Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of self-correction
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Everyone is adam grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the ted audio collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and i'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

You've asked for more spirit conversations with malm gladwell, so we've answered, I hosted him live authors at working with them. The occasion was his new book, revenge of the tipping point. It's a rethinking of his first big idea. A quarter century later.

I have never understood why people perceive changing your mind is being costly and IT .

Sparked to big questions for me about building healthy cultures, fixing college emissions and handling mistakes and failures.

The fastest way to make something go away is just to say I was wrong. Just see, this strategy in the world has wrong.

We also riff on topics ranging from when to stop reading a book to how to stuff facing self estein on success. You're infer trip. Now come glad.

Well, we meet again. Hi adam. I have some beef with you. Okay.

let's go. A lot of IT.

which is why i'm very glad that you're back again to do this. You know, this is a very strange friendship we have. I actually think we ve had more interaction, arguing in front of an audience than we have in all other venues.

Yeah, I have actually a theory about why you're this way, which I T you .

blaming me yeah, all all about you.

I'm not going to share IT now because it's appropriate, but i'll tell you later about what my explanations.

I did get some interesting feedback recently. My favorite one was I just love listening to the two of you fuss and picked each other.

Okay.

that's like i've never heard those words used enduring ly before. But thank you. And then the theme was that people like me Better when I interview you. Then when you interview me, our interactions .

tend to be pretty syme's ical. So it's not really about they like IT Better when I talk the most. What they really think is they like a Better when you initiate the topics, maybe I just bring up boring things and you bring up interesting things.

Well, that's very sweet of you to send. And IT IT does track with one of my hypotheses, which was like, wait minute. So are they saying i'm a Better journalist than you are because they want me to be asking the questions? And then I thought, no, IT means you're a more interesting thinker than I am. No.

because the answers that you get stop, stop.

So I don't know what to do with any of that, so i'm just going to leave in there. But we are going to disagree on a lot of things tonight OK. I don't think there's anyone I have more fun disagree .

eed with .

OK a lot to build up that of. Well, let me further say you changed her my mind about something with with a new book. Okay, I was a further disbeliever in non fiction speakers.

I hated the idea. Yeah, you're just going to end up being the musician that is perpetual stuck singing your first great at over over. And you made me rethink that. Oh, but tell me, tell me why you are motivated to do this.

IT was the twenty for university of tipping point, and my publisher came to me and said, you should just clean that up, modernized the issue with. And I got halfway into IT and realized I didn't wanted do that. And so I just ended up rewriting IT as one does, as one does.

Twenty five years is an extraordinary long period. There were things about covered, and particularly the opium crisis, that I really, really, really wanted talk about. I couldn't see a way to fit those two things in a simple revise of the original book.

I felt like in some ways, IT was a harder book to write in the original, because the original no one thought about epidemic really at all. If you weren't an epidemiologist, you didn't know anything about epidemiology. And now we've been through a pandemic, pretty familiar with this language. And so I felt like you are degree of the divulge when up quite a bit to write this one.

The task of the first book was to convince people of the appropriators of thinking about ideas as epidemics, as viruses. In this book, we've all accepted that. So now the task is to kind of convinced of people that there is more to be said.

When I wrote the first one, I was covering the AIDS epidemic for the washing post. And I was spending all this time with epidemiologists there, a very special breed. And you need to know this because whenever there is a epidemic, the surface and they're in the news. And so I remember once I was having lunch with some guy from cdc. He was a big epidemic just and we're in a restaurant that has a salad bar.

And one of the things in the celebrity is costa with lots of main is and the celibate was configured such that the sun was streaming in the window and landing directly on the main is now has any epidemic? This will help me tell you that's a sure way to get food poisoning salmonia. Here we come through out the entire lunch.

I just seem going to this. You can take his eyes off the sun falling on the coast law, right? And the point is, like those guys are laser focused on the possibility of something going badly wrong.

They will, they will almost always air on the side of imagining things will be worse. And they were, which is exactly what you want in an epidemic. St, right? We all just who denies that any bad is onna happen is useless.

They're just like us. They're in denial, right? You once someone is only other do side of denial.

okay. So that sounds like by your theory, a good epidemiologist is a defensive pessimists, not a strategic optimist.

Yes, I like I ve got I wish I know more about what this turns.

but I tell you.

yes, that's right. But you know, that sounds right. And yeah, this that's right.

So tell me where else this supplies then? So strategic optimists studying for a big test about a week beforehand, they will imagine themselves facing the test. And then that positive image of the future is energizing.

They study really hard. They do great defensive pessimists, have a very different emotional experience. This is july, enormous research.

What they do is about a week beforehand, they wake up in a cold sweat, having just had a nightmare that not only did they feel the exam, they did so bad that their professor took away points on all their previous exams because no way they couldn't earn IT. yeah. And that anxiety motivates them to study really hard. And they do just as well as the chaotic optimist, unless you put them in a good mood, if you want to sabotage the defensive estimates, you make them happy and then they get complacent. They don't study hard and they don't have the fear the kit kicks them in the year.

You the defensive pessimist, sometimes I thought you were like all the way down the line. You're the one who, when we were back stage now, someone asked you the question of how did your early experience as a competitive diver shape you you said, well, when I was diving as a kid, my coach would grade me on this scale of one to turn out to every dive. And I realized that the way to live your life and I was like, great. What that sounds .

that is, I said not.

You said that a good model for your career or something.

I said it's a hello skill for your career.

Yes, I do said this too little grading.

Yes, far too little. If you only get evaluated once a quarter, that is a terrifying event full of judgment and sure what .

you're talking about being evaluated multiple times over the course. How many dives would you do in a typical diving? Fifty, you get fifty of valuation .

yeah and none of them like no individual score hurts and you know exactly where you stand and then you can talk about how to move closer to your target score yeah I do this every time I do anything that matters to me having after we get off stage, I will ask, anybody who's nearby and trustworthy give us this year attent. And then what can we do to get closer to ten? The people who work with me closely are going to offer IT without even me asking, because they know I want IT.

Yeah, what do you want to live your life? Do you?

Do you wait?

Welcome home on the second you cook? no. Finally, that's why you're not a cook, because you can be a cook and have somebody giving you a grade of one to ten after every meal. That's stabilising.

Not at all. It's motivating because i'm a cook.

I come home, i'm exhausted, my partner does not cook, so it's up to me to cook the meal. So I cook the meal, actually enjoy doing IT. The last thing I want is feedback on IT.

Once five, i'm like, i'm sorry I did this. IT took me an hour. That's surprise right there.

Then you have no aspirations of getting Better as a cook to you.

No, because I know this is true. I have gotten a lot Better because privately I critique myself.

But I think so when you're .

trust that judge, I do trust that judge. So this is a difference between my family culture and your family culture. Yeah, this is so in my family culture, father is englishman, mother is jack.

And you did not give feedback on stuff like that. You were polite to a fault if they, you had a problem with IT, you captured to yourself. This is a version of this thing that I really like.

The difference between center and receiver cultures, right? The japanese are a receiver culture. IT is up to the person listening to make sense of what the speaker is saying.

AmErica is a central culture. This is a misunderstand the fault. The person speaking, right? I'm that sender.

I'm i'm receiver. I say that you figured out, right? And I take much in the families text. I extend that to, I make dinner. You say IT .

slovenly that those of the rules, I expect the people who care about me to be honest with me.

I think you made a tougher stuff than I.

I don't think that you I just this is partially a defensive pessimism thing. I know that people are making those judgements privately, and so i'd rather know what's in their head, then have to be a secret. Oh, see. okay. Are you saying when you send me the early draft of revenger the tipping point and ask for comments, you didn't want me to give a err at ten along with the notes?

I wanted you to be as critical as possible, but that's because I sent IT to you early in the process. Writers may always make the mistake of sending something out too late. The mistake people make is they think it's embarrassing to show their work when IT is unformed.

But in fact, that the only time to show your work because how also you going to form IT. We do this thing with my podcast, which I really love, which is I do a first draft of revision history. And then we do the table read and we bring IT as many people as we can.

And it's supposed to be early and they just let loose. You know, I got, what do you think like tell me like, you know and because I think people think that they don't have standing to weigh on someone's writing if they are not themselves. Experience writer, but that is the exact options of the truth. You actually want someone who's not in your little world to be giving you feedback and other disappointed to fine.

we agree on that. No, they will often give you solutions that are not right for your problem. And so I find that sometimes they jump ed too quickly to hear the thing you need to do to fix this.

Why you're giving that suggestion. Oh, that's the problem you're trying to solve. I was too close to IT to see the problem, but you're too far from IT to see the right solution for me.

I actually find the process of tell me what the holes are, point out the flaws, and then I want to fix them on my own. Yeah, to be much more helpful than solve IT for me, not agree with that. So this goes to what I think is the metathesis, the revenge of the tipping point.

which self correction? Yeah, we live in a .

world that does not do enough of IT, where people are afraid of IT, where people based their entire professional careers on avoiding, why are you so enthusiastic about a meeting that you're wrong?

My father, intellectually the most important figure in my life, he had a couple years, I wrote in his orbit. He was an expert on three things, mathematics, the bible and gardening, and on everything else. He was open to correction, even on those three things.

Actually, he was more than open, more than willing to be. He sort of modeled a way of being in the world that, to me as a kid, was incredibly exciting. I just love the fact that you really never knew where he was going to land on a quest. I have never understood why people perceive changing your mind is being sly.

They are afraid of getting judge to stupid, or there is a risk of being seen as a hipcroft. You, how dare you change your mind? You not.

Who I thought you were, I can depend, do we doing a pycke? Any go? And I pycke episode. And what I got wrong about crime in the original tipping point.

this the broken window and stop in risk.

Episode a in my vegetable, a tipper point, I had a chapter that in had opened with this very famous story from new york in the early thousand nine hundred and eighty. IT was case involving a guide bernie gets, and this is when new york is one of most dangerous cities in the united states. It's just a hell hole.

And this is that the absolute nature of new york's fortunes is a very, very famous case, where teenagers, Young african american, come up to a guy name, burning, gets on the subway and they asked him for money, and burney gets, pulls out a gun, shoots them, and one of the kids is down the ground, shoots him and paralyzes in for life. It's this huge story. He becomes his tabloid hero and a symbol for new yorkers of, like we've had enough, we can't take the crime anymore of so I open with this story of berny cats.

And my point, the point of the chapter is, in order to understand why bony gets would do this, you have to understand the fact that the environment of new ork in those years on the people who live there, right, I come to pen and i'm meeting up with a little genius south, he zed ear dog in the hospital to cross the way. And SHE had a bunch of folks who he was going to have in need where i'm going to go out around anyway. At lunch, SHE said, I read your chapter and there's something that just struck me about IT.

And that is that when you write that chapter about the bird guess case, you spend pages talking about bernie gets. And I thought the way thought, and you have two sentences on the three kids who confronted him. And I was like, really, I went back.

I was like, oh my god, I did. He said, what was fascinating to her and problematic about the chapter was that here I had an encounter between two sets of people. And I thought that the White guy who was corn called the victim, although he was the actually the asia, was the interesting one.

And the black kids, two sentences, I just kind of wrote them off and didn't return to them again. And SHE was like, that's why you got a wrong, right? That's what he was saying.

You got that wrong because you bought into a narrative that said that the White people of new york, with the victims of what was happening in those years and the black kids were just standings for criminals. I like cheese. S my first thought was wall that is about us devastating, a criticism as anyone has ever made of something quickly.

Since I am have to make IT. I wouldn't thought I won't fAllen into that trap, but I did right now. IT never occurred to me, though, that that criticism was SHE wasn't saying that I was stupid, right? He was saying that you were blinded by something when you wrote that book.

And he was also saying to meet twenty five years later, and the test of whether I was open or intelligent or whatever was in how I responded to her, not in what I wrote twenty five years ago, right? I never thought I was being personally threatened by that. I ve got about a million times.

I mean, it's I want to find every copy of the tipping point out and just rip out that chapter. I mean, it's modified. But IT doesn't diminish me as a person does that that when I was three, six years old, I like fundamental misunderstood. So that's just the way I thought about that is she's offering me an opportunity to reduce myself by pointing out what I did wrong.

There's a difference between saying, okay, I want to learn from this and not make this kind of mistake again and even correct the path and saying, you know, would be more fun than that let me just broadcast some of my biggest failures and dumb mistakes to the world yeah, you go to unusual length to make your embarrassment s public. Well, you did IT with .

a month debate, was in toronto, got the the big deal in canada bringing people in the broadcast and all over and you have you debate some question. And I came me about year and a half ago, and not only did my side lose by an absolute deviation margin, but I was so terrible that afterwards, the amount of vitreal that was directed by way on mine was precedented. And so I did a podcast episode podcast, basically saying I was terrible.

And then I went to debate school in brooklin, in some high school, and they taught me had to be a Better debate. If it's out there that you were embarrassing and terrible, the best thing to do is just embrace IT and say, oh, IT and then just say, wow, I was bad and he was I just to get Better, right? You can't run away from IT.

I I agree in principle. I think in practice I thought that I was extremely courageous of you to do that because you also made that value visible there. A lot of people who didn't know how bad you are.

Yeah, there's that, but it's fine. The audience, these things is not that large. There's three hundred and thirty million people in this country.

How many listen to a podcast is like this? Many is find the other thing that people forget when they screw up and then apologize for this. You're the only one who remembers IT.

Everyone else just moves on with your life. This is a good question for a psychologist, and that is, what is the effect of an apology on the listener's memory of the event. And I think that when someone does something wrong and apologizes, what that does is implicated. Give the listener the permission to file that way to get to remove IT from everyday consideration.

I think though there's a wrinkle, which is Peter chemist research suggests that apologies are good for failures of confidence, but not for failures of character. You can admit that you didn't know what you were doing, which is what you did not not so helpful to say, no, you're right, I lacked integrity or you're right, I didn't care about you at all because people doubt that your character .

is going to change member itself in the future. Stay away from saying I was the a character.

I am a big fan of the with the maxim the best apologies, change behavior. Let's shift gears a little bit. I want to ask you about something in the book that blew my mind, and it's an after thought.

Yeah, but I could have been a whole book. I was so curious about IT. Tell me about what you learn about punks and goths.

iran, across this book of these papers that have been written by these two sociologists, animal ler and seh. They were people who were studying teen suicide. Someone who call them up once out of the blue and said, oh, guys, study in suicide.

You ve gotten come to my town. They go there and they discover its perfect upper middle class on play. IT is gorgeous.

IT is got the best high school in the state. Everyone loves each other. It's a close in community. And they discovered red, that this high school at the center of this community, I had been in the grip of a suicide epidemic for ten years or more, and they couldn't figure out how to stop IT.

And their conclusion was that one of the problems that LED to the suicide epidemic was at the high school, and the town was a moto culture, that he was a school where there was only one social group that had any kind of standing. And that social group was, i'm a great athlete. I'm an incredible student.

I'm supermarket active and i'm going to go to pan when I graduate. And that if you didn't fall into that very, very narrow definition of success, you were a failure, right? So you set up this situation and none of that because it's a monoculture.

When one person in that realm trading takes their own life IT can raise to the whole community. There's no natural kind of barrier. You know, I am talking to set Alberta.

One of the two researchers, and we were comparing our own high school experiences, is like in my high school, there wasn't one social group. There were multiple social groups. And the effect that was that everyone who came to the high school could find their own place, right?

So you had the gods and the pumps and the jokes and the geeks, and that would have you like the classic fifty high school typology. Where doesn't matter how weird or this functionality you are, this home for you. And that was true, my high school, right? And I suspect IT was true of most people's high schools, that there are these.

And I always thought of this as a problem with my high school. My high school was so resolutely non achieving. Twenty people out of my graduate in class went to college over year. But I didn't realize the extent to which having multiple different kind of pathways for students would be protective.

If I asked you off the top of your head what kind of community or high school would be prone to a suicide epidemic, you would say, oh, it's only a place where the kids feel isolated and anonymous, where there's no strong sense of community, which is no support. And their point was, this high goal was the opposite of that. He had every support in the role.

And that's what made IT. So problematic, IT couldn't been a whole book. This is the kind of be careful what you wish for paradox. The parents moved to their community because they thought they were leaving these kinds of social problems behind. And instead they created an even bigger one.

I thought I was shocking also because we think about building a strong culture and the ideas we should have, no factions, no fault lines. We want everybody to buy into the same values in the same interest. And you're saying, wait a minute, there is a dark side to that kind of uniformity .

is really interesting questions come out of that one is, is this kind of diversity that we're talking about is IT specific to high schools, or are we talking about something that would be true of all organizations? Do you want your your army battle an to have multiple factions who are I don't know I mean, I I don't know the answer to that. It's clear to me that it's very, very problematic to have a monoculture at a time when kids at lessons are trying to find their place in the world and come to develop some sense of self.

I think that pattern holds different stations of life. I'm thinking of a barn in hand study of biotech startups, hundreds of biotech startups, where you look at the culture of bu print that the founder had and some of the founders are hiring on skills, they want to know, what can you do the job today? Others are looking for star potential.

Are you going to be a genius tomorrow? And then there's some that put culture fit above everything else. And IT turns out, if founders put culture fit first, their startups are dramatically less likely to fail, and saying less likely culture fit winds in terms of started of surviving and then going public.

But then after the IPO, the culture fit firms grow its slower rates. And I think what's happening there is early on when you have a really clear mission is very helpful to have a bunch of people who have bought into that. But then once you become a bigger organization, you end up to homogeneous and you have a lot of group thing, and IT becomes harder to change and innovate.

I'd come back to this idea lot in the book and in some part of the book, trying to understand what we mean by diversity. Diversity is a matter of numbers, is not just about having people who are different within an ecosystem or a community. It's about having the people who are different insufficient numbers, such that they can be themselves and can change the culture of the group that they're belonging to.

That notion that diversity is really just about numbers and about people being present in critical mass is the one idea about diversity that is so routinely ignored and suppressed. People wanna make IT about symbolic representation, and symbolic representation is almost as bad as no representation at all. One thing i've changed my mind about is before I in the book, I was deeply suspicious of the use of quoted in any context.

Now i'm like, totally down with quoters fine deal with IT like so I don't understand why we have this aversion to just say, look, there is a difference between having one woman on a corner board on having three. There is a events with in having one non White person in the community and having five. I want to talk .

about this in the context of college admissions, a topic that you've never read about before and have no controversial view on before. We do that though, I I want IT. There's a quick aside on the puns and golf in particular yeah that I thought was so strange, which is you wrote in the book that people who dressed punks and goths are shy. yes.

Well, this is.

I found this completely counterproductive. Ves, so explain IT.

If you're shy and you look super approach able people going to come up to you and talk to you, you can be really bumped up, right, because you want to be left alone. The Better strategy, if you're shy, is to look so outlandish that people avoid you, right?

How's that hard shines in psychology? Is the fear of negative of our ua, especially by strangers. So if you are afraid that people are going to judge you negatively, why would you dress in away the guarantees .

that they're gonna? Oh no. Take the uncertain right. Like think about IT. I'm just like this and i'm deeply shy.

I'm playing my whole time worrying about what is I am. Think of this. I'm key. But if I came in in full on got gear, the uncertainty is gone. Like I know that adam can see the way I look so we can get on other things. We can have a real conversation.

You you're saying that there's a grape of people who would rather have certain rejection that face the possibility of not believe.

I am telling a psychologist this fact. absolutely. That's what people do.

I mean, that's just a that's just a kind of extension on a classic self sabotaging strategy, right? That I am so afraid of fAiling that. What do I do? I guarantee my own failure. So I take the issue up the table.

Never thought about that socially only academy ally and professionally. yeah. But you write IT. IT is an extension of self, handy camp self.

Any capping bug, I think it's everywhere. IT explains so much of the world effect. If I had won, if there was one psychological kind of insight that I wanted to take with me to explain the world IT would be that.

let's say you you're going into difficult math test and you're afraid of finding out that you weren't smart enough to do IT. So what do you do? You don't start studying until then, I before, or you don't study at all. And then if you fail, you can say, well, I didn't try and you don't have to face the .

threat to your fundamental attitude, which is why I think sports are um such a useful thing to be engaging as a kid or any kind of activity where some kind of daily investment is necessary, because IT is a mechanism for thwarting self handicappers. So if you are a member of your high score cross country team, there is a whole ecosystem that is sitting there working to prevent self handicapping on the party, on the team. You go out every day and you run together. You know, there is an ethic that says you don't get wasted the night before, you know, cross country meet like they really take one self handle in possibility after another offer table.

But by that logic then IT sounds like you think we should admit lots of athletes to pan in other iv league schools because they have ve had a chance to go through those character .

building experience. Atom, I think athletics are absolutely essential to being you know healthy, fulfill whatever human being. But I don't think you need to be good at IT. If you're a slow mile, you get all the benefits of being a runner that you get if you're a good mile. This fixation with being good at IT is just posters know all the benefits of being athlete are the discipline, the comoro, the bounce to your day, the physical fitness that I could go on on? You don't have to be good to have any of those advantages.

right? Leave IT to our favorite canadian to replace meritocracy with mediocrity. No.

no, adam, no, no, no, no, because I am also a matter rack. I am a miro rack. When IT comes to the principal function of universities, which is the education and the the construction of sophisticated intelligence, it's not about sports.

If pen wants to decide that what we really want to be is a feather for all the professional sporting associations of the world, then fine, then that matters. But that's not what you state of purposes. You not, you know, your state of purposes to produce a classic intellectuals who go out and change the world. So don't get distracted by someone's fifty hundred meter time.

I think you have it's completely wrong. You have gone on the record saying that the key to success in a career is to be good at things .

that other people aren't.

Well, right OK, right. If you're not just say this.

you put in just .

I in at the ninety second street .

in reflecting on my career. Yes, IT was my observation in the various stages of my career that one should always zig when other people are zg.

I'll use my own personal example, like the fact that I got halfway decent springboard diving was not a sign of anything athletic. I think that was an early sign that I had, I guess, a little bit of initiative and resources. Ess, when I wanted to be an athlete to try enough sports to find one that I actually could stand out at, and then whatever gritted took to get good at that sport. And those are qualities we want.

I know. But adam, you can learn the exact same qualities of grit and resource, ance and discipline, and still not be good. I changed my mind on this when I was in high school, was a very, very good winner.

and I was very good. National champion was a national champion.

and I was a running snap. And I would look down my nose at anyone who wasn't superfast, and I would say, why would they even bother? Then I quit, run for a long time.

And then in my fifties, I joined up with a running group again. And now I was no longer national calibre. Now I was like, mediocre.

And I realized the beauty of media quality. Then I realize running was way more fun. I realized I had a connection with everyone else I never had when I was super good. And I also realize that every positive and silly benefit from being an athlete I still got, even though I was mediocre.

The universe of people who are super good is this small right? Why would we get abscesses with this view? This like the four people who are amazing and neglect the one thousand who can be pretty good in at all the same benefits.

But I saying we should neglect him. I'm just saying that one of the Better predictors of future behavior is past behavior.

Yeah, but no. So when IT comes to university admissions, would I do I think I should be a checkmark in your favor if when you apply to in lead school, you demonstrate that you have participated in some kind of pathetic activity that requires discipline. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, hundred percent. Does that that mean you should deserve a break admissions now? And be they be they should be blinded to your .

times wall. That and if you take this outside of the sports, and this is absurd, just think for a second about you put down on your on your college application. I play the sax iphone, but you can actually play at on is .

more complicated with sexier one. I know i'm sure that the sex iphone gives me the kind of benefits i'm interested in here. Let's put sex iphone aside. You don't give admissions breaks of admissions to people in the marching band.

not breaks. But we want to count .

their excEllent. And I do too, but I don't I don't have. You don't have to be lily armstrong to get independent if you play the truck. No.

no. But we also don't want you to be doing the sexiest equivalent of jogging when other people are running one beef I have with with your books, as I said, yeah, is I think that sometimes you trick people into thinking the success is going to come more easily than IT does OK. So you wrote a whole book about .

how you can think without even thinking. Yes.

of course not. But that's part of a hook. The tipping point, like all you need to do is get to that magic third, and then that things will change even with ten thousand hours and outliers, which I know you have self corrected the number of times. Like, okay, if I put in that critical mass, my work is done and then I can cost as an expert, do you ever worry that people are taking the wrong message from those highlight conclusions?

Well, first off, I would point out that in all those cases, you just talking about the title or about the discussion, I think is little more nuance in that I don't think is a writer of you. You can control how people make sense of your work and nor should you try. It's not a job when these kinds of books are intended to be kind of conversation starters to prompt people to think about their world in different ways.

If I were together, together, all of the things that people have told me about my books over the years, first, for the range of things they have said, the range of meanings they've extracted from my books is way, way, way, way wider than I would ever have imagined. And many of them were things that I did not think that meaning was explicit in the book itself. They were taking IT and applying IT in their own way to their own life. And that is beautiful. I, I, I would never would like to stand in the way of that.

So it's on the receiver now after the center.

I believe to receive our cultures.

I think if somebody has a reaction to my book that's different from what I intended, then I went to learn from that reaction and communicate more clearly.

Next time, I guess I object to the notion that someone who writes a book has a very, very narrow al prescription. And if people don't accept that prescription.

they failed even doing some fun magic one experiments and revision history. I want to give you magic one in a few areas and ask what you you're put in charge of the twenty twenty eight olympics. What's the biggest change make the best proposal i've seen so far. As dan pic, who said, we should make release multiple or multi edge range. So you have really have a teenager, twenty or thirty something, a forty or fifty something in one person.

And I thought .

that was genius.

I think to break up the olympics, I think it's too much stuff going on at once. And we should get to cut IT in half and half should beyond one summer, the other half.

the other summer. I actually think it's a really good idea, because after going to paris, I thought everyone should go to the olympics, and they should happen every year. Because if the only place i've gone where people are genuinely rooting for athletes, regardless of what country they belong to, if you get to do a constitutional amendment, what would you pick?

My favorite magic, one thing is not mind, is my friend lilly. As a idea, if there is one thing you could do that you think would have the biggest positive of effect on the way we live our lives. He said, everyone in the world puts name in the head, and you pull out in a new name, and you have to live in that person's house for a year.

fantastic. It's been to. So you no idea, we go end up and you got do IT for you. We just crimble whole system for a year. I mean, obviously, I would mess everything up. But assuming you can do this, do you think that being incredibly useful exercise, everyone gets ripped out of their comfort zone for like a year?

What what I like about IT is that IT forces you to imagine a real life version of the rosy, invalid ignorance. So those who aren't roll's fans like the test of how justice society is was, would you accept a place in IT if you didn't know what that place was? And IT turns out by that standard, they really want to live in sweden, not so much the us. And the idea that you could be dropped in to anybody's life, I think, makes the the staggering in equities that we have in this country a little bit hard to stomach.

One of the weird things that i've always thought about, private people, rich people, is the assembly of complaint.

You would think, wouldn't you intuitive ly, that the biggest complainers in society would be those in the bottle, and the people who who complain the least will be those on the top right? And you would think that as people acquire wealth and privilege, they should wine less, right? If you have a billion dollars, you should be completely indifferent to your tax rate.

You've got a billion dollars. Why do you care what your taxes are, right? Or like if you've got a billion dollars, why do you care if someone wants to build an apartment building next to your house just by anyone else? You have a billion dollars, right? But this is not what happens is the reverse.

IT strikes me, people in the bottom don't complain that much at all. All of the complaining takes place at the top. And the more people, the close of people, get to the top, the more they complain.

right? I just, i've never in my life remember once reading about this english hedge fun guy who super rich. And if he lived in england more than half the year, he would have to pay english taxes.

So he went and established his place of permanent residence, like one of those little islands off the Scottish coast. He was still upset about the prosperity of giving up on his money that he, he left his family bind in land and went to live. No, one hundred and sixty one every day is a year in like the shtand islands or something like that.

I just thought that is the stupidest man i've ever met in my entire life. He is, he is rich and then is forgotten that fact and is behaving as if he has no money at all. And who's organize his entire life around a complaint, right? My point is that making everyone lives someone else for you would, I think, solve the a image of complaining problem? Can they just enjoy the fact that they are rich? Should ask them.

And that is a book I would enjoy seeing you, right?

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Let's a let's take a few of our audience questions here. One question is, have you ever thought about writing fiction?

Yes, I tried to write a screen play once and he was a disaster. But I enjoyed IT. And I would like to write a fight, well, because that's all I read.

Okay, on spy thrillers. why? I heard you say once that sometimes as you stop reading before the end.

oh, all term.

what is wrong with what the whole point of the filler is to find out the twist at the end?

No, no, no, no, yes. The whole point of the rilla.

I don't think you understand the point of a thrilling no.

no, no idea is what you're wrong. The whole point of a siller is to delight in the little act of magic that the rider creates at the end of the book, with they've set up a puzzle and they resolve IT, right? And what the reason you read your three hundred pages to get to the end is you want to participate in that magical moment.

If you suspect that the magic is not onna happen, there is only one rational response and that's to bail get off the train. The train is gonna crash. Get off the train.

Could not disagree more strongly.

You finish things even though you think it's gonna a disable no.

I get off to train. And page twenty, I don't read two hundred ninety five pages and then say, I now I realized I much more .

hopeful than you also, I suspend.

why would you trust the author for two hundred ninety five pages? And then you lost me. I'm not going to be the last .

because the hard thing is the last ten pages, right? They can IT could still there could still be a possibility that this budget could happen on page to still real. But but this comes a point where you're like it's not like when they kill off a character who in your own mind, you're thinking this person is central to the, to the. I invested deeply in this character. Are you the guy who gets up in the middle in the beginning of a movie and walks out?

Depends, how about .

the movie is wow, adam, you pull the trigger quick on these things.

Mean, why would you waste your time?

There are lots of great books way.

So that says the person who was complaining that your biggest regret is you don't have enough time. Couple of other things that I think I have to ask you about here. How does the higher achiever this identify with accomplishment? How do you stop basing your ego in your identity on success?

That's a really good question and a serious question. There's going to be a point where you're not going to have the same successes you had when you were Younger. And you have to figure how you gna deal with that.

And IT IT is, trust me, I think about this old time. I think that is, it's the central question of getting old. If you belong to multiply social worlds, you have way Better defenses against that kind of defeat.

So with a few, have a terrible day at work. If you still have require you belong to and you still have your kids. If you have multiple social roles, you have multiple ways of getting.

If you have one world and is just work when that goes badly, you have nothing right? I guess one responses, I need to develop more world as I get older to can defend myself against the inevitable deming of the day. I should say that .

tracks also with the psychology, the self. I think about self affirmation theory. I think about self complexity theory. Huge body as a research showing that if you put all your ex and one identity basket, if that basket spills over, then it's devastating. Where is if you have a diverse set of values and groups and goals, then it's a lot easier to tolerate a threat to one of them.

Look at my my mother, who is ninety three years old and is doing fabulously. That's a story for life. She's actually a very interesting k study because shean identical twin and her twin stayed in jamaica and had a relatively a much narrower and less dense, uh, social world.

Just my virtual living in snake, my mother constructed for her self in canada, very, very dense social world. They're both exactly image. They are identical.

When I was a kid, I confused that that's how identical or my arts is. Suffer from dementia, quite advanced. My mother know SHE, if you talk to with, you think you're talk in to a forty year old.

My mother had always had multiple social worlds to sustain. And when one fell away, he added another. I don't think he was conscious, but I think SHE understood on some level that that is what IT means to be healthy in the world.

What's the idea of yours that you ve writing about, that you lived by the most and least .

that i've written about? I once in a parkas episode where I was talking about lists, and I have list. I only ever drink five liquids, milk, water, tea press or base beverages and red wine.

That's IT. I never tva, and people make lot of fun of me for this, but I blues her strongly. Things like that arbitrary acts of self discipline are enormously clarifying. Everyone else, when you go to the restaurant, I O which I had, you want to have to I don't want to drink this.

I'm like, it's totally clear if it's still a clock and I am a glass one morning and you know you only stand by the person in the copy shop and they it's their turn to order and they act like it's never even occurred to them what they might order. This drives me bananas. Just take some disorganized corner of your life that you don't have strong feelings about and just create an arbitrary decision structure and stick to IT. It's fantastic so that I do live my life on that.

What something you'll never change your mind about?

Never change reminder about? No, it's very hard to say. How can I say that?

I don't know. Why would you take a stand like that? No, I I don't take this. I don't think is anything I wouldn't change my my help.

Well, I I don't want to call you formulaic or predictable, but I did the right down now as my expected results.

I will never change my mind about the observation, the belief that my daughters are cute. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, adam.

Thank you as always.

Rethinking is hosted by me, adam grant. The show is part of the ted audio collective, and this episode was produced mixed by cosmic standard. Our producers are handy kingsland mow in asia.

Simpson, our editor is only hundred a sale. Zar, our fact, cheaper. Paul derbin original music by hand sale sea and an election later Brown. Our team includes a lisa smith, Jacob win, ic sama, roxon high lash, bambang chain, Julia dickson and with pennant Rogers.

I got really fixated at one point with looking at the members of the caltech track and field team. And what is hilarious he is how that has a track team. col.

Tech has a tracking. So in in your universe, I believe universe, the track team is filled with people who are very, very, very, very good. There's a guy who goes to harvard, right knock, who is a world class five thousand meter runner.

And my point is, why is he there? Like, what is harvard? Did you have a world class fight? I look on his stroller. He is running all the time. P R X.