December 18, 2023 • 43 mins
Psychologist Adam Grant stops by to talk with Maya about his new book "Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things." They talk about how to filter out unhelpful feedback, the benefits of imperfectionism, and why we need to give soft skills more respect.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out Adam’s first time on the show: “Adam Grant Thinks Again.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin Hay Slight Changers, It's Maya. Before we get to
this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that
I'm launching a newsletter. It's a place where I can
update you about the podcast, my life, and other exciting news.
If you'd like to sign up, you can visit the
link in our show description or go to Maya Shunker
(00:36):
dot com. That's m A y A s h A
n k a r dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
So much of learning requires us to put ourselves in
uncomfortable situations because that's where the challenge lies. But the
fear of embarrassment holds us back, and so we end
up making these tiny little adjustments instead of big leaps.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Author and podcaster at A Grant is back on a
slight change of plans, and he's got a new book
full of ideas for how we can unlock our hidden potential.
One of his tips is to think differently about how
we learn from others.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
A lot of people think being a sponge is about
just absorbing as much information as you can seek infinite
amounts of feedback. Engage all of your critics, not so much.
Not all critics are thinking critically, and I think a
huge part of being an effective sponge is being proactive,
not just about what you take in, but also what
(01:43):
you expel out.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
On today's episode, how to Unlock Your Hidden Potential, I'm
maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
a show about who we are and who we become
in the face of a big change. Adam is an
(02:15):
organizational psychologist and a professor at the Wharton School at
the University of Pennsylvania. He's also the author of a
bunch of bestsellers and a repeat visitor to the Ted stage.
I'm pretty sure after one more Ted talk he can
turn in his punch card for free sandwich. Adam's new
book is called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things,
(02:38):
and as you'll hear, this is one of my favorite
topics to discuss and spar with him about. I started
our conversation by asking Adam why he's so interested in
the topic of hidden potential.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
I think there are so many reasons to be interested
in it. I mean, how many times have you met
somebody who didn't live up to the potential you saw
in them because they didn't see it in themselves, or
because they weren't lucky enough to have a coach or
a mentor, or a teacher or a parent who saw
it in them. And I think the fundamental mistake we
make can we make this mistake when we're judging other
(03:11):
people and when we're evaluating ourselves, is that we assess
potential by where we start, and if something's easy for us,
if we have a natural talent for it, then we
assume there's a very highest ceiling on our potential. And
if we struggle early or if we fail, we think
this is not for me. And what we overlook is
that growth is not determined by where you start. It's
(03:34):
about the distance you can travel. But we can't see
that distance yet, right. We don't have a crystal law
to look into the future, and so we end up
missing out on a great deal of possibility that I
think goes unrecognized.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, and one thing I loved reading about in your book,
as you say, the things that you're most proud of
aren't the domains where you've gotten to the highest heights.
It's actually where you started off at the lowest point
but made a ton of progress along the way. So
can you share a little bit more about that.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
I really loved sports growing up, and after failing to
make the middle school basketball team and the high school
soccer team, I turned my attention to springboard diving, which
I had sort of caught the bug for late as
a teenager. And it was abundantly clear that I did
not have the physical talent to be a great diver.
My teammates called me Frankenstein because I didn't bend my
(04:22):
knees when I walked, which was ironic because in order
to touch my toes I had to bend my knees.
I wasn't flexible, I didn't have the grace or explosive power,
and I was also afraid of heights, so not exactly
set up for success. And I had an extraordinary coach,
Eric Best, who said on day one of practice, I
will never cut anyone who wants to be here, and
(04:46):
if you know, if you focus your energy on this,
I believe you can be a state finalist by the
time you're a senior in high school. And thanks to
Eric's coaching, I made the state finals as a junior
in high school, and I got nowhere near the Olympics.
Let's be clear, I could not have qualified for Olympic
trials if my life depended on it. But I got
(05:06):
a lot better than I ever expected. I ended up
qualified for the Junior Olympic Nationals twice, and I made
the All American list and ended up getting recruited a
diving college. And it was such a pivotal experience for
me to realize just because I start with a lack
of talent doesn't mean I can't overcome many of the
obstacles on my path.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah, I resonate with your story. I truly think
there's nothing that I enjoy more in life than witnessing progress.
Well maybe a really good Indian meal cooked by my mother,
but second to that, I love witnessing progress. And so
I think my version of Adam as the diver is
I began learning Mandarin about six years ago or so
(05:47):
because my husband's Chinese and none of his relatives speak English,
and so I thought, oh, this would be a really
nice way to connect with his family and you know,
try to show them that I, you know, really love
Jimmy and I really you know want to fit into
the family. And talk about a low starting point, Adam,
I took the cake there, I promise, But the joy
(06:09):
of improving at a language that I found so challenging
has been intoxicating, like truly. So I remember there was
this one day where I got into a lift and
it was clear that driver was a little bit uneasy
because he didn't speak English. And then I looked at
his phone and I saw Chinese characters, and I was like,
this is my moment, and so I filt of all
(06:30):
this courage and I spoke to him in broken Mandarin
and he understood what I was saying. And after I
got out of that lift, I called Jimmy and I
was squealing. It was literally like the best day of
my year. And so yeah, and that starting point again
was so low that when you witness the potential that
you had in a space where you really underestimated yourself,
(06:50):
it's just so satisfying.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
That's amazing. I had no idea that you learned Mandarin.
Where have you been hiding this secret?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Well, learning I inng It is a works in progress.
So this is what's really interesting because this, I think
hits on another theme in your book, which is my
decision to pick up a new language of all things
in adulthood was never something that I thought would happen.
And that's because I historically just sucked at learning foreign languages.
So in high school I took Spanish. In college I
(07:18):
took Hi the terrible at both of them, and so
I was pretty hesitant to give a foreign language a go,
especially in my thirties.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
This is so fascinating. Okay, I have a bunch of reactions.
So first of all, can we just pause to mark
the moment when the world learned that there was something
that Maya Shankar was not good at?
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Okay, Adam, that's.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Because I mean, I think everyone admires what a natural
you are at so many things you know, from your
music virtuoso childhood to your mastery of cognitive science to
your ability to have a conversation with anyone about anything
and make their complex ideas understandable. I think it's reassuring
to the rest of us that there are things that
(07:59):
you two struggle with. Would be my first reaction. Secondly,
I'm thinking about I guess the common arc of saying, well,
I'm not a foreign language person, I lack this skill,
and then realizing that it was actually not skill that
you lacked entirely. It sounds to me like you had
a different kind of motivation.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
In your thirties, one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
You were one excited intrinsically to learn, which maybe you
were less so in high school. And two you also
had a really strong pro social purpose here, which is
you're trying to connect with Jimmy's family, and I think
that probably made the language learning a lot more meaningful.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, the root of your motivation matters so much when
it comes to learning. So when I was in high school,
it was like, Okay, just got to get through that
language requirement, try to get the A because I want
to get into a good college, like blah blah blah. Right,
And then similarly in college, I think Hindy was just
a way of checking the box on the foreign language requirement.
And what happened with Mandarin, like you said, is it
(08:55):
took on this hugely emotional quality to it, right, which
I wasn't expecting. And on top of feeling like I
was going to be able to connect with Jimmy's relatives,
what I didn't realize is that so much of culture
is baked into language, and so when I was learning it,
I was learning about this fundamental humility that exists within
Chinese culture, and like how much I love that? And
(09:17):
so it's really it's been so charming to learn about
those elements, and I would have ignored them entirely in
the context of like a high school class right where
I didn't understand how it's going to play out.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yes, and I wonder, okay. So the other thing is
you talk about using it in the cab. So one
of the things I learned while researching basically, how do
you become better at getting better? So what's the science
of improving at improving? One of the things that holds
a lot of us back is we're reluctant to put
ourselves in uncomfortable situations. And nowhere is this more clear
(09:48):
than learning a foreign language. If you look at why
so many people struggle in high school to learn a language,
it's not necessarily that they lack the language gene or
they missed the critical period, and if only they had
learned it younger, they had an aptitude that's gone. It's
that they're afraid to use it because you don't want
to sound like an idiot. Absolutely, we don't want to
embarrass ourselves, and that's totally reasonable. But the only way
(10:09):
to learn to speak a language is to talk it
out loud and to use it as you're acquiring it,
whereas most people expect that they can master it, that
they can commit the entire vocabulary and grammar to memory,
and only then are they ready to speak it. I
wonder if you were that person earlier.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I was so anxious about speaking in a foreign language,
especially Chinese, where you might say a tone with a
slightly different inflection, and you've now set a completely different sentence,
because it's like ma versus ma, right, those mean totally
different things. And yet I think what happened in the
car that day and where I found the courage was
he doesn't speak English. He's clearly feeling anxious. I'm clearly
(10:49):
feeling anxious that I can't communicate with him, and so
that I like dig within myself. I have to like
excavate courage, like it's so deep inside of my body,
and I pull it out and I communicate with him.
And I thought to myself, Wow, talk about a emotional
return on investment, Like I communicated with a human that
I would not have been able to communicate with had
it not been for the skill building. And so sometimes
(11:10):
it takes situations like that to allow yourself to engage
with the thing you're not very good at before you
achieve mastery.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I literally could have written about you in chapter one
of the book. You're embodying the very principle I was
trying to unpack. And I feel like so much of
learning requires us to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, because
that's where the challenge lies. Yes, but the fear of embarrassment,
of feeling incompetent, of looking stupid holds us back, and
(11:38):
so we end up making these tiny little adjustments instead
of big leaps.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Yeah, And I mean discomfort carries the illusion that we're
not making progress, right, And I mean, from a neuroscientific perspective,
the best way to boost brain plasticity is to fail
at things, because when you fail, those errors signal to
the brain that something's wrong. In turn, it triggers the
release of this beautiful cocktail of neurochemicals that help reshape
(12:05):
the brain. It's only when you tell your nervous system, hey, buddy,
the current setups not good enough that it starts making
the relevant changes, right, And so maybe we can channel
some of that when we get frustrated.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way to describe it.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Okay, let's now shift to the ingredients to the toolkit
for unlocking our potential. You talk about the importance of
character or what's otherwise known as soft skills, and can
you please first share the origin story of the term
soft skills because I absolutely loved it, and I feel
like soft skills has gotten such a bad rep for
so long, and I feel like you're redeeming it. So
(12:42):
on behalf of all people who enjoy soft skills and
enjoy cultivating them. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yes, anytime I think of character skills as learn capacity
is to put your principles into practice.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
At some point I got curious about where the term
came from, like, why do we call these vital behavioral skills?
Why do we call them soft? That sounds weak. Well,
if you trace the history, it turns out that the
term originated from the US Army when they were trying
to classify different skills for soldiers and basically measure competencies
to go and defend national security. And they had a
(13:17):
list of hard skills, which were literally the capabilities to
work with machines. Machines were made out of metal that's hard,
and so operating a tank or a gun was considered
a hard skill, and so then everything else leadership collaboration
was lumped in this soft skills bucket, which they didn't
think was unimportant. They just meant you're not using a
(13:38):
piece of almost unbreakable equipment. Yeah, exactly. So I think
obviously that did a great disservice to this category of skills.
And I actually really wonder if we had called those
behavioral skills, if they had been called leadership skills, would
they be branded differently today. The study that really blew
my mind was a study that roz Chetti led where
(14:01):
he found that we could predict your income in your twenties,
how much money you make from the number of years
of experience your kindergarten teacher had.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Wow, unreal.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
I could not believe this when I read this research.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And by the way, listeners, Rod Shetty is like a
natural experiment genius, so he has controlled for all of
the relevant variables, I assure you. Anyway, continue, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
He's a world class economist and the finding is very robust.
And the big question is, well, what are these experienced
kindergarten teachers doing that sets kids up on a different trajectory.
And my assumption was cognitive skills, like they're giving you
an edge and reading and math, and then you get
to carry that with you. It is true that the
more experienced teachers are better at teaching math and reading,
(14:47):
but that advantage dissipates over the next few years and
other kids catch up. Where kids get a lasting advantage
from an experienced kindergarten teacher is in character skills. In
fourth and eighth grade, the kids who happen to have
a more experienced kindergarten teacher randomly assigned ended up getting
rated higher by their later teachers in being proactive, pro social, disciplined,
(15:10):
and determent, and those skills are almost two and a
half times more important for predicting future success than cognitive skills.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
I'm wondering if we can explore some of the mechanisms
by which character skills lead to better outcomes. So, as
I'm thinking about it now, it seems like, okay, determination
kind of a clear one. It means you're practicing maybe
more deliberately, you're practicing harder, etc. It's also possible that
when you build character skills, you're more likable, and so
you're more likely to draw in mentors and peers and
(15:44):
teachers and to attract the attention of employers, And so
there might be this virtuous cycle where character certainly is
making you better at honing the craft, but having character
skills makes other people in your orbit more likely to
want to work with you and help make you better.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
I think that's right. I do wonder how much of
growth is about character skills elevating your individual learning versus
attracting people into your orbit who build the scaffolding to
help you climb.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So, speaking of character skills, I mean, you're just one
of my favorite people to intellectually spar with. But we
were chatting last week about the degree to which we
think character skills are valuable. I tend to lean more
nature versus nurture in that debate, and so, yeah, I
guess my question here is do we have encouraging evidence
that adults can improve their character skills in a persistent
(16:36):
and meaningful way. And, by the way, I would love
for you to be right here. I want to be
wrong because I really do want these skills to be
valuable and mutable, and so I have no pride around
my current point of view.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Well, there's no one easier to persuade than somebody who's
already invested in believing.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
The case hereabouts exactly.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Well, no, honestly, I'm not here to make an argument.
I don't want to persuade you. What I want to
do is share with you some of the evidence that's
really shaped my thinking on this and see if you
find it compelling. So let's start with the evidence in
the book. I was quite taken with the experiment that
Francisco Campus and colleagues did on entrepreneurs in West Africa.
(17:17):
So you take in this experiment, you take fifteen hundred
small business owners, You randomly assign them to a control group,
a cognitive skills training group or a character skills training group,
and the character skills training group sees their businesses grow
almost three times as much over the next two years
as the cognitive skills training group. Now, these founders are
(17:39):
mostly in their forties and fifties, so it's quite late
to be learning character skills.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, you're not in any kind of critical period, you know. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
And the training program is not rocket science. It's a
week of practicing being proactive and disciplined and determined, and
then thinking about how those skills apply to your business.
The fact that randomly assigning people to just practice honing
those skills for a week at midlife, mid career, then
you know, dramatically increases their revenue you looking at both
(18:10):
sales and profits. That to me is pretty persuasive. So
tell me why that didn't persuade you or why it
wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, okay, So let me tell you what I think
would persuade me. Just conceptually and embarras me, I'm thinking
about this out loud. What I hear in the study
you mentioned from Africa might be explained by the following.
There are capacities that lay dormant in many of us,
and we simply don't know that they're useful to recruit
(18:38):
in any given setting. And so what you've done in
this intervention is you've simply made salient to these entrepreneurs
that things like proactivity and determination, whatever the other soft
skills are are going to be helpful to them in
their business pursuits. So it's less about them growing and
seeing improvement in their character skills as much as knowing
(18:58):
to access them in the first place. Fascinating, fascinating, and
because it's week long, I'm kind of like that could
be an alternative explanation, and that's still valuable right to
alert people in certain disciplines that that matters.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, okay, that's very interesting. Yeah, I find that totally plausible.
I would still say that, you know, what's happening is
they're activating a set of dormant capacities and turning them
into useful skills, and so in that sense, they're still learning.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I agree with that. But if say these things exist
in their dormant and you unlock them over the course
of a week, you might go from like zero to
four in terms of like how much you know. And
what I'm arguing is, in the absence of a longitudinal
study that shows that a person can go on the
Proactivity scale, for example, go from zero to seventy five,
(19:47):
I'm not certain about how much room for growth there
is within that particular character trait, and so I'm unclear
as to how again malleable it is. So we know
they can unlock it in the first place, we know
they can maybe inch a little forward over the course
of the week, But how possible is it for two
people pull out of a random sample to both get
to seventy five with the right tools.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, that's a very good question. I think it's an
empirical question that I have not seen a good answer to.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
After the break the case for imperfectionism from a fellow
recovering perfectionist, and we'll hear about a technique to unlock
our hidden potential. It comes from a sea creature that's
up next. On a slight change of plans, I want
(20:48):
to start with your suggestion that we try and be
more like a sponge, and like a literal, living sea sponge.
We're not talking about like a kitchen dish sponge situation.
So can you tell me a little bit more about
this metaphor, and then I will tell you why I'm
obsessed with it.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
So when I was interested in proactivity, I was interested
in being proactive to absorb information that helps you grow.
And we've known for a long time that this is
an important driver of reaching potential. I was looking for
insight about that, and people kept saying as I talked
to people who had achieved extraordinary growth or coach others
to do the same, they kept saying I was like
a sponge, she was a sponge. He was a human sponge.
(21:28):
And eventually it hit me that this might be more
than a metaphor. So I started reading about sea sponges
and I learned that the yeah, I mean, that's in
the job description. Obviously, any self respecting social scientists has
to take the sea sponge.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yes, there's the sea sponge part of the textbook.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Right, Yeah, du Never. I didn't know a thing about them.
I learned a lot, and one of the things that
I learned was that they're not just adept at taking
in nutrients, they also have finely tuned filters to expel
harmful particles. And I think why this resonated with me
is a lot of people think being a sponge is
(22:05):
about just absorbing as much information as you can seek
infinite amounts of feedback, engage all of your critics. Not
so much. Not all critics are thinking critically, not all
critics are speaking constructively, And I think a huge part
of being an effective sponge is being proactive, not just
about what you take in, but also what you expel out.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yes, I mean, I love this concept about filtration because
I think it's so crucial and it's interesting. I mean,
you talk in the book about the perils of having
an ego based filtration system, So that's where you're pushing
out a lot of the bad stuff that you hear
and you're just kind of absorbing all the like, Oh,
you're great, and this speech is great, and there's no
room for improvement, right. I have the underfiltration problem that
(22:53):
you described, and it's been a journey over time. So
if I rewind the clock a bit, I mean, starting
from the time that I was a little kid playing
the violin, I was always someone who sought out an
enormous amount of feedback. But the problem that I have
is I've let too much feedback in and at times
assigned equal importance to all of it than would have
(23:13):
been helpful. And the way that I rationalize this, that
I've justified this is, Okay, I'm a person with a
lot of blind spots. There's a lot of people out
there who know a lot more than I do about
any given thing, and I want to improve as much
as possible, and I don't want to be prideful in
these pursuits. But it's taken me a lot of time
and a lot of confidence building to recognize what feedback
(23:36):
better serves the thing I'm working on and what doesn't.
And that's a really hard it's really hard to fine
tune this filtration system.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Yeah, it's not easy, and I think probably I would
guess that most people are on one extreme or another
on this. Either they pay attention to all the criticism
because they're so obsessed with learning and they think that's
part of having a growth mindset, or their egos are
fragile and being in secure means that nothing gets in. Yeah,
(24:07):
and they don't really learn from criticism, and I obviously
want to find the sweet spot there. So I think
for me, the key questions looking at the research on
what makes for useful input are one expertise is this
person credible in the domain? Two familiarity does this person
know you? And three care? Are they actually trying to
(24:30):
help you get better?
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yes, And I think it's very common to have a
critic who checks the first two boxes but not the third,
which means they don't necessarily have your best interest at heart.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
I think a good coach is not just attacking your
worse self, but actually recognizing your hidden potential and trying
to help you become a better version of yourself.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
And I think to add to that, it's okay to
not assign equal weight to every piece of feedback given
to you by someone that you admire. So there's a
difference between admiring a person and then accepting all of
their feedback, and we shouldn't confuse the two. And I
have a personal example with you on this topic, right,
So you generously gave me a bunch of feedback on
(25:14):
my TED talk. You really helped elevate it. But crucially
I didn't accept all your feedback. And I remember thinking,
wait a second, I'm rejecting Adam Grant's feedback. And this
man literally holds the world record for like the most
TED talks given by like any human. But then I
thought to myself, what would Adam tell me about whether
(25:36):
or not to reject this feedback? And I heard you
in my head. I heard you telling me on the phone, Leya,
I'm just one person. It's one person's feedback. Just reject
this feedback if this doesn't apply to you or feel
constant with you and your personality type and the kind
of TED talk you want to give who cares like.
Don't accept feedback just because it's someone's feedback. Accept it
because it resonates with you. And that was growth for
(25:58):
me because I think back in the day right, Like
ten years ago, I would have been like, accept it all,
no filtration process. But I appreciate you being that voice
in my head along the way.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Well, I'm sorry that I didn't say it more explicitly
right off the bat. If you get a comment just
from one person, that may just be their idiosyncratic taste
or their subjective reaction, and you don't have to pay
attention to it just because someone that you like or
respect said it.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
No, exactly. And I think actually the root cause of this,
and I'm just I'm going to be working on the
skill over the course of my whole life, is that
it is very very easy for me to see another
person's point of view. And I don't want to rid
myself of this trait altogether, because I really do value
my open mind and I think it makes me a
better person overall. It's just that I see that there
(26:44):
are some downsides.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
I agree, and I think this would be an example
of what psychologists would call a strength overused.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Oh that's really nice.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Yeah, So you don't want to eliminate the strength. You
want to make sure you're not using it excessively or
misusing it by applying it in the wrong situations.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yes, exactly. But I also think from a developmental perspective,
is really natural and healthy when we're young to allow
in a bunch of feedback and to test out because
we're still figuring out who we are, like, what we
care about, what we value, what we prize when it
comes to giving a talk or writing a song or
whatever it is. And it is through the process of
(27:22):
receiving feedback and seeing how we respond that we sometimes
even learn what our preferences are in the first place, right,
and what we care about. And what's so interesting in
my own evolution is that I assumed with age that
this would become easier, right, Filtering would become easier, and
it absolutely has overall. But I do feel like when
I enter a new domain, so podcasting for example, or
(27:46):
giving my first head talk, I go back into that
developmental stage of mind where I open the floodgates and
I let all this feedback in and I again have
to fine tune those filtration skills to figure out, you know,
where I want to go. So it can be a process, right.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah, I think it's better to err on the side
of being too open than too closed, because it's much
easier to turn on the filter than it is to
suddenly absorb information that you don't have access to anymore
because people have learned that you're not receptive to it.
And I love the research showing that we're better off
asking for advice than feedback.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah, tell me more about that, because when I read
that in the book, I was like, aren't they kind
of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
So when you ask for feedback, the other person rewinds
to the past and tells you what you did wrong
or what you did right, and that can lead you
to ruminate about all of your mistakes. Yeah, and then
it's really hard to carry that forward to what am
I going to do differently tomorrow. It can also if
it's positive feedback, it can lead you to say, all right,
I'm good, I don't need to change anything. And when
(28:49):
you ask for advice, people actually look ahead and they say, well,
here's the thing I might adjust next time, And then
you can immediately think about, Okay, next time I'm in
this situation, what do I want to try? And that's
less threatening. You're not defensive. You don't have to claim
that you actually were perfect last time. It's a little
bit more optimistic because you have an opportunity to improve it.
(29:12):
So I've actually stopped asking for feedback. I used to
do every talk, I would get off stage and say,
what feedback do you have? Now I say, what's the
one thing I can do better?
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
So, on the topic of coaches, how is it that
we find good coaches and mentors? And there's a somewhat
counterintuitive finding in your book that I'd love you to
talk about when it comes to searching for these people. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I think what most of us assume is that you
want to learn from the best, So find the most
accomplished musician, the greatest athlete, the genius scientist, whatever your
field is, you want to learn from the expert. The
empirical evidence does not support that as the best idea.
My favorite demonstration being that if you take an intro
(29:54):
class with an adjunct professor or a lecturer as opposed
to somebody who's tenured or tenure track in that field,
you actually go on to get better grades in your
next class than that subject. In other words, the person
with less expertise is a better teacher. Why would that be?
I think there's evidence for a couple of mechanisms. One
(30:15):
is that sometimes experts are too far from where you
are to actually remember what it's like to be in
your shoes, so they can't teach the basics. Einstein was
an awful intro physics teacher. The second challenge is that
the process of gaining expertise can make people worse at
communicating what they know. So it's not just that they forgot,
(30:38):
it's that they've been doing a lot of it on autopilot,
and they tend to take much of the knowledge they
have for granted. I think oftentimes the best mentor is
somebody who's just a couple of steps ahead of you,
and maybe not somebody who was a natural, but somebody
who struggled because they actually had to study how to improve.
And I guess that has led me to say, instead
(30:59):
of those who can't do teach, we should say those
who can do often can't teach the basics.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Yeah, I mean, I love this message. And then also
with that said, you know, I did have the amazing
fortune of studying with It's a Pearlman, who's yeah, widely
considered the greatest violinist in the world. And I will
say that Pearlman had a very unusual way of teaching
that led to really great outcomes, and this is what
he did. So I would be playing some passage and
(31:28):
rather than being prescriptive about what to do and like
how I could play it better, he would interrogate me
with a litany of questions around how it is that
I thought I could make the passage better. So it
was sort of like a maya, you're clearly unhappy with
the way that phrase is being shaped. What do you
think you can do about it? And at the time, Adam,
I remember being like, dude, you're the freakin' expert. Why
(31:51):
are you asking me? Right? My like thirteen year old
brain didn't really understand the power the gift that he
was giving me. But what he was training me to
do was to be a critical thinker. I don't want
to be a lobbyist for the world experts. They don't
actually need our help right now. They're doing just fine.
But I want to argue that there's the potential for
them to be great teachers too.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
I think they have hidden potential. So many teachers and
mentors think that they're supposed to be Yoda and they're
just gonna they're gonna unfold their wisdom for you. And
the reality is that people are much better positioned to
learn if you guide them to come up with their
own answers as opposed to just spoon feeding them your answers.
(32:32):
It sounds like what it's like Proman was doing for
you is activating the tutor effect and the coach effect.
So the tutor effect is the finding that the best
way to learn something is often to teach it that
when you have to, in this case, sort of teach
yourself and say, well, here's what I didn't like about
this violin performance. That leads you to understand it better
because you have to explain it. It leads you to
(32:52):
remember it better because you have to retrieve it. And
then in the process of coaching, normally it would be
coaching someone else, but in this case coaching yourself out loud,
you actually discover that you have some of the knowledge
you already need, and that builds your confidence and your motivation.
Is better to be uncomfortable today and better to maor
than it is to avoid discomfort today and stagnate tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, Okay, there are limits though, right to our desire
to get better. Talk about imperfectionism and how that can
be an asset to us when it comes to unlocking
our hidden potential.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, so this is for me, being an imperfectionist is
about It's not about lowering your standards at all. It's
about learning to accept the right imperfections that are not
essential to the excellence you're trying to achieve, or that
are necessary for growth. So I'll give you my diving example,
because this is where I first learned that this is
a skill. And to be clear, I'm still in recovery
(33:45):
from perfectionism.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, we're both recovering perfectionists, so big time, big time.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
But I think in diving, I always was trying to
aim for a perfect ten. And one day my coach,
Eric Best sat me down and said, you know, there's
no such thing as a perfect ten. It's a misnomer.
In one rule book, a ten is for excellence. In
the other, it's very good. And all of a sudden
I realized that the time I was spent trying to
perfect my dives was actually limiting my growth. In fact,
(34:13):
I've come to believe that if perfectionism were medication, it
would come with a warning label that says warning may
cause stunted growth.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
You just got yourself a job at the FDA out
of a nice job.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
I mean maybe, but what I lived was exactly what
the research shows, which is you only work on the
things you know you can do well. Yeah, if you're
trying to be perfect, you avoid anything where you might fail.
You end up missing the forest in the trees and
trying to tinker with these tiny details instead of looking
at the big picture, and you ruminate a lot and
beat yourself up. And I guess the way that I've
(34:44):
tried to put that into practice is I try to calibrate.
I have, you know, a range of different priorities in
my life. And when I write a book, I'm aiming
for a nine because it's a huge investment of time
and I hope there will be a decent number of
people who read it and benefit from it. But I
don't treat everything that way, you know, I'm very content
(35:05):
with a seven when I give a speech, no, knowing
that each audience is a little different and each performance
is going to be a little different, and good enough
is actually good enough in that situation. And I think
this is something we can all do, is to pause
to ask how high are the stakes here?
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (35:23):
And we aim obviously higher when it's more important and
we give ourselves a little bit more grace and permission
to be imperfect on things that are less consequential. And look,
no matter how good you get, there are always going
to be people who don't like what you do, and
there are always going to be aspects of your performance
that are going to fall short of someone's standards. You
(35:46):
cannot please everyone, so you might as well decide who
you're willing to disappoint.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Can you just say that one more time? I need
to hear that.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
One you, in particular, you as a human cannot please everyone,
and neither can anyone.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Okay, and therapy right there.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
So you might as well decide who you're willing to
disappoint and which standards are important to you.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, And I'm thinking about all the domains where this
imperfectionism perfectionist mindset is relevant. And I'm thinking about all
those parents out there that just brate themselves every day
because they don't think they're the perfect parents. And it's like, well,
what if a nine is every day my kids knew
I loved them? Like what if that was a nine?
Like maybe that is good enough slash perfection in the
(36:33):
domain of parenting versus oh, I know coach them through
the remote. I mean, just so it is a huge
manual now, right for how it is that we should
raise our kids. But yeah, it's just making me think
about how we define our north star. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
At first I was really reluctant to apply this to parenting,
Like I don't want parents to be scored. Your parenting
today was a three and a half. Yeah, but you
just changed my mind because there's no reason why we
can't clarify. Like, first of all, you should not expect
to be a perfect parent. No one will ever achieve
that standard. It's impossible. Yeh. Every parent makes mistakes. I
(37:09):
think that's part of how we grow as parents. I
think some of my best moments of growth as a
parent actually have come when I've been really disappointed in
myself for getting frustrated and impatient with our kids. But
I don't think a lot of parents I think this
is a big aha mooent for me. I don't think
a lot of parents have sat down to say, Okay,
I want to be a nine parent, not a ten parent,
because that's going to be healthier for me and for
(37:30):
my kid. What does a nine look like? What are
the behaviors that really matter and what are the ones
that are okay to be imperfect on.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I think that's a great discussion that we could all
have with our families. I'm going to force myself to
have it this weekend.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah. I think the most hopeful message coming out of
your book, and I love that you devote a sizeable
chunk of the book to this topic, is how we
can help unlock potential in others. It is a very
other focused orientation, which I think is just going to
make humanity better across the board, because you don't always
see that represented in in psych books. And so can
(38:06):
you just leave us with some reflections on how we
can help unlock potential in those around us?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
This is my top pick for kicking myself that I
didn't write this into the book, Like, how did this
not make the cut? I don't know, all right. So,
a group of my colleagues, led by Laura Morgan Roberts,
created an exercise called the Reflected Best Self Portrait, and
the idea is that a lot of people have hidden
(38:33):
potential that's invisible to them. It's almost like the opposite
of a blind spot, that you're not aware of some
of your own strengths and so you need other people
to hold up a mirror to help you identify the
things that you're good at that maybe these are underutilized
strengths as opposed to the overused ones that we talked
about earlier. So the exercise, I've had students and leaders
do it for about fifteen years now, and people often
(38:56):
come back and say, this was a life changing experience.
So all you do is you reach out to some
people who know you well in different walks of life.
You could do this with family, some friends, some colleagues,
and you ask them to tell a story about you
at a time when you were at your best. And
then you collect all the stories, which is the most
delightful set of emails you will ever get. And then
(39:18):
your job is to recognize the patterns and compose a
self portrait of who you are at your best. And
very often when people do this like oh, I didn't
even know that was the strength of mine, and now
I see all these places I can use it. I
also felt like this is a gift you can give
to other people to help them see their hidden potential.
So when I first learned about this exercise, I think
(39:39):
it was gosh, it must have been twenty years ago.
I remember the winter break starting and I was a
first year grad student. I had nothing on my calendar.
I was broke. What am I going to do with
this week? I decided that I was going to invert
the exercise, and I picked up a bunch of people who
mattered to me, and I wrote them all a story
(39:59):
about a time when they were at their best and
just emailed it to them out of the blue. It
is one of the most meaningful weeks I have ever spent,
even though I was just sitting in a room writing emails,
because really thinking about, well, what is other people's hidden
potential and how can I make that more visible to
(40:21):
them felt like a really meaningful act of friendship or
you know, an investment in a relationship, and people seem
to really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
I love that example. That's something that everyone listening can
actually do right now.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
I mean, just even pick one person and tell them
who they are at their best.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my
conversation with Adam, you might want to check out the
first time he was on the show. It's an episode
called Adam Grant Thinks Again, and we'll link to it
in the show notes. And that's a wrap on our season.
I just want to thank you for spending this time
with me and the remarkable guests we've had on the show.
(41:33):
We'll be back early next year with new episodes. In
the meantime, I'm wishing you a happy and healthy rest
of your year and a bit more equanimity in the
face of any Slight Changes of plan. A Slight Change
(41:55):
of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me
Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green,
our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Trisha Bovida,
and our sound engineer Andrew Vestola. Louis Scara wrote our
delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
(42:16):
A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a
very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A
Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. So,
(42:51):
I remember when I flew to China after Jimmy and
I got married, and we had this big wedding reception,
and I was so jetlagged first of all, and I
was in extremely elementary Chinese land. I'm still in elementary
Chinese land, but I remember my in laws kind of
looked at me and they're like, so archie to say something.
And then on the spot, I had to come up
with this like wedding speech, and it was so it
(43:15):
was so basic, Adam. I was like, hello, I am Maya,
I'm married Jimmy. Thank you so much for being here,
you know, really poetic, like so much emotional residence. I'm
sure this is great.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
You're like, see spot spot run exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
I'm like, I currently am in China. You are all
currently here as well,
Pushkin Hay Slight Changers, It's Maya. Before we get to
this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that
I'm launching a newsletter. It's a place where I can
update you about the podcast, my life, and other exciting news.
If you'd like to sign up, you can visit the
link in our show description or go to Maya Shunker
(00:36):
dot com. That's m A y A s h A
n k a r dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
So much of learning requires us to put ourselves in
uncomfortable situations because that's where the challenge lies. But the
fear of embarrassment holds us back, and so we end
up making these tiny little adjustments instead of big leaps.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Author and podcaster at A Grant is back on a
slight change of plans, and he's got a new book
full of ideas for how we can unlock our hidden potential.
One of his tips is to think differently about how
we learn from others.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
A lot of people think being a sponge is about
just absorbing as much information as you can seek infinite
amounts of feedback. Engage all of your critics, not so much.
Not all critics are thinking critically, and I think a
huge part of being an effective sponge is being proactive,
not just about what you take in, but also what
(01:43):
you expel out.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
On today's episode, how to Unlock Your Hidden Potential, I'm
maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
a show about who we are and who we become
in the face of a big change. Adam is an
(02:15):
organizational psychologist and a professor at the Wharton School at
the University of Pennsylvania. He's also the author of a
bunch of bestsellers and a repeat visitor to the Ted stage.
I'm pretty sure after one more Ted talk he can
turn in his punch card for free sandwich. Adam's new
book is called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things,
(02:38):
and as you'll hear, this is one of my favorite
topics to discuss and spar with him about. I started
our conversation by asking Adam why he's so interested in
the topic of hidden potential.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
I think there are so many reasons to be interested
in it. I mean, how many times have you met
somebody who didn't live up to the potential you saw
in them because they didn't see it in themselves, or
because they weren't lucky enough to have a coach or
a mentor, or a teacher or a parent who saw
it in them. And I think the fundamental mistake we
make can we make this mistake when we're judging other
(03:11):
people and when we're evaluating ourselves, is that we assess
potential by where we start, and if something's easy for us,
if we have a natural talent for it, then we
assume there's a very highest ceiling on our potential. And
if we struggle early or if we fail, we think
this is not for me. And what we overlook is
that growth is not determined by where you start. It's
(03:34):
about the distance you can travel. But we can't see
that distance yet, right. We don't have a crystal law
to look into the future, and so we end up
missing out on a great deal of possibility that I
think goes unrecognized.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, and one thing I loved reading about in your book,
as you say, the things that you're most proud of
aren't the domains where you've gotten to the highest heights.
It's actually where you started off at the lowest point
but made a ton of progress along the way. So
can you share a little bit more about that.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
I really loved sports growing up, and after failing to
make the middle school basketball team and the high school
soccer team, I turned my attention to springboard diving, which
I had sort of caught the bug for late as
a teenager. And it was abundantly clear that I did
not have the physical talent to be a great diver.
My teammates called me Frankenstein because I didn't bend my
(04:22):
knees when I walked, which was ironic because in order
to touch my toes I had to bend my knees.
I wasn't flexible, I didn't have the grace or explosive power,
and I was also afraid of heights, so not exactly
set up for success. And I had an extraordinary coach,
Eric Best, who said on day one of practice, I
will never cut anyone who wants to be here, and
(04:46):
if you know, if you focus your energy on this,
I believe you can be a state finalist by the
time you're a senior in high school. And thanks to
Eric's coaching, I made the state finals as a junior
in high school, and I got nowhere near the Olympics.
Let's be clear, I could not have qualified for Olympic
trials if my life depended on it. But I got
(05:06):
a lot better than I ever expected. I ended up
qualified for the Junior Olympic Nationals twice, and I made
the All American list and ended up getting recruited a
diving college. And it was such a pivotal experience for
me to realize just because I start with a lack
of talent doesn't mean I can't overcome many of the
obstacles on my path.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah, I resonate with your story. I truly think
there's nothing that I enjoy more in life than witnessing progress.
Well maybe a really good Indian meal cooked by my mother,
but second to that, I love witnessing progress. And so
I think my version of Adam as the diver is
I began learning Mandarin about six years ago or so
(05:47):
because my husband's Chinese and none of his relatives speak English,
and so I thought, oh, this would be a really
nice way to connect with his family and you know,
try to show them that I, you know, really love
Jimmy and I really you know want to fit into
the family. And talk about a low starting point, Adam,
I took the cake there, I promise, But the joy
(06:09):
of improving at a language that I found so challenging
has been intoxicating, like truly. So I remember there was
this one day where I got into a lift and
it was clear that driver was a little bit uneasy
because he didn't speak English. And then I looked at
his phone and I saw Chinese characters, and I was like,
this is my moment, and so I filt of all
(06:30):
this courage and I spoke to him in broken Mandarin
and he understood what I was saying. And after I
got out of that lift, I called Jimmy and I
was squealing. It was literally like the best day of
my year. And so yeah, and that starting point again
was so low that when you witness the potential that
you had in a space where you really underestimated yourself,
(06:50):
it's just so satisfying.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
That's amazing. I had no idea that you learned Mandarin.
Where have you been hiding this secret?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Well, learning I inng It is a works in progress.
So this is what's really interesting because this, I think
hits on another theme in your book, which is my
decision to pick up a new language of all things
in adulthood was never something that I thought would happen.
And that's because I historically just sucked at learning foreign languages.
So in high school I took Spanish. In college I
(07:18):
took Hi the terrible at both of them, and so
I was pretty hesitant to give a foreign language a go,
especially in my thirties.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
This is so fascinating. Okay, I have a bunch of reactions.
So first of all, can we just pause to mark
the moment when the world learned that there was something
that Maya Shankar was not good at?
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Okay, Adam, that's.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Because I mean, I think everyone admires what a natural
you are at so many things you know, from your
music virtuoso childhood to your mastery of cognitive science to
your ability to have a conversation with anyone about anything
and make their complex ideas understandable. I think it's reassuring
to the rest of us that there are things that
(07:59):
you two struggle with. Would be my first reaction. Secondly,
I'm thinking about I guess the common arc of saying, well,
I'm not a foreign language person, I lack this skill,
and then realizing that it was actually not skill that
you lacked entirely. It sounds to me like you had
a different kind of motivation.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
In your thirties, one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
You were one excited intrinsically to learn, which maybe you
were less so in high school. And two you also
had a really strong pro social purpose here, which is
you're trying to connect with Jimmy's family, and I think
that probably made the language learning a lot more meaningful.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, the root of your motivation matters so much when
it comes to learning. So when I was in high school,
it was like, Okay, just got to get through that
language requirement, try to get the A because I want
to get into a good college, like blah blah blah. Right,
And then similarly in college, I think Hindy was just
a way of checking the box on the foreign language requirement.
And what happened with Mandarin, like you said, is it
(08:55):
took on this hugely emotional quality to it, right, which
I wasn't expecting. And on top of feeling like I
was going to be able to connect with Jimmy's relatives,
what I didn't realize is that so much of culture
is baked into language, and so when I was learning it,
I was learning about this fundamental humility that exists within
Chinese culture, and like how much I love that? And
(09:17):
so it's really it's been so charming to learn about
those elements, and I would have ignored them entirely in
the context of like a high school class right where
I didn't understand how it's going to play out.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yes, and I wonder, okay. So the other thing is
you talk about using it in the cab. So one
of the things I learned while researching basically, how do
you become better at getting better? So what's the science
of improving at improving? One of the things that holds
a lot of us back is we're reluctant to put
ourselves in uncomfortable situations. And nowhere is this more clear
(09:48):
than learning a foreign language. If you look at why
so many people struggle in high school to learn a language,
it's not necessarily that they lack the language gene or
they missed the critical period, and if only they had
learned it younger, they had an aptitude that's gone. It's
that they're afraid to use it because you don't want
to sound like an idiot. Absolutely, we don't want to
embarrass ourselves, and that's totally reasonable. But the only way
(10:09):
to learn to speak a language is to talk it
out loud and to use it as you're acquiring it,
whereas most people expect that they can master it, that
they can commit the entire vocabulary and grammar to memory,
and only then are they ready to speak it. I
wonder if you were that person earlier.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I was so anxious about speaking in a foreign language,
especially Chinese, where you might say a tone with a
slightly different inflection, and you've now set a completely different sentence,
because it's like ma versus ma, right, those mean totally
different things. And yet I think what happened in the
car that day and where I found the courage was
he doesn't speak English. He's clearly feeling anxious. I'm clearly
(10:49):
feeling anxious that I can't communicate with him, and so
that I like dig within myself. I have to like
excavate courage, like it's so deep inside of my body,
and I pull it out and I communicate with him.
And I thought to myself, Wow, talk about a emotional
return on investment, Like I communicated with a human that
I would not have been able to communicate with had
it not been for the skill building. And so sometimes
(11:10):
it takes situations like that to allow yourself to engage
with the thing you're not very good at before you
achieve mastery.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I literally could have written about you in chapter one
of the book. You're embodying the very principle I was
trying to unpack. And I feel like so much of
learning requires us to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, because
that's where the challenge lies. Yes, but the fear of embarrassment,
of feeling incompetent, of looking stupid holds us back, and
(11:38):
so we end up making these tiny little adjustments instead
of big leaps.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Yeah, And I mean discomfort carries the illusion that we're
not making progress, right, And I mean, from a neuroscientific perspective,
the best way to boost brain plasticity is to fail
at things, because when you fail, those errors signal to
the brain that something's wrong. In turn, it triggers the
release of this beautiful cocktail of neurochemicals that help reshape
(12:05):
the brain. It's only when you tell your nervous system, hey, buddy,
the current setups not good enough that it starts making
the relevant changes, right, And so maybe we can channel
some of that when we get frustrated.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way to describe it.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Okay, let's now shift to the ingredients to the toolkit
for unlocking our potential. You talk about the importance of
character or what's otherwise known as soft skills, and can
you please first share the origin story of the term
soft skills because I absolutely loved it, and I feel
like soft skills has gotten such a bad rep for
so long, and I feel like you're redeeming it. So
(12:42):
on behalf of all people who enjoy soft skills and
enjoy cultivating them. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yes, anytime I think of character skills as learn capacity
is to put your principles into practice.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
At some point I got curious about where the term
came from, like, why do we call these vital behavioral skills?
Why do we call them soft? That sounds weak. Well,
if you trace the history, it turns out that the
term originated from the US Army when they were trying
to classify different skills for soldiers and basically measure competencies
to go and defend national security. And they had a
(13:17):
list of hard skills, which were literally the capabilities to
work with machines. Machines were made out of metal that's hard,
and so operating a tank or a gun was considered
a hard skill, and so then everything else leadership collaboration
was lumped in this soft skills bucket, which they didn't
think was unimportant. They just meant you're not using a
(13:38):
piece of almost unbreakable equipment. Yeah, exactly. So I think
obviously that did a great disservice to this category of skills.
And I actually really wonder if we had called those
behavioral skills, if they had been called leadership skills, would
they be branded differently today. The study that really blew
my mind was a study that roz Chetti led where
(14:01):
he found that we could predict your income in your twenties,
how much money you make from the number of years
of experience your kindergarten teacher had.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Wow, unreal.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
I could not believe this when I read this research.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And by the way, listeners, Rod Shetty is like a
natural experiment genius, so he has controlled for all of
the relevant variables, I assure you. Anyway, continue, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
He's a world class economist and the finding is very robust.
And the big question is, well, what are these experienced
kindergarten teachers doing that sets kids up on a different trajectory.
And my assumption was cognitive skills, like they're giving you
an edge and reading and math, and then you get
to carry that with you. It is true that the
more experienced teachers are better at teaching math and reading,
(14:47):
but that advantage dissipates over the next few years and
other kids catch up. Where kids get a lasting advantage
from an experienced kindergarten teacher is in character skills. In
fourth and eighth grade, the kids who happen to have
a more experienced kindergarten teacher randomly assigned ended up getting
rated higher by their later teachers in being proactive, pro social, disciplined,
(15:10):
and determent, and those skills are almost two and a
half times more important for predicting future success than cognitive skills.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
I'm wondering if we can explore some of the mechanisms
by which character skills lead to better outcomes. So, as
I'm thinking about it now, it seems like, okay, determination
kind of a clear one. It means you're practicing maybe
more deliberately, you're practicing harder, etc. It's also possible that
when you build character skills, you're more likable, and so
you're more likely to draw in mentors and peers and
(15:44):
teachers and to attract the attention of employers, And so
there might be this virtuous cycle where character certainly is
making you better at honing the craft, but having character
skills makes other people in your orbit more likely to
want to work with you and help make you better.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
I think that's right. I do wonder how much of
growth is about character skills elevating your individual learning versus
attracting people into your orbit who build the scaffolding to
help you climb.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So, speaking of character skills, I mean, you're just one
of my favorite people to intellectually spar with. But we
were chatting last week about the degree to which we
think character skills are valuable. I tend to lean more
nature versus nurture in that debate, and so, yeah, I
guess my question here is do we have encouraging evidence
that adults can improve their character skills in a persistent
(16:36):
and meaningful way. And, by the way, I would love
for you to be right here. I want to be
wrong because I really do want these skills to be
valuable and mutable, and so I have no pride around
my current point of view.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Well, there's no one easier to persuade than somebody who's
already invested in believing.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
The case hereabouts exactly.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Well, no, honestly, I'm not here to make an argument.
I don't want to persuade you. What I want to
do is share with you some of the evidence that's
really shaped my thinking on this and see if you
find it compelling. So let's start with the evidence in
the book. I was quite taken with the experiment that
Francisco Campus and colleagues did on entrepreneurs in West Africa.
(17:17):
So you take in this experiment, you take fifteen hundred
small business owners, You randomly assign them to a control group,
a cognitive skills training group or a character skills training group,
and the character skills training group sees their businesses grow
almost three times as much over the next two years
as the cognitive skills training group. Now, these founders are
(17:39):
mostly in their forties and fifties, so it's quite late
to be learning character skills.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, you're not in any kind of critical period, you know. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
And the training program is not rocket science. It's a
week of practicing being proactive and disciplined and determined, and
then thinking about how those skills apply to your business.
The fact that randomly assigning people to just practice honing
those skills for a week at midlife, mid career, then
you know, dramatically increases their revenue you looking at both
(18:10):
sales and profits. That to me is pretty persuasive. So
tell me why that didn't persuade you or why it
wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, okay, So let me tell you what I think
would persuade me. Just conceptually and embarras me, I'm thinking
about this out loud. What I hear in the study
you mentioned from Africa might be explained by the following.
There are capacities that lay dormant in many of us,
and we simply don't know that they're useful to recruit
(18:38):
in any given setting. And so what you've done in
this intervention is you've simply made salient to these entrepreneurs
that things like proactivity and determination, whatever the other soft
skills are are going to be helpful to them in
their business pursuits. So it's less about them growing and
seeing improvement in their character skills as much as knowing
(18:58):
to access them in the first place. Fascinating, fascinating, and
because it's week long, I'm kind of like that could
be an alternative explanation, and that's still valuable right to
alert people in certain disciplines that that matters.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, okay, that's very interesting. Yeah, I find that totally plausible.
I would still say that, you know, what's happening is
they're activating a set of dormant capacities and turning them
into useful skills, and so in that sense, they're still learning.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I agree with that. But if say these things exist
in their dormant and you unlock them over the course
of a week, you might go from like zero to
four in terms of like how much you know. And
what I'm arguing is, in the absence of a longitudinal
study that shows that a person can go on the
Proactivity scale, for example, go from zero to seventy five,
(19:47):
I'm not certain about how much room for growth there
is within that particular character trait, and so I'm unclear
as to how again malleable it is. So we know
they can unlock it in the first place, we know
they can maybe inch a little forward over the course
of the week, But how possible is it for two
people pull out of a random sample to both get
to seventy five with the right tools.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, that's a very good question. I think it's an
empirical question that I have not seen a good answer to.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
After the break the case for imperfectionism from a fellow
recovering perfectionist, and we'll hear about a technique to unlock
our hidden potential. It comes from a sea creature that's
up next. On a slight change of plans, I want
(20:48):
to start with your suggestion that we try and be
more like a sponge, and like a literal, living sea sponge.
We're not talking about like a kitchen dish sponge situation.
So can you tell me a little bit more about
this metaphor, and then I will tell you why I'm
obsessed with it.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
So when I was interested in proactivity, I was interested
in being proactive to absorb information that helps you grow.
And we've known for a long time that this is
an important driver of reaching potential. I was looking for
insight about that, and people kept saying as I talked
to people who had achieved extraordinary growth or coach others
to do the same, they kept saying I was like
a sponge, she was a sponge. He was a human sponge.
(21:28):
And eventually it hit me that this might be more
than a metaphor. So I started reading about sea sponges
and I learned that the yeah, I mean, that's in
the job description. Obviously, any self respecting social scientists has
to take the sea sponge.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yes, there's the sea sponge part of the textbook.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Right, Yeah, du Never. I didn't know a thing about them.
I learned a lot, and one of the things that
I learned was that they're not just adept at taking
in nutrients, they also have finely tuned filters to expel
harmful particles. And I think why this resonated with me
is a lot of people think being a sponge is
(22:05):
about just absorbing as much information as you can seek
infinite amounts of feedback, engage all of your critics. Not
so much. Not all critics are thinking critically, not all
critics are speaking constructively, And I think a huge part
of being an effective sponge is being proactive, not just
about what you take in, but also what you expel out.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yes, I mean, I love this concept about filtration because
I think it's so crucial and it's interesting. I mean,
you talk in the book about the perils of having
an ego based filtration system, So that's where you're pushing
out a lot of the bad stuff that you hear
and you're just kind of absorbing all the like, Oh,
you're great, and this speech is great, and there's no
room for improvement, right. I have the underfiltration problem that
(22:53):
you described, and it's been a journey over time. So
if I rewind the clock a bit, I mean, starting
from the time that I was a little kid playing
the violin, I was always someone who sought out an
enormous amount of feedback. But the problem that I have
is I've let too much feedback in and at times
assigned equal importance to all of it than would have
(23:13):
been helpful. And the way that I rationalize this, that
I've justified this is, Okay, I'm a person with a
lot of blind spots. There's a lot of people out
there who know a lot more than I do about
any given thing, and I want to improve as much
as possible, and I don't want to be prideful in
these pursuits. But it's taken me a lot of time
and a lot of confidence building to recognize what feedback
(23:36):
better serves the thing I'm working on and what doesn't.
And that's a really hard it's really hard to fine
tune this filtration system.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Yeah, it's not easy, and I think probably I would
guess that most people are on one extreme or another
on this. Either they pay attention to all the criticism
because they're so obsessed with learning and they think that's
part of having a growth mindset, or their egos are
fragile and being in secure means that nothing gets in. Yeah,
(24:07):
and they don't really learn from criticism, and I obviously
want to find the sweet spot there. So I think
for me, the key questions looking at the research on
what makes for useful input are one expertise is this
person credible in the domain? Two familiarity does this person
know you? And three care? Are they actually trying to
(24:30):
help you get better?
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yes, And I think it's very common to have a
critic who checks the first two boxes but not the third,
which means they don't necessarily have your best interest at heart.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
I think a good coach is not just attacking your
worse self, but actually recognizing your hidden potential and trying
to help you become a better version of yourself.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
And I think to add to that, it's okay to
not assign equal weight to every piece of feedback given
to you by someone that you admire. So there's a
difference between admiring a person and then accepting all of
their feedback, and we shouldn't confuse the two. And I
have a personal example with you on this topic, right,
So you generously gave me a bunch of feedback on
(25:14):
my TED talk. You really helped elevate it. But crucially
I didn't accept all your feedback. And I remember thinking,
wait a second, I'm rejecting Adam Grant's feedback. And this
man literally holds the world record for like the most
TED talks given by like any human. But then I
thought to myself, what would Adam tell me about whether
(25:36):
or not to reject this feedback? And I heard you
in my head. I heard you telling me on the phone, Leya,
I'm just one person. It's one person's feedback. Just reject
this feedback if this doesn't apply to you or feel
constant with you and your personality type and the kind
of TED talk you want to give who cares like.
Don't accept feedback just because it's someone's feedback. Accept it
because it resonates with you. And that was growth for
(25:58):
me because I think back in the day right, Like
ten years ago, I would have been like, accept it all,
no filtration process. But I appreciate you being that voice
in my head along the way.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Well, I'm sorry that I didn't say it more explicitly
right off the bat. If you get a comment just
from one person, that may just be their idiosyncratic taste
or their subjective reaction, and you don't have to pay
attention to it just because someone that you like or
respect said it.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
No, exactly. And I think actually the root cause of this,
and I'm just I'm going to be working on the
skill over the course of my whole life, is that
it is very very easy for me to see another
person's point of view. And I don't want to rid
myself of this trait altogether, because I really do value
my open mind and I think it makes me a
better person overall. It's just that I see that there
(26:44):
are some downsides.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
I agree, and I think this would be an example
of what psychologists would call a strength overused.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Oh that's really nice.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Yeah, So you don't want to eliminate the strength. You
want to make sure you're not using it excessively or
misusing it by applying it in the wrong situations.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yes, exactly. But I also think from a developmental perspective,
is really natural and healthy when we're young to allow
in a bunch of feedback and to test out because
we're still figuring out who we are, like, what we
care about, what we value, what we prize when it
comes to giving a talk or writing a song or
whatever it is. And it is through the process of
(27:22):
receiving feedback and seeing how we respond that we sometimes
even learn what our preferences are in the first place, right,
and what we care about. And what's so interesting in
my own evolution is that I assumed with age that
this would become easier, right, Filtering would become easier, and
it absolutely has overall. But I do feel like when
I enter a new domain, so podcasting for example, or
(27:46):
giving my first head talk, I go back into that
developmental stage of mind where I open the floodgates and
I let all this feedback in and I again have
to fine tune those filtration skills to figure out, you know,
where I want to go. So it can be a process, right.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah, I think it's better to err on the side
of being too open than too closed, because it's much
easier to turn on the filter than it is to
suddenly absorb information that you don't have access to anymore
because people have learned that you're not receptive to it.
And I love the research showing that we're better off
asking for advice than feedback.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah, tell me more about that, because when I read
that in the book, I was like, aren't they kind
of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
So when you ask for feedback, the other person rewinds
to the past and tells you what you did wrong
or what you did right, and that can lead you
to ruminate about all of your mistakes. Yeah, and then
it's really hard to carry that forward to what am
I going to do differently tomorrow. It can also if
it's positive feedback, it can lead you to say, all right,
I'm good, I don't need to change anything. And when
(28:49):
you ask for advice, people actually look ahead and they say, well,
here's the thing I might adjust next time, And then
you can immediately think about, Okay, next time I'm in
this situation, what do I want to try? And that's
less threatening. You're not defensive. You don't have to claim
that you actually were perfect last time. It's a little
bit more optimistic because you have an opportunity to improve it.
(29:12):
So I've actually stopped asking for feedback. I used to
do every talk, I would get off stage and say,
what feedback do you have? Now I say, what's the
one thing I can do better?
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
So, on the topic of coaches, how is it that
we find good coaches and mentors? And there's a somewhat
counterintuitive finding in your book that I'd love you to
talk about when it comes to searching for these people. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I think what most of us assume is that you
want to learn from the best, So find the most
accomplished musician, the greatest athlete, the genius scientist, whatever your
field is, you want to learn from the expert. The
empirical evidence does not support that as the best idea.
My favorite demonstration being that if you take an intro
(29:54):
class with an adjunct professor or a lecturer as opposed
to somebody who's tenured or tenure track in that field,
you actually go on to get better grades in your
next class than that subject. In other words, the person
with less expertise is a better teacher. Why would that be?
I think there's evidence for a couple of mechanisms. One
(30:15):
is that sometimes experts are too far from where you
are to actually remember what it's like to be in
your shoes, so they can't teach the basics. Einstein was
an awful intro physics teacher. The second challenge is that
the process of gaining expertise can make people worse at
communicating what they know. So it's not just that they forgot,
(30:38):
it's that they've been doing a lot of it on autopilot,
and they tend to take much of the knowledge they
have for granted. I think oftentimes the best mentor is
somebody who's just a couple of steps ahead of you,
and maybe not somebody who was a natural, but somebody
who struggled because they actually had to study how to improve.
And I guess that has led me to say, instead
(30:59):
of those who can't do teach, we should say those
who can do often can't teach the basics.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Yeah, I mean, I love this message. And then also
with that said, you know, I did have the amazing
fortune of studying with It's a Pearlman, who's yeah, widely
considered the greatest violinist in the world. And I will
say that Pearlman had a very unusual way of teaching
that led to really great outcomes, and this is what
he did. So I would be playing some passage and
(31:28):
rather than being prescriptive about what to do and like
how I could play it better, he would interrogate me
with a litany of questions around how it is that
I thought I could make the passage better. So it
was sort of like a maya, you're clearly unhappy with
the way that phrase is being shaped. What do you
think you can do about it? And at the time, Adam,
I remember being like, dude, you're the freakin' expert. Why
(31:51):
are you asking me? Right? My like thirteen year old
brain didn't really understand the power the gift that he
was giving me. But what he was training me to
do was to be a critical thinker. I don't want
to be a lobbyist for the world experts. They don't
actually need our help right now. They're doing just fine.
But I want to argue that there's the potential for
them to be great teachers too.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
I think they have hidden potential. So many teachers and
mentors think that they're supposed to be Yoda and they're
just gonna they're gonna unfold their wisdom for you. And
the reality is that people are much better positioned to
learn if you guide them to come up with their
own answers as opposed to just spoon feeding them your answers.
(32:32):
It sounds like what it's like Proman was doing for
you is activating the tutor effect and the coach effect.
So the tutor effect is the finding that the best
way to learn something is often to teach it that
when you have to, in this case, sort of teach
yourself and say, well, here's what I didn't like about
this violin performance. That leads you to understand it better
because you have to explain it. It leads you to
(32:52):
remember it better because you have to retrieve it. And
then in the process of coaching, normally it would be
coaching someone else, but in this case coaching yourself out loud,
you actually discover that you have some of the knowledge
you already need, and that builds your confidence and your motivation.
Is better to be uncomfortable today and better to maor
than it is to avoid discomfort today and stagnate tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, Okay, there are limits though, right to our desire
to get better. Talk about imperfectionism and how that can
be an asset to us when it comes to unlocking
our hidden potential.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, so this is for me, being an imperfectionist is
about It's not about lowering your standards at all. It's
about learning to accept the right imperfections that are not
essential to the excellence you're trying to achieve, or that
are necessary for growth. So I'll give you my diving example,
because this is where I first learned that this is
a skill. And to be clear, I'm still in recovery
(33:45):
from perfectionism.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, we're both recovering perfectionists, so big time, big time.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
But I think in diving, I always was trying to
aim for a perfect ten. And one day my coach,
Eric Best sat me down and said, you know, there's
no such thing as a perfect ten. It's a misnomer.
In one rule book, a ten is for excellence. In
the other, it's very good. And all of a sudden
I realized that the time I was spent trying to
perfect my dives was actually limiting my growth. In fact,
(34:13):
I've come to believe that if perfectionism were medication, it
would come with a warning label that says warning may
cause stunted growth.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
You just got yourself a job at the FDA out
of a nice job.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
I mean maybe, but what I lived was exactly what
the research shows, which is you only work on the
things you know you can do well. Yeah, if you're
trying to be perfect, you avoid anything where you might fail.
You end up missing the forest in the trees and
trying to tinker with these tiny details instead of looking
at the big picture, and you ruminate a lot and
beat yourself up. And I guess the way that I've
(34:44):
tried to put that into practice is I try to calibrate.
I have, you know, a range of different priorities in
my life. And when I write a book, I'm aiming
for a nine because it's a huge investment of time
and I hope there will be a decent number of
people who read it and benefit from it. But I
don't treat everything that way, you know, I'm very content
(35:05):
with a seven when I give a speech, no, knowing
that each audience is a little different and each performance
is going to be a little different, and good enough
is actually good enough in that situation. And I think
this is something we can all do, is to pause
to ask how high are the stakes here?
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (35:23):
And we aim obviously higher when it's more important and
we give ourselves a little bit more grace and permission
to be imperfect on things that are less consequential. And look,
no matter how good you get, there are always going
to be people who don't like what you do, and
there are always going to be aspects of your performance
that are going to fall short of someone's standards. You
(35:46):
cannot please everyone, so you might as well decide who
you're willing to disappoint.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Can you just say that one more time? I need
to hear that.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
One you, in particular, you as a human cannot please everyone,
and neither can anyone.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Okay, and therapy right there.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
So you might as well decide who you're willing to
disappoint and which standards are important to you.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, And I'm thinking about all the domains where this
imperfectionism perfectionist mindset is relevant. And I'm thinking about all
those parents out there that just brate themselves every day
because they don't think they're the perfect parents. And it's like, well,
what if a nine is every day my kids knew
I loved them? Like what if that was a nine?
Like maybe that is good enough slash perfection in the
(36:33):
domain of parenting versus oh, I know coach them through
the remote. I mean, just so it is a huge
manual now, right for how it is that we should
raise our kids. But yeah, it's just making me think
about how we define our north star. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
At first I was really reluctant to apply this to parenting,
Like I don't want parents to be scored. Your parenting
today was a three and a half. Yeah, but you
just changed my mind because there's no reason why we
can't clarify. Like, first of all, you should not expect
to be a perfect parent. No one will ever achieve
that standard. It's impossible. Yeh. Every parent makes mistakes. I
(37:09):
think that's part of how we grow as parents. I
think some of my best moments of growth as a
parent actually have come when I've been really disappointed in
myself for getting frustrated and impatient with our kids. But
I don't think a lot of parents I think this
is a big aha mooent for me. I don't think
a lot of parents have sat down to say, Okay,
I want to be a nine parent, not a ten parent,
because that's going to be healthier for me and for
(37:30):
my kid. What does a nine look like? What are
the behaviors that really matter and what are the ones
that are okay to be imperfect on.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I think that's a great discussion that we could all
have with our families. I'm going to force myself to
have it this weekend.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah. I think the most hopeful message coming out of
your book, and I love that you devote a sizeable
chunk of the book to this topic, is how we
can help unlock potential in others. It is a very
other focused orientation, which I think is just going to
make humanity better across the board, because you don't always
see that represented in in psych books. And so can
(38:06):
you just leave us with some reflections on how we
can help unlock potential in those around us?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
This is my top pick for kicking myself that I
didn't write this into the book, Like, how did this
not make the cut? I don't know, all right. So,
a group of my colleagues, led by Laura Morgan Roberts,
created an exercise called the Reflected Best Self Portrait, and
the idea is that a lot of people have hidden
(38:33):
potential that's invisible to them. It's almost like the opposite
of a blind spot, that you're not aware of some
of your own strengths and so you need other people
to hold up a mirror to help you identify the
things that you're good at that maybe these are underutilized
strengths as opposed to the overused ones that we talked
about earlier. So the exercise, I've had students and leaders
do it for about fifteen years now, and people often
(38:56):
come back and say, this was a life changing experience.
So all you do is you reach out to some
people who know you well in different walks of life.
You could do this with family, some friends, some colleagues,
and you ask them to tell a story about you
at a time when you were at your best. And
then you collect all the stories, which is the most
delightful set of emails you will ever get. And then
(39:18):
your job is to recognize the patterns and compose a
self portrait of who you are at your best. And
very often when people do this like oh, I didn't
even know that was the strength of mine, and now
I see all these places I can use it. I
also felt like this is a gift you can give
to other people to help them see their hidden potential.
So when I first learned about this exercise, I think
(39:39):
it was gosh, it must have been twenty years ago.
I remember the winter break starting and I was a
first year grad student. I had nothing on my calendar.
I was broke. What am I going to do with
this week? I decided that I was going to invert
the exercise, and I picked up a bunch of people who
mattered to me, and I wrote them all a story
(39:59):
about a time when they were at their best and
just emailed it to them out of the blue. It
is one of the most meaningful weeks I have ever spent,
even though I was just sitting in a room writing emails,
because really thinking about, well, what is other people's hidden
potential and how can I make that more visible to
(40:21):
them felt like a really meaningful act of friendship or
you know, an investment in a relationship, and people seem
to really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
I love that example. That's something that everyone listening can
actually do right now.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
I mean, just even pick one person and tell them
who they are at their best.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my
conversation with Adam, you might want to check out the
first time he was on the show. It's an episode
called Adam Grant Thinks Again, and we'll link to it
in the show notes. And that's a wrap on our season.
I just want to thank you for spending this time
with me and the remarkable guests we've had on the show.
(41:33):
We'll be back early next year with new episodes. In
the meantime, I'm wishing you a happy and healthy rest
of your year and a bit more equanimity in the
face of any Slight Changes of plan. A Slight Change
(41:55):
of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me
Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green,
our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Trisha Bovida,
and our sound engineer Andrew Vestola. Louis Scara wrote our
delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
(42:16):
A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a
very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A
Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. So,
(42:51):
I remember when I flew to China after Jimmy and
I got married, and we had this big wedding reception,
and I was so jetlagged first of all, and I
was in extremely elementary Chinese land. I'm still in elementary
Chinese land, but I remember my in laws kind of
looked at me and they're like, so archie to say something.
And then on the spot, I had to come up
with this like wedding speech, and it was so it
(43:15):
was so basic, Adam. I was like, hello, I am Maya,
I'm married Jimmy. Thank you so much for being here,
you know, really poetic, like so much emotional residence. I'm
sure this is great.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
You're like, see spot spot run exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
I'm like, I currently am in China. You are all
currently here as well,
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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