Transcript
00:00:00Some of the worst advice in the world doesn't come from idiots.
00:00:03It comes from people who are smart, people who care, people who read books,
00:00:07people who are trying to help, and that's why it's so dangerous.
00:00:10I'm here with David Epstein, the great science writer and multiple New York Times bestselling author.
00:00:16David has consulted NASA and pro sports teams and four to five hundred companies.
00:00:20I worked in the White House. We heard a lot of this nonsense, and we know that it's wrong,
00:00:24and so now what we're going to do is we're going to break it down,
00:00:27explain why it's wrong, and tell you how to do better.
00:00:29A lot of this advice, it doesn't come from nowhere.
00:00:31It actually comes from research, but that research has been changed
00:00:35or applied the wrong way in public translation.
00:00:38I've spent years digging through research, and sometimes when it becomes popular
00:00:42and gets translated to the public, it loses a lot of that nuance
00:00:46and can really become rigid rules that don't help people get where they're trying to go.
00:00:51So let's get into it.
00:00:52The first piece of dangerous advice that smart people believe is
00:00:55that cynicism is a sign of intelligence.
00:00:57We have evidence out there that when people are cynical, other people say,
00:01:00wow, they're really smart.
00:01:01Look how critical they are.
00:01:03Look how much they can deconstruct.
00:01:04When in fact, we have evidence that cynical people score worse on cognitive tests.
00:01:09I agree with that.
00:01:09I think skepticism, I think there is an element of skepticism with intelligent people,
00:01:13but I think that's different from cynicism, and that's important to recognize.
00:01:16Absolutely.
00:01:17And I think in many ways, the better predictor of intelligence is openness.
00:01:20Openness to new ideas.
00:01:21Openness to the possibility that you're wrong.
00:01:23Skepticism of yourself as well, one of the things that really irritated me about law school
00:01:27is that legal practice is actually advantages people who are cynical and pessimistic and good
00:01:32at deconstructing.
00:01:33And I was somebody who was actually not that cynical, who was actually reasonably optimistic
00:01:36and reasonably good at constructing.
00:01:39So I felt like I was always bicycling into the wind.
00:01:41So in any way, if you are cynic, you're not that smart.
00:01:44And you ended up as not a lawyer.
00:01:45Right.
00:01:46So never quit.
00:01:47Grit is everything.
00:01:49Grit, important.
00:01:51Perseverance, important.
00:01:52But even Angela Duckworth, the guru of grit, has now been altering what she says and is championing
00:01:57what she calls the paramecium principle, where like the single-celled organism, which just moves
00:02:01toward where it senses food or warmth, and then moves a little more if it senses more.
00:02:05I mean, I was in her class when she was talking to her students and saying, this is what you
00:02:08want to do.
00:02:09If you get some signal there, go a little more that way.
00:02:11Maybe pivot the other way if you see something there.
00:02:13So instead of holding tight to a long-term plan, you want people pivoting in response to their
00:02:19lived experience.
00:02:20It's interesting because I want to believe the idea that you should never quit.
00:02:23That feels viscerally right to me.
00:02:24And yet, there are times when not quitting is really just escalation of commitment to a
00:02:29failing course of action.
00:02:30And so you want to get rid of that.
00:02:32All right.
00:02:33The famous Churchill quote, he says, never, never, never, never, never, never give up.
00:02:36We always cut off the part that says like, accept when it's good sense to stop.
00:02:39Exactly, exactly.
00:02:40So, boys and girls, sometimes you should quit.
00:02:43My next one is avoid awkwardness.
00:02:46I feel like we spend too much of our time avoiding things that are awkward.
00:02:51And to me, that's a mistake for a couple of reasons.
00:02:53Number one, it's a forecasting error.
00:02:55So a lot of things that we anticipate are going to be awkward.
00:02:57Having an uncomfortable conversation, reaching out to an old friend, asking somebody out on
00:03:02a date.
00:03:02Our perception, our prediction of what the awkwardness is far higher than the actual awkwardness
00:03:08of it as well.
00:03:09And the second reason that I think that avoiding awkwardness is a bad idea is that sometimes
00:03:13awkwardness discomfort is a good signal.
00:03:15It's a sign that you're learning.
00:03:17It's a sign that, oh my gosh, you know, I remember I took an acting class and I'm not
00:03:20a very good actor and it was really awkward.
00:03:22But the thing is, the awkwardness was a signal.
00:03:24It's like, hey, I'm doing something new and I'm learning.
00:03:26Yeah, totally.
00:03:26And I think your subtext there is the spotlight effect, right?
00:03:29Where when you feel awkward, it's like other people aren't paying that much attention
00:03:32to it as you think because they're paying attention to themselves.
00:03:34Absolutely right.
00:03:35That was not awkward for me.
00:03:36Okay, so I agree with that.
00:03:37Always make the choice that preserves optionality.
00:03:39So keep your options open as long as possible.
00:03:41In many cases in life, especially early on, you do want to have options and be able to
00:03:45pivot.
00:03:46But at some point, I think people often make choices just to preserve their options.
00:03:49Yeah.
00:03:50Keep their options open.
00:03:51I love this work, this research by Scott Stanley on sliding versus deciding in relationships
00:03:55where people don't commit in their mind because they want to keep their options open.
00:03:58But they end up going through the steps of commitment anyway, and they end up in less
00:04:01satisfactory relationships because they slid into it thinking they're keeping their options
00:04:05open instead of making a proactive decision.
00:04:07Yeah, I don't want to keep talking my own tortured experience, but this reminds me a little bit
00:04:11of law school, too, because a lot of people go to law school.
00:04:13They spend their whole life keeping their options open.
00:04:15There's one of my favorite stories is a probably apocryphal story about a thing from Lyndon
00:04:18Johnson about Texans wearing a cowboy hat.
00:04:21You know this one, right?
00:04:22And there's a huge wall in front of him.
00:04:23He says, how am I going to get it over the wall?
00:04:25It's like, there's no way I can scale this wall.
00:04:27And what he does is he throws his cowboy hat over the wall and he's like, okay, now I'm
00:04:30stuck.
00:04:31Now I have to commit.
00:04:32So basically commitment rather than keeping your options is sometimes the right move.
00:04:35Keep your options open sometime, I guess is what you're saying.
00:04:37Yeah, keep them open sometimes.
00:04:38But like you said, don't keep your options open for your entire life.
00:04:40Right.
00:04:41Sometimes you want to make choices.
00:04:42Choices are going to be made.
00:04:43Right.
00:04:43So you want to make them proactively instead of trying to keep your options open.
00:04:46And keeping your options open rather than making a choice is itself a choice.
00:04:49Asking for help or advice makes you look weak.
00:04:52Big mistake.
00:04:52One of the biggest pieces of counsel that I give to younger people is to ask other people
00:04:57for advice.
00:04:58And there are a couple of reasons for that.
00:04:59Number one is that one of the things we know about the research on feedback in general is
00:05:03that the best feedback is actionable.
00:05:05And so when you ask for feedback, that is instead of asking for feedback, you ask for advice.
00:05:10You're framing the conversation in a way that it's going to give you something actionable.
00:05:13That's one thing.
00:05:14So you get actually actionable guidance on how to move forward.
00:05:17The other thing is that it's another forecasting area because we think that if we ask people
00:05:21for advice, they're going to think less of us.
00:05:23And they actually think more of us because you're coming to me for advice.
00:05:25Wow.
00:05:26What a student judgment you have.
00:05:27I'm all for asking people for advice, asking for help.
00:05:30It's another forecasting area.
00:05:31We think that people are going to be less generous, less helpful than they actually will
00:05:34be.
00:05:34I mostly agree.
00:05:35Okay.
00:05:36Let me throw one caveat in there.
00:05:37Okay.
00:05:37Which is for the first time in my three books, but the third one, I decided to ask advice of
00:05:41other authors on titles and covers and things like that.
00:05:44And I'd never done that before.
00:05:45And the advice was all over the place.
00:05:47No two people agreed on the same thing.
00:05:49And so it put me in the position of soliciting advice from like 10 authors that I really like
00:05:52and ending up ignoring basically nine of them.
00:05:55Yeah.
00:05:55And I was one of them that you ignored.
00:05:57And you were one of them.
00:05:58Thank you for that.
00:05:59So here's the thing.
00:06:00Ask for advice.
00:06:01Just don't ask me for advice if you're not going to take it.
00:06:02That's right.
00:06:03So yeah.
00:06:03Be careful with you if you ask.
00:06:05Set expectations.
00:06:06People are most creative when they are most free.
00:06:08And I picked this one from a recent survey that psychologists ran in a number of different
00:06:11countries looking at the most prominent creativity myths.
00:06:14The most prominent was that people are most creative when they are most free.
00:06:17Interesting.
00:06:18Because in fact, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made
00:06:21for preventing you from having to think whenever possible.
00:06:23And so if you have a ton of freedom, you'll just go down what cognitive psychologists call
00:06:27the path of least resistance.
00:06:28Right.
00:06:28Meaning you'll do the same things that you've seen before.
00:06:31So you actually need boundaries and constraints to struggle against in order to be creative.
00:06:36But I think people think that what you want is total freedom.
00:06:38But in fact, that will just cause you to go where you've already been.
00:06:40Yeah.
00:06:40I think that's interesting.
00:06:41I'm going to agree to a point.
00:06:43I'm going to be like 84% agree.
00:06:4584.
00:06:45Okay.
00:06:45Very specific.
00:06:4684% agree.
00:06:47You're going to add some decimal points there.
00:06:4884.7% agree.
00:06:50Okay.
00:06:50Now I believe you.
00:06:52And freedom, it's a balance.
00:06:53Because I think a lot of times the experience that some people have at work, it's overly constrained.
00:06:57And I think there's a difference between constraints and control.
00:07:00Right.
00:07:00So for instance, constraints I think are generally a positive thing.
00:07:03But there are a lot of people on the job, even doing creative work, who feel controlled.
00:07:07They're told exactly how to do it.
00:07:08And when people are controlled, they either comply or defy, but they don't create.
00:07:13Fair point.
00:07:13So yeah, some constraints are great.
00:07:15And I try to do that as much as I can myself.
00:07:17Next one.
00:07:18You can make good choices for your future self.
00:07:20And I think that's a myth sometimes.
00:07:23Because we don't know our future self.
00:07:25I guess all the things that I have are like basic forecasting errors.
00:07:28There's some great research from Hal Hirschfield at UCLA, who found that a reason that people didn't save for retirement is that they imagined their future self.
00:07:37So the David of age 80 as a totally different person from the David of today.
00:07:42So we don't know our future selves.
00:07:44We don't know who we're going to be.
00:07:45We also make choices like the end of history illusion, which is that we think, I look back on my life.
00:07:50It's like, oh, in the last 10 years, wow, I've changed a lot.
00:07:52I have different interests.
00:07:52I have different things.
00:07:53And then when I forecast out the next 10 years, I say, oh, no, but 10 years from now, I'm going to be exactly the same.
00:07:58So we're not very good at understanding our future selves, making good choices about our future selves.
00:08:03And I think that gets in trouble.
00:08:04Yeah, I think there's pretty good research also showing that people think they're going to be willing to do things in the future that they're not now.
00:08:09Like, I'll exercise in the future.
00:08:11I'll save money in the future.
00:08:12But you're not doing it now.
00:08:13It means there's probably something wrong with your decision-making model.
00:08:16Absolutely.
00:08:17So forget about your future self.
00:08:19Okay.
00:08:19I think you're going to agree with this one.
00:08:20Good learning feels fluent.
00:08:22Good learning feels fluent.
00:08:23Good learning feels easy.
00:08:24Like, you feel like you're learning the best when you're actually doing the best learning.
00:08:27And I think this is contradicted by the whole area of desirable difficulties in cognitive psychology,
00:08:31which show that actually techniques like forcing yourself to do a test before you actually know the material
00:08:38primes you to learn even though it feels terrible.
00:08:40Right.
00:08:41It slows you down.
00:08:41It's more frustrating.
00:08:42And so there are actually really interesting studies looking at people rating professors and teachers sometimes.
00:08:47And they tend to rate them based on the feeling of fluency, like how fluid their own learning feels.
00:08:51And that is often exactly opposite to their actual learning.
00:08:54Because it's like going to the gym, but for your brain.
00:08:56Like, the stuff doesn't feel good.
00:08:58You're damaging muscle.
00:08:59You're tweaking tissue.
00:09:00But that's what builds you up.
00:09:01And so people tend to rate based on getting things right.
00:09:04And they're not getting enough wrong when they're actually studying.
00:09:06They're not lifting enough weights.
00:09:08That's right.
00:09:08Yeah.
00:09:08So you can feel fluid if you're doing, you know, five-pound curls.
00:09:12Oh, this is so fluent.
00:09:14This is so fluent.
00:09:14This is great.
00:09:15But you're actually not learning.
00:09:16And that's obvious in a gym, but it's less obvious when you're doing cognitive work.
00:09:19Yeah.
00:09:19Yeah.
00:09:19I think that's super interesting.
00:09:20And there's some work that Ayelet Fischbach has done on this on reframing discomfort.
00:09:24When we're trying to master something new and we feel uncomfortable about it, we can say, oh, discomfort.
00:09:29Like, this is not a bad thing.
00:09:30This is basically a learning signal.
00:09:32That's right.
00:09:33That's right.
00:09:33I mean, discomfort isn't a sign that you're not learning, but ease is a sign that you're not learning.
00:09:37Could be.
00:09:37I think the one caveat here I throw on this is that a lot of times people who are in a flow experience feel a sense of fluency.
00:09:43And those are important moments in our life.
00:09:47There may be moments where we're creating effectively, maybe not where we're learning effectively.
00:09:51I agree with that because I think flow is less about learning, more about experiencing.
00:09:55Yeah.
00:09:56And I think flow is quite rare in the work that most of us do.
00:09:59Like, I think there's a reason why a lot of that research has been like surfers and painters and things like that.
00:10:03It doesn't show up in quite the same way in most other cognitive ways.
00:10:06So if you're feeling like this is completely cockamamie and disfluent, it means that you're learning something here, folks.
00:10:11All right.
00:10:11Here we go.
00:10:12All time is equal.
00:10:13Come on.
00:10:14I think one of the big myths that we have about our performance is that all times of day are created equal.
00:10:19And we have massive evidence that there are big differences in performance based on different times of day.
00:10:23And I think when we try to schedule things, we're just looking for open slots rather than being deliberate and intentional about when we do things.
00:10:30I know you've written really interesting about chronotype, like how people are at their best at different times of day.
00:10:35By the way, I feel like I've converted myself from a night owl to a morning lark.
00:10:38So I don't know the extent to which that's possible.
00:10:40Yeah.
00:10:40But I think I've done it.
00:10:41My guess is that you're probably less of a night owl than you were originally if you're able to do that.
00:10:46It's really important that we're intentional about when we do things.
00:10:48And there are other choices in our lives that we make that should be intentional about time.
00:10:51So, for instance, as I've written about, there's nobody in my family who's allowed to go to a discretionary medical procedure or an important doctor appointment in the afternoon, period.
00:11:00Right.
00:11:00If you can avoid it, do not go to the hospital.
00:11:02Do an important medical procedure in the afternoon.
00:11:05I think that's a different time.
00:11:06Totally.
00:11:06A different ballgame.
00:11:06So this one, I'm really curious what you'll say about this one.
00:11:09You should always have a 10-year plan.
00:11:10No way.
00:11:11Oh, all right.
00:11:11Okay.
00:11:12Easy agreement.
00:11:12I mean, I feel like it's fine to have long-term goals and plans, but if it makes you rigid and it means you're not pivoting to the opportunities that open...
00:11:21I mean, you've been talking about forecasting errors, right?
00:11:23You can't see the opportunities that are coming.
00:11:25You don't know what's coming.
00:11:26Right.
00:11:26If you're not open to pivoting to those, you're going to miss your best opportunities.
00:11:30I look at, like, when I was a teenager, I was going to go to the airports academy, be a test pilot, be an astronaut.
00:11:34I had it all mapped out exactly what I'm going to do.
00:11:36I didn't do any of those things.
00:11:37Look how far you've fallen.
00:11:38That's right.
00:11:39You're sitting on a couch with me.
00:11:41With Dan Pink.
00:11:42That's right.
00:11:42If I had only known, I would have...
00:11:43It's like the plan.
00:11:45But all of the most important projects in my professional life have come from opportunistic pivots where something presents itself, turns out to be bigger or more interesting than I would have thought, and instead of saying, like, that's not in the plan, you turn toward it.
00:11:58Right.
00:11:58I think the other thing that you see sometimes is that planning is a sign of some amount of risk aversion.
00:12:04That is, we try to, we think we can map things out, make decisions for purely instrumental reasons, and try to do things simply because they're going to lead to something else when they don't.
00:12:15And also, if you make decisions for that reason, you're not going to be very good at it.
00:12:18Agreed.
00:12:19We're agreeing too much.
00:12:20Okay.
00:12:20I want to throw some, like, a wrench in your gears here.
00:12:23All right, here we go.
00:12:23So, achieving a huge goal will leave you satisfied.
00:12:27Briefly, it will leave you satisfied, but far less enduringly than you think.
00:12:32We are adaptive animals, and so I'll just talk my own experience here.
00:12:36So, I thought that I would be completely pumped when I wrote a book.
00:12:40Like, if I could write a book, I'll be happy, okay, because I'm a reader and I like to write a book.
00:12:44I assume if I'm writing a book, I'm going to be miserable.
00:12:46No, no, I just, if I can, if I'm like, oh my gosh, I have never written a book before, so once I write a book, I'm going to be happy.
00:12:51Yeah, yeah.
00:12:52So, I wrote a book, and I was psyched to see it for about 10 minutes, and then it's like, oh, how's this book going to do?
00:12:57Who's going to like it?
00:12:58And then it's like, okay, so I'll be happy when, if a book becomes a bestseller.
00:13:02But then it becomes a bestseller, and you're like, okay, great, it's a bestseller this week.
00:13:05I better stay on for next week.
00:13:06Right, right.
00:13:07And so.
00:13:07It's amazing how quickly that happens, that hedonic treadmill.
00:13:10It's incredible, and so I think that what's important is to actually enjoy the pursuit as much as the goal attainment.
00:13:19And I'm all for retaining your goals.
00:13:20All I'm saying is that if you set goals, particularly audacious goals, and you hit them, you're going to be less happy than you think.
00:13:26Yeah, it's really interesting.
00:13:27Less happy, less enduringly.
00:13:28Like, Scotty Scheffler, the pro golfer, was talking about this recently, how he celebrates a win for a few minutes, right?
00:13:33And he was getting at what psychologists call the arrival fall.
00:13:35See, the idea that, like, if I only arrive, then everything will be okay.
00:13:38Or midlife crisis, someone's like, wants to climb Everest, but it's like, they're still the same person when they come back down.
00:13:43It's still them.
00:13:44That said, all the things, you know, we've both felt this with books and things like that.
00:13:48I am still glad to have done those things in retrospect.
00:13:50Sometimes I think I enjoy them more in retrospect, which is a kind of enjoyment than I actually do in the moment.
00:13:56So I don't want to take away from the delight of, like, achieving goals or having achievements.
00:14:01I think many people need to lower their expectations for the achievement.
00:14:03About how much it's going to pay off emotionally in the short term.
00:14:07I think that there is a kind of, if you go further on in life and you go look back retrospectively, having achieved some goals will leave you somewhat satisfied.
00:14:15It's interesting.
00:14:16It's like, it's like another forecasting error, right?
00:14:17How you're going to feel about, we're really getting at forecasting errors.
00:14:20Yeah.
00:14:20All right.
00:14:21My forecasting errors and I'm going to not like your next one.
00:14:23What is it?
00:14:24The time management is the main problem.
00:14:25The main problem of what?
00:14:27The main problem for productivity.
00:14:28Oh.
00:14:29And it can be a problem, but.
00:14:32Oh, time management.
00:14:33Okay.
00:14:33Not managing time effectively is the main problem in productivity.
00:14:36Right.
00:14:36Right.
00:14:36Right.
00:14:37And I think, in fact, a major problem is people get so caught up in productivity hacks that there's
00:14:41an illusion that they can actually get all this stuff done.
00:14:44Right.
00:14:44Like, if I look at my inbox right now, in the rest of my life, I won't be able to reply to
00:14:48the unread messages that are sitting there right now.
00:14:51And I can try to implement all kinds of systems I did in the past.
00:14:54I had a response list A, B, C, D, and pretty soon realized that if it wasn't done A, I just
00:14:59couldn't get to it.
00:15:00So I think instead of more productivity tactics, not that those are bad, but you actually just
00:15:05need to cut a bunch of stuff out.
00:15:06And sometimes that involves not seeing things that would be interesting enough that you would
00:15:09otherwise respond, but you just got to be ruthless.
00:15:11Yeah, I mean, I know that you're a fan of Oliver Berkman and he's helped me, his books have
00:15:15helped me think a little bit about this.
00:15:17One thing that I, sort of a metaphor that's helped me on this thing is like, there's so
00:15:20much stuff to read out there and there's so many magazines and newspapers and things like
00:15:24that.
00:15:24And I love all of those things.
00:15:26And yet I'm never going to get to it and never going to get to it at all.
00:15:30And so he has this, you got to change your metaphor of like, it's these, these magazines
00:15:34and newspapers and things are not in a bucket.
00:15:36They're actually in a river and the river.
00:15:38And so just like a river will go by you and it's like, Hey, like that part of the river
00:15:42just went by me.
00:15:43Okay, great.
00:15:43There's going to be another part of the river coming here too.
00:15:45So seeing like this volume of this, this volume of material that you can possibly enjoy as
00:15:51a river that's going by you rather than a bucket to empty was very helpful to me.
00:15:56It's hard to let it go though.
00:15:57Like I find that I'll have to create folders and bookmark websites that I want to read.
00:16:00And now I know I'm not going to read them, but I need them bookmarked.
00:16:02And I'm like, Oh, I cataloged it.
00:16:04Okay, I can let it go.
00:16:05If you took it, if you took a list of my piles of articles and books to be read, I would
00:16:10basically need a hundred people spending the rest of their lifetimes on this task.
00:16:15And yet part of me still thinks I can do it.
00:16:18This next one, it should be uncontroversial to you because you wrote a whole book about
00:16:21this, but we tend to believe that, especially as parents that our kids should specialize as
00:16:25early as possible.
00:16:26So I'm preaching to the saved here.
00:16:28But I think that there is some very good evidence that you've written about very elegantly
00:16:34showing that what you want, especially as young people, but I think even more broadly
00:16:39in our lives is some amount of sampling, experimentation, trying stuff, going across different genres.
00:16:48You know, the model, as you say in your book, is Roger Federer, who played multiple sports
00:16:54before specializing in tennis versus Tiger Woods, who had a club in his hand at age two.
00:17:01So that got him on the, whatever, the Mike Douglas show or the Merv Griffin show when he was
00:17:05like a child, like a toddler, but also led to, I think, a somewhat unhappy life and 15 back
00:17:14surgeries.
00:17:14Well, I mean, I think, yeah, there's the injury aspect, but I would say that Tiger Woods
00:17:17has been very successful.
00:17:18I don't, lots of things happen in lots of people's personal lives, but I view him as a success.
00:17:22What I think the difference is, is that if you look at the science of development, Federer
00:17:25is the norm.
00:17:26Right.
00:17:27Okay.
00:17:27Got it.
00:17:28That's a better way to put it.
00:17:29And so, cause I think they both made it to, you know, became successful, but, and there's
00:17:31just this brand new paper out in the journal science that looked at 30,000, some musicians,
00:17:36scientists, and athletes, and saw that the behaviors that produce top youth success, early specialization,
00:17:41narrow focus, are negatively correlated with the behaviors that produce the best adult success,
00:17:46which is this broader, early beginning in sampling and building a broad school set and seeing
00:17:50where you match.
00:17:51It's just that the youthful prodigies get an early lead, but they don't sustain the lead
00:17:57and the late bloomers make a comeback.
00:17:59And the more often you pick something, the more often you match somebody in a space, in
00:18:03a sport, in a skill, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot.
00:18:06Yeah.
00:18:07So don't specialize early, folks.
00:18:08Sample.
00:18:09Okay.
00:18:09I'm not sure what you're going to think about this one.
00:18:11Play to your strengths, ignore weaknesses.
00:18:13I think that's bad advice.
00:18:14Oh, okay.
00:18:15I might disagree with this one.
00:18:16I do think you want to like lean into your superpowers, but I think you can often be limited
00:18:22if you don't try to raise the floor.
00:18:24You can have like a personal bottleneck.
00:18:26So if I think about, again, some of the sports research, there's some interesting research
00:18:30in soccer players looking at the ones who kind of progressed to the highest levels, had this
00:18:33habit of assessing their own weaknesses and working on those things.
00:18:37And I think there can be a desire to outsource everything you're not awesome at, and I think
00:18:42you should outsource some things you're not awesome at, but I also think that can mean
00:18:46that you lose perspective on all the things that need to be done and aren't as good at integrating
00:18:51them.
00:18:51Yeah.
00:18:51I actually don't necessarily agree with your point there because I feel like there is a
00:18:56whole universe of things that one can be good at, and most of us are not very good at most
00:19:02things.
00:19:03And then finding things that you are genuinely good at, and focusing on that is important.
00:19:08And you can spend a lot of your time fixing your weaknesses because your weaknesses are
00:19:13so much greater in number than your strengths.
00:19:16And so I think that there's a defensive thing that you can do to make sure certain weaknesses
00:19:20don't hold you back.
00:19:21But I actually think you should calibrate your life much more toward your strengths.
00:19:25Now, it could just be that this is something that I learned.
00:19:27Like, I think I spent a lot of my earlier life trying to fix my weaknesses and discovering
00:19:32that there's actually a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small number
00:19:37of things that I'm actually moderately good at.
00:19:39And I should just do those things.
00:19:42It wasn't enough berries.
00:19:43Yeah.
00:19:43It's very small.
00:19:44No, it's like this tiny little thing of, like, a couple of things that I'm pretty good at.
00:19:48And it's like, wow, I better find, you know, that little island and stand on that little
00:19:52island or else I'm going to drown in all of these weaknesses.
00:19:54And I can maybe fix a weakness here, but I got all these other ones over here.
00:19:57So I'm constantly, like, trying to stay afloat.
00:20:00Maybe picking and choosing a weakness here and there if you've identified that it may be
00:20:03a limiting factor.
00:20:04Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:20:05And it could be that, and I feel like so much of what, when you look at, like, people working
00:20:11in organizations, there is a lot of efforts to fix people.
00:20:15And I think that more effort should be put on putting people in the right positions rather
00:20:19than trying to fix them.
00:20:20I agree with that.
00:20:21Rather than trying to match quality.
00:20:22Yeah, sort of matching people's propensities and proclivities and strengths to particular
00:20:27roles rather than putting people in a role and then doing the remedial work.
00:20:32Okay, you've tweaked me a little on that one.
00:20:33I've moved my needle a little bit.
00:20:34Okay, finally, last, but certainly not least, is my claim that the Declaration of Independence
00:20:39is wrong and that it's a mistake to pursue happiness.
00:20:43Do tell.
00:20:43I think happiness is the wrong goal, the wrong thing we should be pursuing because I think
00:20:48a lot of the evidence says that happiness is a byproduct of other things rather than something
00:20:53that you want to actively seek.
00:20:54So I think if you pursue excellence in your craft, if you pursue meaning in your life, if
00:21:00you pursue strong relationships, that will allow you to be happy.
00:21:05But constantly scrutinizing yourself saying, am I happy?
00:21:08And saying, oh, what I have to do is try to be happy.
00:21:11I think that's a fool's game.
00:21:12I think that's fair.
00:21:13I mean, it sounds bad.
00:21:14Yeah.
00:21:14But when I think of some of the most important things I've done, whether it's, you know,
00:21:18parenting or writing books or-
00:21:20It's hard.
00:21:21Well, let's say writing books and running the 800 meters, my early competitive runner.
00:21:24If someone asked me in the middle of those things, like, are you happy?
00:21:26I'd say, are you insane?
00:21:27It's torture.
00:21:28Right.
00:21:28But it's so engaging.
00:21:30Right.
00:21:30It keeps bringing me back.
00:21:31And so I get this feeling of a sense of engagement.
00:21:32And I don't think we should ignore happiness altogether.
00:21:34If you're really engaged and really unhappy all the time, you should probably change something.
00:21:37But in general, I think there's so much emphasis on doing what makes you happy
00:21:40that there should be a little more on doing what gives you meaning or what brings some satisfaction.
00:21:45What is meaningful?
00:21:47What contributes?
00:21:48What connects you to other people?
00:21:50And I think that happiness then will emerge from that.
00:21:53But if your goal is happiness, what you end up doing is you end up constantly measuring
00:21:58your happiness.
00:21:58Am I happy enough?
00:21:59Am I happy now?
00:22:00And I think that that's a bad idea too.
00:22:02In the same way that my watch, here's an analogy.
00:22:05So my watch, this watch here actually measures my sleep.
00:22:08And measuring my sleep has made me sleep worse.
00:22:11I was going to say, I was about to give another piece of advice, which is like measuring a
00:22:15lot of your personal data is actually a bad idea for the large majority of people.
00:22:18I didn't realize this watch measured my sleep.
00:22:20And so it's like, oh, I realized, oh, it measures my sleep.
00:22:22And then I look at it and it's like, oh, you didn't sleep very well last night.
00:22:25And I'm like, oh my God, I didn't sleep well.
00:22:26God, no wonder I'm like, I guess I feel terrible.
00:22:29And then it's like next night I have a hard time falling asleep.
00:22:31And it's like I'm losing sleep over and I felt perfectly fine in my sleep.
00:22:35Once I started measuring, I felt worse.
00:22:37And so that's another reason why it's just like do meaningful things with people you care
00:22:42about in a way that is excellent and you're going to be okay.
00:22:45This is a bonus piece of advice we got here.
00:22:47Like when I was, the better I became as a competitive runner, the less I used a watch.
00:22:50Oh, interesting.
00:22:51Then you start focusing on the metric and instead of going by developing a feel for, you know,
00:22:56are you pushing too much or not?
00:22:57Interesting.
00:22:58All right, my last one.
00:22:59The creativity is synonymous with originality.
00:23:02I think we make that mistake that to be creative, an idea has to be fully original.
00:23:06You didn't come up with this, did you?
00:23:07What do you mean?
00:23:08This idea?
00:23:08I think it's...
00:23:09It's not original, is it?
00:23:10It's not.
00:23:10No, it's a...
00:23:11This originally came out of the Romantic period.
00:23:13Okay.
00:23:14Before that, like in Shakespeare's time, you can find antecedents to everything he wrote.
00:23:17Sure.
00:23:17Stuff that now we would actually call plagiarism.
00:23:19Oh.
00:23:20But that's...
00:23:20But it was viewed as you build off things that people understand and the creativity is
00:23:24really altering it in some way.
00:23:25Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:26So they understand the basis.
00:23:27Yeah.
00:23:27And even if you're looking at like tech innovation, most of the breakthroughs come from recombinations
00:23:31of different knowledge or moving something from one area to somewhere else where it's
00:23:35seen as creation.
00:23:36And so I think people...
00:23:37This kind of goes again with like being the most free.
00:23:40It's you just want to mind wander and have free creations of the mind, which you do want mind
00:23:43wandering time for sure.
00:23:44But often I think the way to go is to find something interesting and engaging and start
00:23:48building off of it instead of just having a total blank page.
00:23:52Yeah.
00:23:52I think that's generally right because in some ways there is, you know, I mean all creativity
00:23:58in some ways, I think creativity might be inherently recombinant.
00:24:02That is, someone's come up with some element of this before and maybe you're just putting
00:24:05it together in new ways.
00:24:06The other thing about that is that if you're thinking about creativity not only as an expression
00:24:11of who you are but as a way to match to a need in a market, it's particularly true with artistic
00:24:17work, is that you want to actually have something be both novel and familiar at the same time.
00:24:23Right, that's right.
00:24:24You don't want to...
00:24:24If it's completely freaky and new, it might not land.
00:24:27If it's completely like what's come before, people will say it's boring.
00:24:32And so I think that in artistic work especially, you're trying to find that match between novelty
00:24:37and familiarity.
00:24:38Absolutely.
00:24:39And the crazier some of it is, the more familiar some of it has to be.
00:24:42Exactly.
00:24:42That's why like fantasy movies that have a really bizarre setting always have the same
00:24:48kind of hero's journey plot.
00:24:49Great.
00:24:50Exactly.
00:24:50Exactly.
00:24:51And you see it sometimes in visual art.
00:24:53You see it sometimes in theatrical art.
00:24:55And I think it's something that I think about as someone trying to create stuff.
00:24:59It's like, okay, that's been done before.
00:25:01That's a little too wild.
00:25:03What is a way to meet somewhere out here?
00:25:05Yeah.
00:25:05Yeah.
00:25:06I feel like we agreed too much.
00:25:08I disagree.
00:25:09Okay.
00:25:09There we go.
00:25:10I totally disagree with that.
00:25:11So thanks for listening to our bad advice.
00:25:14If you enjoyed this video, David and I made two other videos together.
00:25:18One is how boredom can be an innovation engine.
00:25:21And the other is why your best ideas often come at the worst time.
00:25:25Thanks for watching.
00:25:26We'll see you in the next one.
00:25:33Thank you.
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