense of I play guitar as a way to bring some joy to other people and not just buy myself in my room.
Again not because I pass a moral judgment on that I don't. But because I think that it's not in line with what evolution had in mind. And so you will end up feeling a profound sense of disease and not know why. Yeah so I think we're in sync there.
I think it's interesting. I reminded of there was an E.B. White quote that I loved where he said I wake up in the morning torn between a desire to enjoy the world and improve the world. And this makes it very difficult to plan the day.
It's pretty good. It kind of does but I think the research I've read on this says that over time people gravitate toward trying to align it to and say I want to find things that I enjoy that are also helpful to others. And I want to find ways of helping others that I personally enjoy and I think whichever place you start that's the only sustainable place to land. That makes sense.
So now talk to me about what does it take to really become extraordinary. You have a lot of examples in the book not the least of which is your own with diving and how you got better and better there. But even somebody like Steph Curry who's documentary if I remember is called underrated. And he's a great example in the book.
What is that process? Well let's start with Steph Curry because I think there's an incredible scene in the documentary that came out after I turned in the book. This is a missing scene. I learned so much from his trainer Brandon Payne about how they structure practice to bring out the best in Steph Curry and keep him.
I think he's already the best shooter in the history of basketball and he wants to keep getting better. So if you look back at how he did that early on, there's a scene. You saw the documentary? I haven't seen it yet.
I don't want to do a spoiler on the whole thing but you kind of already know where he ends up. But there's one scene in particular that I cannot get out of my head which is Steph Curry's in high school. He's short. He's not six feet yet.
No way he's going to be tall enough to make the NBA based on that growth trajectory. I think it's probably the assumption. And he's got a huge problem which is every time he takes a shot he's guarded by somebody who is tall. He gets blocked because he's shooting from his hip and it's a really slow developing shot.
It comes from low, people can see it coming and then just slide it down and sometimes they don't even have to jump. And he watched. Sky is going nowhere. So he talks to his dad.
It helps to have a dad who is an NBA player. Yeah. When you're running that wall. And his dad says, you've got to rebuild your shot.
If you want to get to the next level, if you want to play in college, you have to stop shooting from the hip and start releasing higher. It's going to be a faster release. It's also going to be harder to block. That's your path.
And you watch Steph Curry literally lose the ability to shoot. He has to start over and go back to the drawing board. And I think a lot of people are unwilling to do that because he was a really good shooter shooting from his hip. And the idea of going backward and saying I've got to give up the games I've already made and start over from scratch.
That's just too much to lose. But Steph Curry is passionately committed to getting better. And he wants to play in college. So he literally goes through months of just brick after brick after brick.
So what do I take from that? I take from that a couple things. One, sometimes you have to reverse to go forward. A step back and lead to two steps forward if you find a better method.
And that's exactly what he's doing. Two, you have to then be willing to embrace the discomfort of saying this is going to feel like crap. And three, you have to be willing to tolerate imperfection and say I'm going to make a lot of mistakes. I'm going to get worse on the path of getting better.
And that to me is a bunch of character skills that we don't teach enough. But we ought to. Okay. But I'm going to guess that there is a lot more than just a willingness to go backwards.
What do we, in terms of drilling, repetition, ability to push your boredom, like where, where, what breaks most people? Because I've said many times boredom kills more dreams than failure ever will. From an entrepreneurship standpoint, yeah, I see that all the time in terms of people that I work with, in terms of entrepreneurs that come to me seeking help. I'm just like the number of days that you're going to spend doing things that you absolutely do not want to do, but they just have to get done in order to get to the next level.
It's like you can avoid it a little bit more maybe if you're, you know, just working for somebody else because you can, what do they call it? Quiet quitting, you can back off. Yeah, you can do it. But if you're going to be the one responsible for everybody's paycheck, all of a sudden you just have to do it.
It's an idea that you touch on in the book. Yeah. What's the deal? Okay.
So long before burnout, what you're talking about is the problem that psychologists call it bore out, which I was delighted to find this actual term. Literally, you're bored out of your mind. And I think that comes from the way that most people think about deliberate practice, which is I've got to, I've got to just push myself through. I've got to, I've got to push as hard as I can through this slog.
It's monotonous, it's repetitive, but I know I need to do it. And the problem is like, bore out is sort of the opposite of burnout in that it's under stimulation and chronically that actually is a source of burnout. And that's your point about how boredom kills more dreams than failure does because repeated experiences of born out, just at some point, I cannot, I can't find a will to do this. I just don't want to do it anymore.
I'm exhausted. So Steph Curry's trainer Brandon Payne has a really interesting solution to this. He, he does what I would call drawing from whole body work at Sports Psychology, deliberate play, is supposed to deliver it practice. And it's the idea that I want to take the specific skill I want to build.
And I want to, I don't want to gamify it in the sense that we're going to create a leader board or a bunch of bells and whistles to trick you into liking the thing you hate. I actually want to re-engineer the very process of skill building. So it's fun. So for Steph, an example of one of the games Brandon created is called 21.
He's got a minute and a half to score 21 points from anywhere on the court. And the shots are deliberately calibrated so that his best shot of making the 21 is to shoot from places that he's not that accurate. And also he's got to move really fast and get out of breath so that he's stimulating what he would do in a real game. And guess what?
That score, he has a personal best, which is, okay, how fast can I do 21? And then instead of having to, to compete against other people, he's actually trying to compete against his best, excuse me, instead of having to try to compete against other people, he's basically trying to raise the bar for his future self and defeat his past self. And I think that kind of deliberate play is a great solution to borrow because you're taking the daily grind and you're actually turning it into a source of daily joy. It is a fun challenge for Steph Curry to say, okay, can I get 21 in a minute today?
How do you want people to apply this in their normal life? Like does all this stuff apply to a career? Does this only apply if on sports? Like how do you apply this if you're not the entrepreneur or you're in the accounting department at a big company?
Well, let me actually give you my personal example because after writing this chapter, I was like, I should probably practice what I was teaching there and see if I can put this into action. So I was thinking about the most boring parts of my job. And the thing I hate most as an author is editing just bores the hell out of me. Like I already figured out the idea of the AHA, the insight is there.
I've covered the evidence, I found a story to bring it to life. And now I'm just tinkering. It's like, you know, I'm on the one yard line and I've already marched all the way down the field. The last yard takes so much effort to try to refine it.
And it doesn't feel to me like I'm learning anything or contributing anything, but I know it matters for the reader's experience. And it's the task that I procrastinate on most most, I will start the next chapter instead of editing the last one. I'll put it away for weeks because I just don't get energized by it. And then I wrote this chapter about deliberate play and said, I've got to turn this into deliberate play.
How do I do that? All right, let me take a, I've got specific things I'm trying to improve in my editing. So one thing that I've struggled with for a long time is concreteness and imagery. I'm an abstract thinker.
I'm very cognitive. I start with the data. And I need to, I need to have lots of stories so that people can, who are much more, I guess more narrative oriented than I am for you, for example, you love stories, right? I need to have a story in there that you can relate to and say, ah, okay, that makes the evidence stick.
So I'm trying to rewrite a paragraph. I'm trying to turn a study into a story. Why don't I try to write this in the voice of Maya Angelou? And that's my game.
Can I take a paragraph and rewrite it as Maya Angelou would write it? Always Maya Angelou. No, so that was the first thought. And then I thought, okay, I went to poetry because poets are great at imagery.
Let me also go to some of my favorite fiction authors. How would John Green write this story? How would JK Rowling do it? How would Maggie Smith do it?
And that becomes a little experiment where every day I've got a different author I'm working on. And I'm trying to write a little bit in their voice. And now we have Claude and Chate GPT. And I can actually compare what I came up with to what the generative AI tool produced and learn something in the process.
Anything is fun now. No, I don't want to say it's fun. It's kind of fun. And I almost like it.
That's really interesting. So how did you come up with that game? How do people figure out what their way of making something play is? So really good question.
So for me, it started with, I was actually reading, I was reading Harlan Coben, who's just great at page starters. And I was like, wow, okay, how would Harlan Coben do this? And then I realized it wasn't enough of a stretch for me because Harlan builds a lot of psychology into his books. And so I went to Maya Angelou as a more extreme option.
How would I do that if I were in a different area? I think where I would start is I would say, let's look at, let's take a job. What's a task you hate, Tom, that you find boring? Oh, God, anything to find?
Finance. Okay, what's the best about finance in particular? There is something weird about the way my brain processes numbers. I can feel myself.
It's like running a marathon in quicksand. And so all of a sudden, when I go from like what we're doing now, I feel sharp, I feel alert, I can put ideas together very quickly. But once it gets to math, I can do it. And I at times feel like I think about the numbers in a more useful way than many of my peers.
However, I do it so slowly that I'm just like, this is really unbearable. I cognitively feel unrecognizable to myself. It's very weird. And so that makes it because it's so inefficient.
It just makes it a real slog. And there's no story. There's no emotion to it. It's all just like, where do we have to cut?
Where do we add? Oh, God. Okay. And so what's the what are you trying to do with numbers that involves learning or scaling?
So the involves learning or skill building that I'm not sure yet. I don't know how to answer that question, but I will say what I'm trying to get to is, okay, how do we capital allocate? Knowing what my goals are, where do I allocate the resources in order to get to that next level? Or what story is the data telling?
That gets a little more fun in terms of trying to actually analyze. But as you like really dig in, you start trying to cross check to make sure I'm not telling a fake story that this is the real story that the data is telling. That just gets really tedious. Okay.
So a few places I would start. One option would be to pick something you already enjoy and try to graft it onto this process. So could you write a comic book about your capital allocation? It's really interesting.
I don't know. I'd have to think about that. The way I have done it historically is I will reward myself. So like, okay, this is your objective.
You need to get this done by this time. And if you get that done by that time, then I get to move on to the things that I find fun. So I will often do if I have art to review, which I love, I'll say, okay, I see that I've got art to review, but I also have finance to do. I'm going to do the finance first.
And if I finish it, you know, by whatever time, then I can go do the art stuff. But I've never thought about how to turn that into a game. I mean, I think it's a timer is interesting. It's an experience, definitely an experiment to run.
Yeah. So you can do a timer and accelerate the reward if you finish a little faster without making mistakes. Yeah, even just doing something where I'm beating my personal best. So this goes into, okay, where we build video game series, which not many people know yet.
So we think a lot about gamification. And you talk in the book about you don't want shallow play, you want deep play as a deep play as we call it. Dan Quayle called it deep fund, which I love the term for instead of fun with that in mind. So how do you go from the shallow gamification of just like get better time, get, you know, experience points, whatever in a video game to something that's deep fun, because this really applies to me on multiple levels, one to go help me better orchestrate a game of things that I find boring, but also help me make better video games.
Maybe we'll find out. I think the difference between shallow and deep fun is about purpose. It's about saying, hey, I'm going to find a way to enjoy the process of working toward a goal that really matters that I believe in. So how many people are working on video games right now?
The team fluctuates, but call it 15 full time. Okay, so what I would do is I would take those 15 people and say, let's start with them. Let's do a brain writing exercise, where we're going to we're going to each jot down 20 ideas for how we're going to take the financing part of building a video game company and make it more fun. We're going to collect everybody's ideas.
We're all going to rate them independently. And then we're going to just pilot the five best ideas. And then you've got a little bit of deep fun in the process of trying to get everybody's independent creative problem solving skills focused on this problem. And then ideally, they've also come up with some things that would be fun to try.
You do a lot of consulting in business, right? I do more consulting than I intend to, but I've given up on formal consulting and made it advising. I'm happy to tell you, here's what I've seen in the randomized control experiments and logical studies, happy to give you examples from other organizations I've worked with. I will not tell you how to implement it because your company is best run by you.
And I can hold up a mirror and kind of reflect some problems to you and generate some solutions you might not have thought of, but you need to have ownership over whether you're going to take those seriously or not. I asked because I'm curious, who has gamified the workload the most interestingly? So I don't know if this counts as gamified, but I'm definitely going to say it's a version of deep, deep fun. And it's probably a variation on something we were talking about earlier, which is job crafting.
So have you ever been a Morningstar, the tomato paste plant in Northern California? Believe it or not, I've never even heard of them. Okay, good. So one of the most interesting organizations I've ever visited.
So I went there five or six years ago to do a podcast episode because I found out that they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They've never had a single boss since the 1980s. And I was like, this is, we've all heard about Holochrusty in the tech world. They started it much earlier and they found a way to make it effective in manufacturing.
I just want to see that, I want to understand. And they do a lot of unusual things that may not be, it could fit for anybody's company, but they do have some processes that I thought were really compelling. So one thing they do is when you join Morningstar on day one, they don't know how to assign you a job because you don't report to anyone. And eventually they realize what we should do is just give you the job of your predecessor.
And you do that for the first year. At the end of year one, then you get to rewrite your own job description. How fun is that? You get to figure out what you enjoy doing, what you think is meaningful.
And that's now your new job. But they put guardrails around it. I was going to say, yeah, they have a couple of them. One guardrail is you have to write up an explanation of how what you want to do is get a better advance than the mission than the prior version of your job.
So you've got to make a case that this is going to generate collective value. Number two, you then have to go to the five to 10 people you're most independent with and get their buy-in and convince them that this is a better version of your job. And if you do that, you have created a more fun, more meaningful version of your job. Committee that has to approve it.
It's basically, they call it a colleague letter of understanding. And so there's a group of your colleagues who have to give you the thumbs up. Wow. Okay.
This is super weird. And this really starts to lean into the future of work. Okay. So without you having to endorse this is like the thing everybody should do.
It's an experiment. I want to understand why and how. So what made them embark on that journey back in the 80s? I think they realized at some point that they wanted to build a company on self management.
So they were into the idea that people should have a more autonomy at work than they do. And they hated the idea that there would be office space style, eight bosses breathing down your neck and micromanaging you. And they said, what if we treat people like adults? What if we not only recruit but develop on intrinsic motivation and encourage people to really think about how what they care about and enjoy aligns with what's good for the company.
And then they said at some point, you should be an active architect of your own job. And we're not going to start over from scratch in most cases. We're going to have you tinker with your existing job to try to make it better. But if you want to make a radical change and you think there's a better way for you to contribute to the company, we want to know that.
Because a lot of people are, you know, are sort of selected into a job that just was not made for the middle. And I thought that was cool. I don't think that it has to be that extreme. So let's now pull back and bring this into like, how does a slightly more traditional workplace do this?
So WL Gore, have you spent any time with them? No. So they made Gore texts. You probably know them for their gloves and winter gear.
They have instead of a ladder hierarchy, they built a lattice system. And the simple idea, Igor is normally in companies, good ideas die when one person up the ladder above you rejects them. And they said, what if we did the opposite? What if instead of one, no killing an idea?
We allowed one, yes, to give life to an idea. So the idea in a lattice is you can go to multiple people at different levels of the hierarchy and pitch your idea or your project. And all you need is one of them to give it the green light in order to begin working on it. And that means you could spend 10 or 20% of your time on something that's very defund for you that might generate value for others.
I loved one example they had where a guy basically said, hey, the some of the GORE-TEX material that we have that repels grit on bike cables. I wonder if that could keep the grit off my guitar strings. And he starts prototyping it. He brings in this guy, John Spencer, and John finds a sponsor for it in the company.
He finds one senior executive who says, yeah, sounds interesting. And three years later, they have one of the most successful guitar strings on the market. And I think it keeps the strings clean dramatically longer than the existing options. That was somebody's idea.
They dreamed up. They thought it would be fun to work on. They then realized this could be really valuable to the organization. And they had to find one person who could approve the investment in it.
And that's all they needed. I don't know why more companies don't run that experiment. Can I tell you? Yeah, tell me.
That sounds like a suicide run. So as you were talking about, I was like, okay, hold on, these are companies with just ridiculously high profit margins that I don't know how long they've been in business. But if the tomato company's been around since the 80s, I get it. There is a point at which it becomes hyper predictable.
But I mean, they've survived recessions because my immediate reaction is at least in a small company where you're fighting for every dollar, there's hyper variability. We make a lot of our revenue off of YouTube. And that means I'm in a knife fight with the algorithm, which people are, it's share of eyeball time. There's only so many things that people can watch.
And YouTube could not care less, whether it's me or somebody else, they just want to keep you on the platform. They'll care to a certain extent because we do highbrow content. If you guys will give me that our CPM speak for themselves, we get fucking high CPMs. I'm going to be unapologetic about it.
And that might lean towards us a little bit. But if we take our eye off the ball for half a second, somebody else is going to come in in the space. They're going to take some percentage of our share away. They're just new people entering the space every day.
And so the thought of being able to look away and expect it to be the same when we come back, just non-existent. Now, I am a big believer in, I don't scale. So me micromanaging people is even worse than just like walking away. But it seems that what you need and the reason that more companies don't do that is you need to know exactly where you're trying to get to.
You need to communicate how we're going to get there. You need to leave room for better ideas because I operate on what Ray Dalio calls the dot collector. So you want people to be able to give feedback to anybody anytime. So if somebody thinks my strategy is dumb, I would want them to give feedback.
The whole company can see, by the way. I tell people to give me feedback aggressively and in public. And I do that because I want to set the standard. I want people getting weird about somebody saying they don't like their idea or whatever.
But man, like the odds, I don't want to make a blanket statement because I will do whatever works. But with my experience, the odds of people pulling in opposite directions border on 100% and that's a risk. I agree with that. I agree with how they keep laser focus.
Okay. So I think you may be right, Gore may be able to get away with that because they have some very well-defined market niches and they're successful and they have a lot capacity. Maybe a better example of how you would take this into a more traditional company is innovation tournaments. So great example, Dow Chemical years ago says we're looking for ideas that will save energy and reduce waste.
And we'll let anybody in the company submit proposals. They have to cost no more than 200 grand US and they have to be at least have the potential to pay for themselves within a year. And they're very focused call for this is what we want. You then have peers and subject matter experts evaluating the proposals promising ones might be paragraph at first, then they get advanced around to you read a couple pages, maybe get paired up with somebody who had a similar idea.