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Today on Something You Should Know, could the time of year you were born impact your health now? Then, new technologies that are already changing how we live. From sponge cities to AI to meat grown in a lab.
take a blood sample from a cow, get the sort of stem cells out of that, start growing them, and you just turn it into meat. The principle is intact. It's just how do you get it to industrial scale and how do you get people to accept it? Also, how to keep more of your food from going bad and failure. We're all going to fail. So let's learn to fail well. And
And it's not thick skin per se, right? It's just more healthy recognition of what life is all about. Life will have ups and downs, and the ups are all the sweeter for the fact that they're not the uniform experience. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
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Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel. The World's Top Experts. And Practical Advice You Can Use In Your Life. Today, Something You Should Know, with Mike Carruthers. So here's an interesting question. Hi, welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. The question is, could the time of year you were born have an effect on who you are?
That's kind of the theory behind astrology, I guess, that your birthday has something to do with who you are. But what I'm going to talk about is something very different.
Psychiatrists and anthropologists from Harvard and Queensland universities studied children from birth through age seven several years ago, and they found that babies born in the winter were significantly longer at birth than babies born in the summer. By age seven, they were heavier and taller than those summer babies. They also had larger heads and scored higher in a series of intelligence tests.
The study also found that babies born in the fall live the longest and suffer less illness in old age. Good news for the summer babies is that they tend to be happier with a brighter outlook than grumpy winter babies. Spring babies were found to be the most prone to illness, but their eyesight seemed to be better. And that is something you should know. Music
If you've been on planet Earth long enough and you take notice of it, you can see how things have changed. Change is often slow and gradual, but when you look, you can see that life today compared to life, say, 25 years ago is very different in a lot of ways.
And I always think it's fun to imagine, well, what's going to come in the next 25 years based on where we are now? What's likely to change in the way we live our lives? Not so far off in the future that it's impossible to predict, but in the near future. What are some of the technologies that are already here, just not commonplace, at least not yet?
Here to reveal and discuss some of this is Jay Ingram. He's host of two national science programs in Canada, Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio and Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada. He's the author of 19 books, his latest being The Future of Us, The Science of What We'll Eat, Where We'll Live, and Who We'll Be. Hey, Jay, welcome to Something You Should Know. Great to be here, Michael. Thank you.
So you're a science journalist, so I can see how you would be predisposed to liking this. But why do you think this is an important topic to talk about? What's coming or what's on the horizon or what's already here and hasn't really gone mainstream yet?
I think people should be aware of the vast array, or at least a selection of the vast array of technologies that exist today that could well have an impact on our lives in the future. But rather than predicting specifically, I prefer to look at a choice. And I think the more we think about those today, think about them seriously, the more
the better off we'll be in the future. But I'm not, I try and stay away from picking winners. But, you know, to go into the future blindly without even knowing what people are doing today, I think is a mistake.
So I think an interesting place to start would be food because we all got to eat and food technology keeps changing the kinds of food that we can eat and what's available. And of course, now there's like, you know, new kinds of meat. There's plant based meat that people seem to like. And but then there are people who who advocate, you know, that we should do away with meat.
There are some people that would like to advocate that, but it's not realistic. And in fact, if you pay close attention to technologies that might seem promising on the surface, like lab-grown meat, you can see that there is now major pushback against it, especially from big meat producers who get their meat from the traditional sources, live animals.
And I like the idea of lab-grown meat. I don't think it's as distasteful as some people think. But, you know, this is the thing, right? You have a technology that while small-scale at the moment
If it were able to be scaled up from, let's say, flasks in the lab where it is now to vats, giant vats, then you might make some inroads and you never have to kill an animal. You just keep its cells reproducing. But...
Culture and social forces and political forces all have their way with these technologies. So, you know, look at vegetable-based, so-called vegetable-based meats like chicken.
beyond meat, companies like that, that did exceptionally well when they first went on the stock market and it looked like they were the big thing. And then they didn't exactly collapse, but their value dropped by about 50%. And it doesn't seem to me that they're making many inroads now.
And, you know, you can, I mean, honestly, one of the most fruitful areas could be growing insects not to eat whole. Like everyone goes, ew, I don't want to eat a grasshopper. But you know what? You don't have to. You grow a billion crickets. You turn them into flour. You feed animals with that protein source. And therefore, you've taken a lot of pressure off plants.
growing stuff for animals, which you could now grow, use the same land to grow for humans. And I think that's a huge potential. It's already really scaled up in Africa. But again, it's going to be the cultural acceptance of something like growing crickets that is going to be tough. But that's happening now. And in fact, I mean, you could buy cricket flour on Amazon and many people do and eat it.
That's right. But how many? Well, I don't know. They don't check in with me. Not many is the answer. Right. I mean, you know, and the other thing is you're right about meat. So especially from a North American perspective, there are a lot of people who are turning away from meat and, you know, eating pulses like lentils and stuff like that. And those are healthier diets.
But, you know, there's a very interesting correlation that has held for decades that as soon as the take-home pay, the money in the pocket of people in a country grows, their taste for meat grows with it because below a certain level of income, it's just too expensive. But people, I mean, and I'm saying this in general because it's been in generally true in the past,
they'll turn to meat as they start to get the income. So there may be a hump that we have to get over where, you know, most of the world has reached their point where they get their fill of meat and they may start to follow the health advocacy and turn to vegetables, but we're just not there yet. But, you know, I live in a province in Canada, Alberta, where raising cattle is a big deal. And I can tell you, you know,
You raise the idea of plant-based burgers, you get a lot of pushback. What is laboratory meat? What is it?
There's something that's been used in labs for almost a century now called tissue culture, where if you take cells, like individual living cells from an animal, and you put them in glassware in the lab, and you add a medium that has nutrients in it, they will divide and reproduce. And you'll eventually, in the lab version, get a layer of cells covering the glass in that bottle.
So they are animal cells that came from an animal. And you can actually grow generation after generation of those cells in the lab without ever taking cells again from an animal. So now take a blood sample from a cow, a prize cow, in fact, and get the sort of stem cells out of that, the cells that
can grow into say muscle cells, start growing them, but you got to grow them on a vast scale that has never really been done before. But if you can get them growing, then what you get is a massive cell muscle cells, which is like a steak, right? It's a massive muscle cells with fat cells and other things in it.
And you just turn it into meat. And in fact, you could do this with pet food today, pretty much. I mean, my dog doesn't care what the meat looks like. He'll eat it anyway. The problem is that humans want a steak and a marbled steak, just the right color. You know, they want a little bit of blood in it. And so this complicates the issue tremendously. But
The principle of growing muscle cells in the lab, which are essentially meat, is intact. It's just how do you get it to industrial scale? And then how do you get people to accept it? Oh, yeah. I mean, you can just imagine the pushback to that. I mean, it just seems so Frankenstein-ish, ghoulish to be making meat in a lab. People just aren't.
I mean, people will taste it, right? Like, oh, you got to try this. But to really serve it for dinner, eh, I don't know. But I will say this. There are chicken nuggets on sale in Singapore right now that are lab-grown chicken nuggets. Now, I haven't tasted them. And in fact, I have had vegetable-based chicken nuggets and compared them to real chicken nuggets.
And I don't think they're as good. So that's the other thing, right? It's familiarity. I know what a steak feels like in my mouth, what it smells like, what it tastes like. If the lab-grown steak doesn't meet those measures, doesn't meet that threshold, I'm not going to like it.
What about other food technologies, not meat, but other things that is here or on the horizon that looks promising?
Yeah, so, I mean, we've been talking about meat, but if you go to the other side of the plate and think about plants and the vegetable component of your dinner, vertical farming is a technology that a lot of people talk about. So in essence, a greenhouse, but vertical. And you could probably take a 30-story building and build
Fill it with lighting and that raises energy demand. So you gotta, you know, park that for a moment, but it's, it's not actually difficult to grow. Props fruit like strawberries, lettuce, all kinds of greens, especially.
in a huge building where you have no insect pests, you control the climate precisely, so you don't get drought, you don't get anything like that. And the other virtue of it is, I live in Canada, we don't grow a lot of greens during the winter, but you could
in a vertical farm so that instead of importing lettuce from California, say, you could grow it 10 blocks away and have it fresh. But again, one of the issues, and I mentioned energy, one of the issues here is, okay, you've got to heat it and you've got to provide light. Where are you going to get the light? Well, maybe you'll have solar panels that
generating the electricity to power the lights to let the plants grow. There is a kind of an irony there because you're taking sunlight, changing it to electricity, then changing it back to fake sunlight to grow the plants.
But how else are you going to do it? You're not going to get enough natural sunlight in the winter and a lot of parts of the world. So vertical farms have started. They're working. They're working on a scale that, you know, is okay. But any of these things that we're talking about, whether it's lab grown meat or vertical farms or insects, the scale has got to be enormous from where at least from where it is today.
Let's talk about transportation because, you know, we were supposed to have our flying cars already and we don't. What's on the horizon? What's new in transportation? I'm more interested, actually, although the car is obviously a big deal.
uh, in what, uh, airplane traffic is going to be fueled by. And airlines are now experimenting. I'll get to your flying car in a sec. Uh, airlines are experimenting with biofuels. So you take something like food waste and you process it to get, uh,
something like kerosene and you fly planes with it. So, you know, at most what I've seen so far is passenger jets flying, let's say from Washington to Miami with one engine fueled by regular fuel and the other fueled by biofuel. But again, it's got to scale up really fast. Anyway, the Paris Olympics, you've got to go, I guess, because they're promising to have some version of flying cars.
to get people from the outskirts of Paris down to the Olympic facilities. We're talking about new technologies and new ways that life will change in the very near future, and in some cases already. My guest is Jay Ingram. He is author of the book The Future of Us, the science of what we'll eat, where we'll live, and who we'll be.
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. For
So Jay, can you explain sponge cities, which is a concept I don't think most people have heard of, but with all the recent floodings that we've seen all over the country, all over the world, this idea may be really something. So explain sponge cities.
There's this concept where instead of having a lot of surfaces like parking lots where the water can't possibly stay, it has to flow over the parking lot into a drain somewhere. Instead, you design the landscape in a way that there are opportunities, small ponds, maybe porous road surfaces,
opportunities to allow rainwater and melting snow not to flow away. And it's estimated that if this were applied on a large scale to countries like the U.S.,
You would have much less damage from stormwater. You'd have much less maintenance of stormwater sewers, and you wouldn't have nearly as many floods. There was just an issue of Wired Magazine talking about this, where these areas in Shanghai, China, have been converted from basically wastelands that water was just pouring over into parks.
And it's all just to capture the water before it goes away. So, you know, it may be, and again, you know, I don't like to make predictions really, but it may be a combination of sponge cities, better housing design, much more use of solar cells on roofs. I mean, really, I think every new house should have
you know, solar panels on it, why wouldn't you? It's free energy. And so, you know, it may be tinkering with those kinds of things rather than a whole radical new design of houses. You know, it's interesting because you've said several times that, you know, these things would have to scale up. And we just had a mathematician on talking about the linearity bias and that,
People worry that things aren't going to scale up, but they usually do. And he gave the example that back in when COVID first started and they were trying to get people vaccinated, all these news reports, it's going to take 10 years to get everybody vaccinated because there's a bias that it will continue at the rate it's going now. And clearly it didn't. It scaled up really fast. And a lot of these things, it seems when the need is there, they scale up really fast.
yeah that's interesting now and then i think there was a general perception
that this is a pandemic and a lot of people are going to die, so let's get this rolling. And one shouldn't ignore the fact that a lot of really good experimentation on mRNA vaccines had already been done. It wasn't like we were starting from scratch. But you're right. I don't disagree that there's a linearity bias, but there has to be a kind of acceptance.
And if you can get people behind some of these ideas and see the sense in them and they don't cost them an arm and a leg, then I think you can get things going. It may be, you know, that food might be a little tougher than say designing a city to absorb the water or putting solar panels on a roof. I mean, once you've got solar panels on a roof, you don't pay any attention to them. Changing your food habits significantly, uh,
Maybe. On the other hand, you know, what people don't remember is that sushi was a non-entity in the late 50s in North America. And then some of the first sushi bars started in the United States. And now, like, I'm doing this interview from southern France. If I walk out my door here, I can point to three sushi places within the first block. So it can happen.
So in all the research that you did, what was maybe one technology that you uncovered or you researched that really kind of blew you away that's really fascinating to you? You might be surprised when I say this, but prosthetic limbs.
Because for too long, people with arm, leg amputations had to make do with like, honestly, it's not much of an exaggeration to say a hook for a hand and a peg leg for a leg. But together with AI and the miniaturization of electronics,
prosthetic hands and lower legs and feet are becoming way, way more sophisticated. Now you might argue, well, you know, that's a small percentage of the population. Yes, it is. But you know how it works that you make huge advances in one area and suddenly you see spill offs going off in all directions. And, uh,
So that's something that really impressed me. And of course, the other thing is just AI in general. I wouldn't want to predict... I don't like to predict anyway, like I said, but I wouldn't want to predict anything about AI because it's just moving too fast. I mean...
Chat GPT is what? A year and a half old. Okay. So what about 10 years from now? Where are we going to be? These things are hurtling along. And, you know, AI already is making a huge impact in medicine. One of the huge medical issues we're going to face in the next 10 years is dementia and the number of people with dementia.
AI is going to do a way better job of not only predicting if someone's going to get it, but also helping to design drugs, which we don't really have yet, to ease that person along and allow them to live many more productive years. So I would say prosthetics for that targeted audience, but AI for all of us.
Well, we could talk about other technologies that are here or almost here that you write about. I mean, we could talk for a long time. We're out of time, so maybe another day we'll have you back. But I enjoy talking about this more than I enjoy talking about predictions way off in the future, years and years away, because usually they're wrong, whoever is making the prediction. But this is stuff that's already here, right?
And, you know, I look forward to tasting laboratory-grown meat one day. I've been talking to Jay Ingram. He's the author of 19 books. His latest is called The Future of Us, The Science of What We'll Eat, Where We'll Live, and Who We'll Be. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Jay. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks a lot, Michael. Thank you.
If you look back over your life, you can spot the failures. We all have them. And there are different kinds of failures. The kind, in retrospect, you could have prevented if only you had done something different.
You know, like you burned your dinner because you got involved in a phone call and forgot that there was something on the stove. You could have prevented that. And then there are the kind of failures you had to try, like interviewing for a job you didn't get or asking someone on a date but were turned down. You failed, but you had to try. Life is full of failures, and I can assure you there are more to come in your future and mine.
Here to talk about failing and more importantly, failing well, if that's possible, is Amy Edmondson. She's a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School and author of the book, Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well. Hi, Amy. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks so much for having me.
So let's start with you explaining what you mean by failing well, because it sounds kind of like an oxymoron. I mean, failing is the lack of doing something well. So it seems like we need an explanation. Well, there are two parts to failing well, and indeed, one part is failure.
Preventing preventable failures. Now that might sound almost definitional, but I promise there is a method to my madness. The other part is promoting what I will call intelligent failures and welcoming and valuing them for the new knowledge they bring.
So, yes, failing well is deliberately meant to be provocative, but it does have those two important components. So let's talk about those components. Dive right in and explain them. So by and large, preventable failures occur in familiar territory. They occur in places where we already have a recipe for success, a process that creates
can lead to the results we want. I'll define failure as an undesired result. And undesired results can range from, you know, I accidentally put salt instead of sugar in the cookie recipe and they taste awful, to a scientific experiment where I am hoping against hope that my new hypothesis is right and that I will have a breakthrough scientific discovery over here. And alas,
Mother Nature had something else in mind. But the only type of failure that is legitimately useful, valuable, should be welcomed into our lives and workplaces is intelligent failure. And those are the failures that happen in new territory, new to the world or new for us. If you're a scientist, it's new to the world. If you're a kid learning to ride a bicycle, it's new for you.
where you are in pursuit of a goal, you have the available knowledge that exists about how to get the result you want, you have a strong belief that it might work, and yet you're wrong.
And in that case, it's almost impossible not to fail. I mean, I can't imagine there's any kid in the world who tried to ride a bike the first time and just took off. I mean, it just doesn't happen. You just don't think it can happen, right? You don't hop on that bike and sail along perfectly the first time. But going back to that kid on the bike or maybe the scientist in the lab, when you get on the bike the first time with high hopes of nailing it and you don't,
It hurts. You're laying on the sidewalk crying. Failure has a bad connotation. No one gets up and says, yeah, look at me. I failed really good and now I'm going to try again. Nobody does that.
And yet the extent to which you can do that or get closer to doing that is the extent to which you'll learn faster, be happier and probably take more smart risks. Just by trying to just by having it not hurt so bad. Yes. By in fact, you could say by having more rational actions.
self-talk or rational reactions. Like if you're the kid learning to ride the bike and you fall off after 30 seconds or 10 seconds the first time, you should say to yourself,
Good first try. And indeed, nobody ever learned to ride a bike without falling off quite a few times before they got the hang of it. Like I'm on schedule. I'm on program. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in pursuit of this wonderful goal of freedom. So here's what I wonder as I observe people in the world. Some people are able to take failure seriously.
rejection, you know, those kinds of situations easier than others. Some people seem devastated by it. Other people, eh, no biggie, move on to the next. And I wonder if the people who are so devastated by it are better off avoiding those situations where they're likely to fail and be so torn up by it or dive into those situations because the more exposure to failure, the more used to it you get.
Well, I guess, I mean, that's a possibility. And honestly, I don't have data on that. But what I can say with some confidence is that you can develop your failure muscles. And actually, one of the things that does help people, especially kids, do that is participating in competitive sports. Because the beauty of competitive sports is that
And it is always the case that one team wins and the other team doesn't. And so you get more, it's disappointing every time, but you get more comfortable with that and realize that it's actually part of it and that it makes the losses make the victories all the sweeter. And I think that's true in other areas as well. That's just one arena where you can kind of develop that
experience that disappointment doesn't mean devastation. Don't you think though, or, or, well, I don't know. I'm not going to tell you what to think that even in sports now in kids sports. Now we try to sugarcoat it. Like you're not, you didn't fail. You didn't, you didn't lose because you're a winner and yeah, but your team lost 19 to nothing. And I completely agree with you. And I think we are doing, giving, doing a disservice to these kids because
Because we are inadvertently sending the message that only success counts. Therefore, we're sort of lying to you right now, telling you you succeeded even though you failed. And so we're making failure more toxic rather than less. So how would you, if you're a kid lost 19 to nothing, what would you say to him?
Wow, that was a big loss. Let's take a look at it together. Let's figure out which skills are most in need of development and let's
Let's develop a training plan. Now, if you're winning, if you're losing 19 to zero every single time, maybe this isn't your sport. Let's, you know, let's shift to something that, you know, that you might enjoy or have a steeper learning curve on. I mean, it's not the case that everybody should be good at everything, but it is the case that nobody ever got good at something without training.
effort without repeated attempts to improve and then earnest examination of what worked and what didn't and using that examination to make changes going forward.
Well, I think, you know, that's one of the complaints and criticisms of a lot of parents today is they kind of try to protect their children from failure. And kids have to fail in order to grow. It is so natural as a parent because you love your kids. You don't want them to suffer.
to try to protect them from failure, to try to sort of intervene and either be the snowplow that smooths the road ahead of them in ways they're unaware of, or otherwise tell them in the example you just provided that, oh no, you did great, when in fact,
You did okay, but there's lots of opportunities to do better. And I think what the research would suggest is those kids are not being well served by that approach. They need to have their small, safe failures in a way that allows them to grow and learn and expand and develop the skills for withstanding life's inevitable setbacks.
I don't know if you looked at this, but it seems to me that failure is a little easier in numbers. Like if you fail alone, it's a lot harder to take because it's kind of like feels like it's all your fault. That's true. I didn't look at that in any systematic way, but I couldn't agree more. It's, you know, it's certainly problematic.
emotionally easier to be a part of a team that just lost the match than to be the individual out there on the tennis court that lost the match and you feel all eyes are on you and, and you have no one to commiserate with. Uh, but, but that too, I think probably a healthy mix of both is what works to continue to develop, um,
What I keep referring to is failure muscles. And it's not thick skin per se, right? It's just more healthy recognition of what life is all about. Life will have ups and downs, and the ups are all the sweeter for the fact that they're not the uniform experience.
But if you didn't get those messages growing up, if you're a big boy now and a big girl now and you have to live your life in big boy land and big girl land, how do you develop that muscle and not be devastated every time things don't go your way?
I think the best way is to just start by taking more small risks. You know, pick up a hobby that you, you know, pottery or, you know, watercolor painting or maybe a sport. Pickleball.
Pick up something that you don't yet do that you know at the outset you will not be brilliant at it on day one. So it's a given, right? So it won't be a disappointing fact when you encounter it.
And that just gives you more of this absolutely essential experience of doing and trying things that you're not perfect at and realizing the world didn't come to an end. In fact, it's kind of fun. It's kind of fun to play around with something new. It seems that one of the things that hurts so much when people fail is
is they think about what other people must be thinking. And my sense is they're not thinking anything. They don't, they're not holding you accountable and thinking you're horrible. They're probably thinking good for you for trying.
Absolutely. 100%. And more, you know, they may not be thinking of you at all, but yeah, they see it as brave. They see it as fun. They see it as, you know, sometimes, oh, I'm glad it wasn't me, but good on her for doing that. It's, I mean, people, in fact, we like people better when they are honest, authentic people.
fallible human beings than when they're know-it-alls or I'm so perfect, aren't I? Nobody really likes those people. So we err in thinking
People will like us more and respect us more when we appear to be perfect, when in fact the opposite is true. Well, it seems like the whole subject, the whole connotation of failure just has really bad PR because success, people who are successful, usually the story glosses over all the failures it took to get there. And it's just success. It's all by itself. And, and,
And yet so much of life. I mean, the kid on the bicycle. Ask any stand up comedian. Ask every stand up comedian. The first time they got up to do comedy, they bombed. They failed miserably, but they came back and they got better and better and better. But nobody gets up there and just nails it. I don't think that's ever happened.
No. In fact, I was playfully just for myself, came up with the term elite failure practitioners to describe super successful people, you know, in every field from celebrity chefdom to science to Olympic athletes and so on. You know, and I'm like, you know, these are these sort of super high achievers in different realms are not people who have failed ever.
less often than the rest of us. They're literally people who have failed more often than the rest of us. So, and then I decided, no, why keep the term private? I'm going to use it. You know, they're EFPs, elite failure practitioners. They're the people who have mastered the art of failing well and look where it gets them.
Yeah, but people have heard for, you know, pick your example, you know, Babe Ruth got the most home runs, but he also had the most strikeouts. But it doesn't seem to help. It still hurts. Failure hurts. It's true. It's true. You know, and if we talk to those people, they don't jump up and down with joy when they experience a failure, but they have learned that, yep, this is part of the journey. And if I care enough about...
excellence or about where I'm headed or what my goal is, you know, to go to the Olympics or to, you know, have a national television program as a chef or, you know, you name it. If I want that enough, I am willing to fail. I just have to be. It's logical.
I heard something recently, I think it was a guest on this podcast who said that kids today, a lot of people today, one of their big goals is to be famous.
And not famous for anything, not a famous baseball player. They just want to be famous. And they don't want to fail. How can you fail at being famous? There's nothing to fail at. But you can't just be famous. Well, some people are. It seems like a hollow goal. Doesn't it? At the very least. Because it's devoid of passion for the content area. Yeah.
And I think that the best kind of fame comes from a real passion for something, whether it's a sport or science or becoming an effective business leader, because you really do want to make this particular impact on the world.
And that, I think you need that. But it does seem like a real mindset shift is, I mean, how many times, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, we've heard all the cliches and everything. And yeah, they're great, but you've really got to change the way you view your failure or it seems like you're never going to get anywhere. Yeah.
This is, of course, very closely related to the wonderful work by Carol Dweck and others on the growth mindset or the learning mindset as opposed to the fixed mindset. When people internalize that idea that they just are who they are and that's a kind of a fixed, that's their personality, that's their ability level, then they truly don't want to be caught out short. But if they have a growth mindset, they know that
where they are and where they want to be are simply a matter of hard work and good learning along the way. And it's, I think we're seeing, I mean, ironically, because there's more and more evidence that that's powerful, we're seeing people heading in the other direction, just as you were saying. Yeah, that's kind of sad, I think. Yeah, it's like people want the easy way. Well, people vote. I mean, who wants the hard way? But the fact is,
there is no easy way much of the time. That road is closed and you've got to get there the other way. And people seem to be less willing to do it. I couldn't agree more. And I think that, you know, yes, the hard way is essentially the only option or the only way. And also I think people fail to realize the extra joy and exhilaration that comes from accomplishing something hard.
You know, you don't really get that much fulfillment from doing something easy. Right. And what you were saying earlier is it feels better to have failed and then succeeded than to have just succeeded. Because then, I don't know, it's like good and evil. You can't have one without the other. It's just you have to feel that.
Yeah, it's like dark and light. I mean, they kind of, they're two sides of the coin and you pretty much have to experience, you have to have both in your life for a full and effective life. Well, I love that you start the book with Winston Churchill's quote of success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. I think that nails it. I think that just nails it.
I think so, too. I think so, too. And then I always want to be clear that I care equally about the sort of less kind of sexy part of failing well, which is preventing accidents and failures in life.
familiar territory as best we can. So talk about that. Well, it's everything from, you know, don't text and drive, right? That would be an example. If you text and drive and then get into a car accident, that is not a failure that we value, right? That is a failure in familiar territory where we all know that you don't text and drive. So you made a mistake and
It's a mistake you could have, you know, if you have no self-control, then put the phone in the backseat, do whatever you have to do. And, you know, life in, say, a factory is full of opportunities for basic failure, you know, error-induced safety problems or manufacturing problems that are utterly preventable when we follow best practices.
And best practices are everything from getting the right training to wear your safety goggles to, you know, speak up quickly if you see something that doesn't seem right so that we can catch and correct it before a failure happens. So in other words, I'm a huge fan of discipline and excellence in familiar territory as well as a fan of thoughtful experimenting in new territory.
Well, it does seem that the difference that that's the difference between a mistake and failure that those. Yes. A mistake is texting and driving. That's a dumb mistake you made. It's not a failure. Right. And it doesn't turn into well, it turns into a failure if you have an accident. And here's the problem. If you miss if you text and drive and don't have an accident, you have made a mistake, but you haven't paid for it. And now you may be tempted to make that mistake again.
So I define failure as an undesired result, not as an action. - Well, I think people generally wanna sweep failure under the rug. We don't like to talk about our failures, but I like how you kind of champion failure and want us to embrace it because success without failure
isn't so much success. I've been speaking with Amy Edmondson. She's a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, and the name of her book is Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate you coming on today. Thanks, Amy. Mike, thank you so much for having me. It was great talking with you. Thank you.
I'm one of those people who, I don't know, I just really, really hate wasting food. And I came across this article in an old Shop Smart magazine, which was a magazine that was published by Consumer Reports some time ago. They stopped publishing it. But this is about ways to store the food you bring home so you don't have to throw it out.
First of all, they suggest you hurry up because food can start to go bad in as little as an hour. So when you go shopping, get home as soon as you can and put your food away quickly. And put things in the right place. Milk goes in the back of the fridge. Eggs stay in their carton and put them in the back of the fridge, not the door, and they'll last about three weeks.
Meat and seafood should be kept low and in the back of the fridge. But if you're not going to use them within a few days, freeze them. Check the temperature of your fridge. It should be 37 or 38 degrees and your freezer should be set at zero.
And don't overstuff the fridge or the freezer. The way they work is air has to circulate. And if it can't circulate, the food can't get cold. And you shouldn't stack meat, pieces of meat on top of each other.
And that is something you should know. Our audience gets bigger because people recommend this podcast to their friends. You know, the old word of mouth thing, which works really well. And we really appreciate it. And we invite you to do the same. Share this podcast with a friend. Just hit the share button on whatever app you're using and share an episode and let them hear it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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