(Transcript) Adam Grant on Changing Your Mind, the Flaws of Intuition, Horizontal Hostility, and More
Noor Tagouri (00:00:00):
3, 2, 1.
Adam Grant (00:00:03):
Ignorance is dangerous. What's even more dangerous is being ignorant of your own ignorance. I kind of have a love hate relationship with intuition. There are those warning signals that you get and you can't always explain them. I also know that there are times when our intuition leads us astray, the narcissism of small differences, right? That if you were to actually take a step back, you're cutting off your nose to spite your own face. Nope, these people are not exactly consistent with my principles, therefore, I can't ally with them.
Noor Tagouri (00:00:41):
Adam Grant is one of my heroes. He's an author, organizational psychologist, the top rated professor at Wharton School of Business, and not only a Ted speaker, but also a Ted podcaster. He has a TED podcast called Work Life. I first learned about Adam Grant in a Boston bookstore where the cover of his book, the Originals, how Non-Conformist Move the World Caught My Eye. It's a white book with bright colored paint splatter. I still don't know what the art meant, but as someone who in that moment judged a book by its cover, I knew I needed to read it and by read it, I mean I devoured it. I've gifted this book dozens and dozens and dozens of times and still continue to the originals is where I learned about the concept of horizontal hostility, which if you know me, you've heard me mention it at least once, his latest book, think Again. The power of knowing what you don't know could not be more timely, and we get into all of it, how we quote, think how we change our minds, what intuition actually is, and if it is always good horizontal hostility, of course, doing work you need for yourself doing work you actually need for your own self and so much more. This is one of my favorite podcast episodes and one of my favorite conversations I've ever had, so I hope you enjoy every single minute of it.
(00:02:13):
Welcome to our guided stories telling session. Adam, I told you this in our pre-call that I'm a huge fan and just constantly inspired by you, so again, I'm going to say thank you so much for teaching us and giving us so many tools and the language that we need to build our team and to build our business and just our core values and principles and all those cool things. Thank you.
Adam Grant (00:02:39):
Thank you, Noor. I really appreciate that. I will try to live up to it and thank you for giving voice to the stories of so many marginalized people. I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but I'm glad to be here.
Noor Tagouri (00:02:51):
You are here today because I love reading your stories and now I want to hear more of your stories. I get to hear some of them on your, but hopefully we're going to get a little deeper today. I like to get started by asking you and just doing a little check-in. How is your heart today?
Adam Grant (00:03:10):
I don't know. I haven't tested my pulse or anything like that, so I couldn't tell you. I would say overall good. I think it's obviously been an incredibly hard year for so many people and I feel very fortunate that I have nothing major to complain about. How about you?
Noor Tagouri (00:03:32):
My heart is, it's a little anxious I'll say, but I think I've just kind of been anxious lately in general and I'm figuring out the reasons behind that. I'm doing things to alleviate it and I'm spending time outside. I just took a little swim in our pond, which was really lovely and it cleared my head and I also have been spending time in what? 60 degree weather right now. I'm just loving it.
Adam Grant (00:04:00):
That's good to hear. Yeah, you can't invite a fellow podcast host on your show and expect to ask all the questions, watch out.
Noor Tagouri (00:04:07):
I know, and that's like, it's kind of hard because this is really supposed to be about your guided storytelling and just hearing your insights come out, but it just becomes this double interview, which I think is really great for all of the listeners and they're really grateful for it. But then I just get surprised, which I shouldn't be and I'm so grateful for it. So thank you for asking me about my heart. Thank you for also writing something during this time that is really helpful to so many people. Did you actually write your latest book, think again during Covid or were you already working on that? You already knew we were going to need it?
Adam Grant (00:04:41):
No, it was a complete accident. I've always tried to write books that were timeless and I made the mistake of writing one that was also timely this time I had no idea. I started working on it in 2018 after too many experiences of being frustrated that other people wouldn't open their minds, and then sometimes discovering that I was the one who needed to open my mind and think again. Wow. So I started working on the book and then I think I had finished about two thirds of it when the pandemic started and I realized there was a bunch of rethinking and a bunch of rewriting that I needed to do.
Noor Tagouri (00:05:14):
Did you feel like you just completely rewrote it or do you feel like a lot of it held up?
Adam Grant (00:05:18):
I think most of it held up because I was interested in the general psychology of what stops us from questioning our opinions and our assumptions and what stops other people from doing that too, and how do we change those dynamics and I think the psychology holds right. Some of the examples changed. I think also some of the questions that I started asking were different from ones that I really thought I was going to get into. I guess a good example would be I really thought the whole book was going to be about getting people to rethink their own views, and I normally think about opinions as something you hold consciously, and what Covid really brought to the fore was how many assumptions we were clinging to that we didn't even know we had in the first place. It never occurred to me to question the assumption that it was safe to hug extended family or that it was safe to eat indoor in a restaurant, and I think that made me much more aware of the fact that some of the most important rethinking that we do has to do with things that we don't even know we have thoughts about to begin with.
Noor Tagouri (00:06:22):
Wow. Yeah, I mean, and it oftentimes takes other people kind of pointing them out in the way that you have over and over again in your books to really give us the language to talk about the thing that we're already experiencing and think again, the subtitle is the power of knowing what you Don't know, and I felt that in a way that I didn't really expect because usually when you say the power of something, you're talking about something magnificent, something great, the power of knowing what you don't know, and then you immediately take us to a vulnerable corner that people are very uncomfortable going to, which is admitting that they don't know something. And oftentimes most people don't know how to admit that they don't know something. I actually was just having a conversation with my sister-in-law who was feeling a little down and insecure about not knowing certain things in her field right now, and I just said to her, I think the bigger thing to do, the thing that people prefer you to do is to simply say that you don't know and ask questions because that shows that you're open to learning, that you're open to growing and we want more of that.
(00:07:26):
At least that's how we like to build our team. So what did you know about framing your title that way and what did you need the reader to know before they opened the book?
Adam Grant (00:07:38):
I think you're spot on. I think ignorance is dangerous. What's even more dangerous is being ignorant of your own ignorance, and I wanted to signal to people that if you want to keep an open mind, if you want to stay informed and keep learning, that you have to be aware of all the gaps in your knowledge, and that's hard for a lot of people. I think there are a lot of people who fail to realize a fundamental truth of life, which is the faster you are to admit when you're wrong, the faster you can move toward being right. And I have so many people in my life who seem to think that the longer they deny their wrong, the longer they can fool themselves and everyone else and sort of hold onto the illusion of being right as opposed to saying, all right, maybe I should update my thinking and try to get it right.
Noor Tagouri (00:08:32):
Well, I think the idea of updating your thinking isn't even one that people really consider. We either consider You're wrong or you're right. There really isn't a growth or in between. We joke around with this term like, oh, those people at work are still stuck in high school. There are people who are still stuck in high school. Their internalized selves are still their young teen childlike selves that haven't gotten a chance to heal or evolve, which that part of ourselves is actually a really great place to tap into once you've been able to heal it once you've been able to work through things and once you've been able to evolve. So is it really that people are uninterested in evolving or they don't know that it's okay to, or I don't know, what was it that you kind of came up with all of the above? It's
Adam Grant (00:09:21):
Everything. Is that an option on this quiz?
Noor Tagouri (00:09:24):
I'm taking it. Yeah, that's a B, C, D, E, F G. Oh man.
Adam Grant (00:09:27):
No, it's a combination. I think for some people it's, it's just even having the courage to question their opinions internally and say, okay, maybe I was always wrong. Maybe I used to be right. And the world has changed in my day job as an organizational psychologist. I see this all the time when I watch the Blackberry fall apart or Blockbuster or Kodak or Sears or toys or us go out of business, it's not that those people were never right, it's that they stuck to their opinions for too long and the world changed around them and they didn't adapt with it. So for some of us, I think it's that for others, it's recognizing that when you admit I was wrong or I don't know or I changed my mind, that doesn't reveal your insecurity. It actually signals that you're secure enough in your strengths to admit some of your weaknesses, and that showing that kind of humility actually takes confidence. So it's a bit of a reframe for people to say, Hey, you know what? The confidence to say what you don't know and to say how you've evolved is actually a very powerful way of living in the world because it both allows other people to respect your integrity and it allows you to keep growing and learning.
Noor Tagouri (00:10:42):
Right? Wow. So we're talking about how people are nervous about how they're going to be perceived or how other people are going to look at them, which unfortunately many of us are more focused on than how we even feel about ourselves. But part of me is also thinking about the fear of questioning your beliefs, beliefs that were taught to you by people that you trusted, whether they be your parents, your teachers, your religious leaders, whoever it is, and having that be shaken and having that really feel like a piece of this building that's made of blocks that you've kind of, the whole Jenga thing is falling apart. That's what I'm trying to say, and that's kind of what people are feeling. So they're holding onto this thing, and I've had these really hard conversations with people before, even when they know something doesn't make sense, they just know that if they question this belief, then they have to question everything else and they don't want to go there. But that willful ignorance has them still harming other people with the way that they think and just the way that they vote or the way that they spend their money or whatever it may be.
Adam Grant (00:11:54):
Yeah. It reminds me of, I thought a brilliant insight from the psychologist George Kelly, who had just a completely eyeopening definition of hostility. He said that hostility is the anger and frustration that you feel when a belief that you already know deep down was false gets invalidated, and all of a sudden you have to grapple with the reality that the thing you secretly suspected was wrong is in fact wrong and you really don't want to acknowledge it.
Noor Tagouri (00:12:23):
What is it that happens to our insides when you do start to begin to chip away at that acknowledgement and decide, okay, I have to move in this direction, or I will have to stay here?
Adam Grant (00:12:37):
Well, I think if you talk to neuroscientists, they'll tell you that a threat to your core beliefs is a great way to trigger the amygdala, which is the threat detection system and exist to, in some ways, govern fight or flight, and a lot of times people will attack, other times they'll vigorously defend. There's some work in neuroscience that says it's like being punched in the mind that you literally show a physiological pain response when somebody attacks one of your core beliefs, which I think explains a lot of what's going on in our polarized world right now. I think though, that there's a sense in which after you respond that way, if you have the equanimity or the curiosity to pause and say, huh, that's interesting. Why did I get so upset? It was just a comment that somebody made. It was just an observation. It doesn't necessarily have any implications for me.
(00:13:32):
I can choose to ignore it, and yet I completely lost it. What's going on there? As you start to unpack, okay, why is this belief part of my identity? Why is it central to my value system? You could start to realize, you know what? Sometimes it's actually liberating to let go of those old ideas that are holding you back, especially to your point, if you grew up in some setting where you were indoctrinated or brainwashed to believe particular things before you really thought about them on your own, and the experience of being able to independently say, okay, well let me evaluate the evidence. Let me look at the logic here and decide for myself. That's empowering for a lot of people.
Noor Tagouri (00:14:17):
Do you remember when you began to think for yourself?
Adam Grant (00:14:24):
It's strange to think about not thinking for myself.
(00:14:30):
I'm trying to think of whether there was a point where I had a conscious awareness of it. I think, yeah, I actually have a vivid memory of standing outside with two of my nursery school friends and going up. I think we were on a deck in the backyard and going up step above them and saying, I'm three and a half, and they were still three. They hadn't turned three and a half yet, and I felt like it gave me some authority to not only think differently from them, but also to maybe tell them what to do a little bit, and it, it's the first memory I have of having a mind of my own.
Noor Tagouri (00:15:11):
Wow. I mean, I love that because like I said, that version of you is so pure and still exists and still tears you on, you think? Yeah, a hundred percent. I totally think that our inner child still exists within us. I do morning pages, which is the practice that Julia Cameron writes about in the artist's way, and when I'm really stuck in a problem or in a creative rutt or whatever it is, my go-to practice is to write to my younger self. I actually, I will show you this is I love that. This what I keep on my little screen.
Adam Grant (00:15:52):
So cute. Look at all the hair.
Noor Tagouri (00:15:53):
And that's three year old nude. I know, right? She's so cute. And this is the little girl that I write to and she has all of my answers, and I think it's because I've spent enough time mean she had the imagination of the whole entire world. And I was lucky enough that my parents were so encouraging to her and made sure that I did every little thing that inspired us. They put a camera in my face since I was a little baby, and they knew that this was something that I gravitated towards. So before society told me who I should be and what I should look like, I always go back to that because that was the purest version of myself I think, and I'm trying to get back to the energy and the spirit that version of me had and trying to peel away all of the layers that I of muck essentially that I attached to myself as I've grown older.
Adam Grant (00:16:48):
What I think is so interesting about that is it stands in direct contrast to what psychologists normally recommend when we study mental time travel. So the idea is that so often when we make decisions or we form opinions, we we're too stuck in the immediate considerations of the moment. And the goal is to step outside of those, and usually the recommendation is fast forward in time, imagine your future self in 20 years, will you regret this decision? What do you think you'll wish you had paid more attention to? And the hope is then that people are less likely to get seduced by status when they choose a job or a career path that they're more likely to prioritize meaning and relationships. If they think about what's really going to matter to them in the long run, you're going backward. You are going to, I mean, you're going to a less wise, right, less intelligent version of yourself.
(00:17:43):
And I think one of the things that's interesting about that is when you use the term purity, it reminded me something that happened to me that I didn't expect to be a pivotal moment at all, but it was so I was just about to launch my second book, I guess this was 2016, a friend called and she said, your launch is a couple days away. What are you doing to celebrate? And I said, nothing. I'm a writer. That's what we do. We write authors, publish books. And she said, don't you think this is a big milestone? You poured at least a year of your life into this maybe more, and it's not like you write a book every day. This is really something you should should mark and you should savor. All of a sudden it dawned on me that I am terrible at enjoying success.
(00:18:35):
Whenever I accomplish a goal, it takes about four minutes for me to then recalibrate, raise the bar, and then focus on next year's goal. And it hit me that I needed just like you do to get in touch with an earlier version of myself, a more naive and maybe a slightly version of myself that was less likely to take a meaningful accomplishment for granted. And so what I ended up doing was I ended up rewinding to say, okay, if 10 years ago or five years ago even, I knew I was going to publish a second book, let alone a first one, that people were actually going to read it that would've made my day, and I need to stay in touch with that earlier version of myself because it's going to allow me to appreciate those moments, and it's something I've done ever since. Whenever something meaningful happens that I'm tempted to just say, nah, as expected, that's a part of my life now.
(00:19:26):
It's part of my identity. I've tried to rewind the clock and say, okay, if I could get in touch with the 10 year old or the 15 year old or the 20 year old year old version of myself, how excited would I be? And then I have a responsibility to that version of me to experience that level of joy for at least a day. Is that similar to how this plays out for you? Because it sounds like when you write to your younger self, you're also doing it to live up to the dreams, the goals of your younger self. I'm curious to hear more about that.
Noor Tagouri (00:19:55):
Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And I also really relate to the just immediacy of, I did the thing that I said I was going to do and it's over with and I have to move on and I have to move on. I think gratitude really plays a role in that for me. Now, my husband actually just said this yesterday, are you grateful to today for the things that you prayed for yesterday? And you don't have to be a praying person to acknowledge that. You still have to sit in gratitude and mindfulness for the things that you've always dreamed of that you've always asked. For me, I think that especially because I'm on such a different path that's not traditional and not because I didn't want it to be traditional, I wanted the whole traditional route of working from a top 50 market, top 10 market to national news.
(00:20:43):
That's what I wanted. That's what I thought I wanted. And because that wasn't possible because the noss were not because of my talent, but because of what I chose to wear, I had to figure out how to build differently. And that was, that's the biggest gift I've ever been given because now you look at kind of the state of media and I'm realizing becoming my own media company, becoming my own media platform is what saved me and what saved my career. And of course, I want to continue building, but I have to remember that those little goals that I had, because I've been setting goals for myself since I was three years old, three and a half year old Adam and three-year-old would've been great friends because that's all I did. And I have to remember when it's really hard when I get more and more no's that the yeses that I got were ones that I didn't even dream of and that you almost have to be like, how are you can't get upset about the fact you got in the room, you got in the room that you never thought you were going to get into, and this still happens.
(00:21:50):
I had a meeting with my number one production company that I want to work with one of the best in the world right now, and they immediately took my pitch and they loved me and they loved my pitch, and it just wasn't a right fit. And I was a little bit sad, but I was more overwhelmed with the fact that I can't believe I got to pitch to them. My relationship with my younger self and the way that that manifests is I've always believed that when people are struggling with figuring out what it is that they want to do, I love how Elizabeth Gilbert says she doesn't really believe in following passion. She believes in following curiosity, curiosity. I really, really live by that, and I do think that when you're really young, you have these things that you still really enjoy doing that still find ways to manifest.
(00:22:40):
I ask my mom every once in a while to tell me about the things that I used to do as a kid. I all of a sudden during Covid decided when local theaters open back up, I'm going to join the theater. I'm going to join the community theater. I don't care if no one ever knows that I joined the community theater, but I think that that's something I want to do. And I asked my mom if that was something that I was interested in as a kid, where did this come from? And she said, yes. And so I'm trying to tap into that even if it's just as a hobby, because I think it's really important to have a relationship with that person. And I don't believe that that person has gone. I don't believe my younger self has gone, and maybe according to I think that this is a psychology type thing.
(00:23:21):
I'm not a psychologist, obviously, I'm just a really big imagination person, but if we believe that time is a social construct and we believe that the things that have happened to you, you can still heal from your past, then I believe that if I can go back in time and I've done E M D R therapy, which is kind of where some of this comes from, but if I can go back in time and heal different versions of myself, it's almost like a domino effect. It can really lift these huge burdens and change my mind in ways that I didn't think were possible. I remember as a teenager, I also didn't really think it's funny that you wrote this book the way that you did because I remember thinking in my head, I don't know if anybody can ever change my mind. I love collecting stories.
(00:24:08):
I love learning so much, and it wouldn't come out of nowhere. It would come in a moment where my mind was changed, and I would ask myself, I wonder if this is the last time my mind is going to change. And I think I asked myself that because it felt like such a big deal when you have a truth that you believed in, and then it shifts and it shifts and it shifts and you grow and you evolve. And it's almost scary because this is really personal, but I'm noticing the more that I do this, the more that I change my mind, the more that I heal those past versions of myself, the harder it is to come back to certain friendships and relationships that you have because you're not the same person, especially because of Covid. You've been so far away from people, and now as we are fully vaccinated and starting to see people or reconnect with people, it's just a little jarring almost, because I'm like, do you still know me? I don't think you do.
Adam Grant (00:25:13):
It's a lot. I do know. Oh, there's so much there. I mean, the first thing it reminds me of is I had the hardest time for a long time with a few friendships. When we would get together to catch up, that's all we would do. We would catch up, we would reminisce about old experiences, and we weren't creating new experiences together. And at some point, wait, this friendship is just reliving the past. It's not actually moving forward in the future. And then there's the question of, well, am I holding that back? Is the other person, is it something about the connection between us? And I think that's just incredibly complicated. The other thing that you reminded me of when you were talking is it's such a travesty that you had to face so much prejudice and discrimination in order to land on this different path. Right? In an ideal version of the world, you would've just chosen it as opposed to feeling like you
Noor Tagouri (00:26:10):
Were forced to build. I'll say the originals played a really big role in that too. Thank you.
Adam Grant (00:26:14):
Oh, well, I hope it didn't ruin your career.
Noor Tagouri (00:26:18):
No, it was in the best way possible. It became a manual that anybody we worked with had to read because we had to tell them. You gave us the affirmation that what we were doing was the right thing and not just going into an abyss with complete uncertainty.
Adam Grant (00:26:36):
Well, that is wonderful to hear, especially about the book that I failed to celebrate. It's great to know that
Noor Tagouri (00:26:43):
It helps so much. I didn you. No worries.
Adam Grant (00:26:45):
Thank you. Yeah, you can do all my book celebrations from now on. Got you.
Noor Tagouri (00:26:52):
Hi there. If you find our work beneficial and you want to support how we build our company at your service, you can subscribe to my Patreon at patreon.com/nor. It's usually personal writings, and as I build a community on there, hopefully more, your support is how we build. I also curate a weekly newsletter of all the things I'm benefiting from and enjoying that week. Anything from what I'm reading, watching, listening, buying, and more. Like most things, I keep it personal. You can subscribe to it at nor tag.com/newsletter. Now, back to the story,
Adam Grant (00:27:35):
As you do start to achieve some of your goals, and then they start to become things that you expected. I found that sometimes it's helpful to decouple my aspirations for my expectations to say, look, you know what? I do want to keep raising the bar. I do want to have more ambitious goals because when I achieve something, it means I've gained more mastery or more doors have opened and I can start aiming higher, and I should be doing that. That's one way to avoid resting on your laurels and being complacent. It's also a way to keep challenging yourself and growing. And the thing to be careful about is to not assume I'm always going to hit those goals to raise the bar for what I want to accomplish, but sort of keep the bar where it was on what I expect to accomplish. And that way, if I hit the higher goal, it's almost a pleasant surprise and it's exciting.
(00:28:25):
And if I don't, I'm like, okay, this still went pretty well and I met my expectations. And it seems a little bit more realistic. And I think the reason that I guess that I've been rethinking this relationship between aspirations and expectations is that if the expectations go up with the aspirations, it's sort of a lose lose because if you succeed, it's basically just like, yeah, whatever. If you fail, it's hugely disappointing. And if that happens, too many times you stop raising the bar like, oh, well, I don't want to miss. I don't want to fail. I don't want to fall short. And so this idea of saying, all right, I'm going to let the aspirations go up. I'm going to be increasingly ambitious, but my expectations are going to rise more slowly is a way to keep myself, I guess, pushing myself and stretching myself, but not just completely undermining the experience of goal pursuit and then success or failure.
Noor Tagouri (00:29:25):
Definitely one of my spiritual teachers actually taught me expectations are premeditated resentment, and I have to,
Adam Grant (00:29:33):
That's a great
Noor Tagouri (00:29:34):
Line myself almost every single day because I am an expectations person. I mean, I set goals, I schedules that are minute by minute from 3 0 4 to 3 0 7, this is what I'm going to do. That's how I work, and that's how my brain feels like it can get things. I never get every single thing done, but the habit and the work of just even evolving my schedule throughout the day to remind myself that I'm getting things done is it's a way to alleviate my anxiety, I think, and I'm replacing the word, but and every single time, and it's making me a lot happier, and I'm realiz.
(00:30:14):
I'm realizing that we really do set ourselves up to not only resent ourselves, but resent other people even when the expectations that we're setting are not clear. We're not vocalizing the expectations. It's like expecting people to read our minds. I thought that, I assumed that you would feel this way, but it's really them projecting their own insecurities onto you, but then taking it out on you when you're not responding. I'm realizing more and more that this type of insecurity is really selfish, even though it's in the name of being caring. And a lot of things that we do in the name of caring for someone or loving someone is actually really selfish because you're putting your own emotions and anxiety onto other people, and you're assuming that they're not a human being with their own stuff as well.
Adam Grant (00:31:10):
That's such a common problem. One of the places I've seen it in my work on generosity is people end up in this trap where they say, okay, I am just thinking of an example of this that I've, it's just been extremely frustrating. I actually, I had a student this fall who came to me with a big dilemma and he said, I'm really having a hard time setting some boundaries in my life, and I feel like I'm not doing enough for other people, but I'm also getting way overextended. What's going on? Tell me more. And he said, well, I started volunteering. I got a coveted job, and then I started volunteering to help people who are going for internships at that company prepare and learn about the interview process. And I said, well, why are you doing that? He said, well, I believe in paying it forward. And there were a lot of people who helped me, and I feel a lot of empathy for, I'm a senior and these poor juniors are all, they're anxious and they're stressed out and I can help them. And I said, Kareem, lemme take a step back here and ask you what good are you actually doing?
(00:32:34):
If anything, you're giving some students an unfair advantage, right? By giving them an inside view of the interview process. And if you didn't do that, it's possible that other stressed out anxious students would have more of a level playing field and get the job, so why are you helping them? He said, well, because I know them and I feel a little bit of their suffering. Okay, so are you doing this because you care about them and you really believe this is the best way to help them? Or you're doing it to try to make yourself feel a little bit better in this situation and feel like you've alleviated their pain even though you're not actually net helping anybody, you're just shuffling who gets the job and who doesn't If you're successful, I've had this experience so many times where I've put all this pressure on myself to help people, and then I've had to step back and ask, am I actually doing good here or do I just want the person to like me? And I think that's so much of what's driving in the Kareem example. He has these students who if he says no to them, he's going to think, oh no, I'm jeopardizing the relationship. I'm hurting their feelings. They're not going to want to be my friend anymore. I'm maybe destroying my network. Aha. So are you really there to help them? Maybe
Noor Tagouri (00:33:50):
Not. He's still making it about himself. So many people who do things in the name of wanting to help and caring for, I just really care about this person. I'm just really concerned. You're still making it about yourself. One of my friends, actually, she's a trauma expert and she taught me this, which I am always so stuck on where it's more important to let someone fail and figure it out on their own than to help them. And I said to her, we were talking, the example was her and her sister working out together. And I said, but what if your sister was going to physically hurt herself? And she said, it's more important that I listen to her and respect her feelings and let her hurt herself so she can learn something on her own than it is to interject and try to save someone. And everything shattered in my brain because I thought when you see someone who's about to fail, maybe it's your job to go in and save them and to help them, but maybe you're doing them a disservice from not learning the lesson that they need to learn and not letting them grow and ask for help the way they need to.
Adam Grant (00:35:04):
Yeah, it's a little bit of the white Knight syndrome, which is I want to rush in and come to the rescue and be the hero in this situation as opposed to asking what's really going to serve the other person best.
Noor Tagouri (00:35:17):
Definitely in the long run. Another thing I really like about your book is the cover art and the cover design. And I hear a really up and coming creative visionary to the creative direction for your art, your cover art, which is a lit match, but instead of fire, the match that is lit is lit of water. Tell me about this person and what they meant by this story.
Adam Grant (00:35:44):
Well, we had a hard time coming up with a cover concept for this book, and I am not a fan of judging a book by a cover in general, right? There are great books with terrible covers out there. I do think if you see an amazing cover, it usually means there's a creative team that put a lot of energy and passion into coming up with something that would represent the book. And maybe you could give a book with a great cover, an extra chance, but don't judge a book for a bad cover. So it's always been important to me to make sure that the cover captures the reader's attention and says something about the book and how do you capture thinking? Again, it's something that happens inside your head. And we tried optical illusions, and some of them were just cliched and others, you actually couldn't understand what they were supposed to be saying.
(00:36:31):
And we were at a loss, and I happened to say to our oldest daughter, Joanna, who's 12, that we were stuck on the covers. And she came to me about an hour later and said, I have an idea. What if you had a candle or a match with fire but water instead? Oh my gosh, that's a really interesting idea. And then she actually created a mockup of what the image would look like, and I loved it. It immediately made me think, again, I sent it to the team, they loved it, and then they created their design version of it, and that became the book cover. This is my favorite part of think again, is that I had to rethink where creative ideas came from. It would've never occurred to me before that to go to our 12 year old and say, can you come up with a book cover concept for me
Noor Tagouri (00:37:19):
Telling you the younger versions? The younger versions are the geniuses.
Adam Grant (00:37:23):
Although I couldn't have done that at 12. So sometimes it's just a more creative person who also happens to
Noor Tagouri (00:37:30):
Be younger. She's also a 12 year old. So
Adam Grant (00:37:33):
No, I give my wife Allison, all the creative credit back. You
Noor Tagouri (00:37:35):
Allison's 12 year old. Yeah, I mean, just brilliant. I asked this question and I wanted you to share this story because actually the originals, the reason that I bought it, I read the originals before I read give and Take, and the reason I bought it was because this cover was just so amazing. It was literally the last time I went into a bookstore and I just bought a bunch of books because of the covers that I liked. And yours happened to be the one that I read first. It may have been the only one I read actually, and look where we are now.
Adam Grant (00:38:03):
Amazing. Yeah, that's actually a great example of judging a book positively by its cover. And then of course, you have to update and rethink your judgment once you read it and decide if it was any good. But one of the things that I did not think about going in was a book in many ways is an invitation into the mind of an author. And the cover is that's the envelope, right? That's when you get a wedding invitation. There's a first impression that you have of it. And I think a book is very much the same way. And too many authors sit down and say, if I just get the words, if I capture my ideas and I tell my stories, then my work is done. And I think that no, you need to think about how you package the invitation too, so that people aren't just excited to engage with your ideas and take a trip in your brain. They also are doing it with the right frame of mind.
Noor Tagouri (00:39:07):
Yeah, it's just finishing the body of work and making sure that you're putting the same amount of importance into every single aspect of it. It's fantastic. I hope Joanna grows up to do all of the book covers, all of the add. Great. It's a family collaboration.
Adam Grant (00:39:22):
Me too. She started doing some cover design for other authors and has made a couple of book trailers too. And it's, it's amazing to see her finding this creative outlet, which the pandemic could not have been a better time for it.
Noor Tagouri (00:39:35):
Wow. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. I'll be the first person, maybe the second person after you and Allison to buy one of her books because of the cover, because that's what I do. I judge them by the covers.
Adam Grant (00:39:46):
We're ready, bring it up.
Noor Tagouri (00:39:49):
In this whole process, what was the biggest thing that you changed your mind about?
Adam Grant (00:39:55):
There were a lot of things. I think the biggest thing that I changed my mind about was about how to have charged conversations going into writing. Think again. I was convinced that the reason we're so polarized is because people only see their own side, and what we need to do is show them the other side. I now believe that that's not only failing to solve the problem, it's actually part of the problem. It's exacerbating the problem. And the research on this is pretty extensive and very robust. It's on our tendency as humans to fall victim to binary bias where we take this whole complex spectrum of views and attitudes, and we tend to dumb it down and oversimplify it into two categories, which helps us sort of, I don't know, find our footing in a confusing world. And so if you take somebody who has an extreme stance on any issue, whether it's abortion or climate change, and you show them the other extreme, that just reinforces the tendency to believe that they're only two positions and which one are they going to like better?
(00:41:02):
The one that they're already invested in, or the one that sounds crazy and wrong and evil to them. And most people obviously, will choose their own side. What we need to do is get people out of these binaries, and anytime somebody says, well, it's us versus them, or, well, let me show you the other side. What I want to know is what does the third angle look like? What's the fourth perspective that's missing? What we want to do is complexify the conversation and show the spectrum, the shades of gray, all the nuances between the positions and say, okay, instead of just these two extremes, actually some people who agree with you on one piece of that issue disagree with you on another piece of it. And there's a whole bunch of different camps. So climate change is a clear example. The media mostly covers people who are alarmed about a burning planet or who are completely dismissive of the fact that climate change is even happening.
(00:41:52):
And what about all the people in the middle? Turns out most people are somewhere in the middle. Many people are concerned but not alarmed. They think, you know what? There's a lot of evidence that climate change is happening. It might not be good. I don't know that it's an immediate emergency, and I'm also not sure what to do about it. And then there are also many people who are skeptical saying, well, I don't know that it's totally settled yet. What exactly is the biggest cause of it and what we should do to act on it? And when you amplify those views, you take the people who are denying science right on one extreme and give them an opportunity to identify with one of those camps that's more middle of the road, which is part of opening their minds to science. So that was probably the biggest rethinking I did while writing the book.
Noor Tagouri (00:42:37):
I mean, that's something that sounds like you can continuously be rethinking that. It feels like there's so many layers to it because people who hold those really strong values oftentimes will feel like they're compromising on their values and that there's something wrong with them or that they're betraying some value that they have when doing it. It's like how we have a two party system in America. We only have Democrats and Republicans, but I want to bet that most people in this country don't agree with every single thing that their personal party does. Yet we are living on this binary, and we don't even give people really rumor permission to explore other options or to say, I like a little bit here. I like a little bit there because the other side is always evil, and this happens also more intimately within our own community. So we can talk about these ends of the spectrum, but one thing that you taught me was this concept of horizontal hostility, which I had experienced so much, but I didn't have the language for, which is experiencing a distaste or hostility with people who share the same values as you are who are a part of your community.
(00:43:52):
The example that I always give, which is one that you wrote about, is the research that was done on vegans having more hostility towards vegetarians than non-vegetarians. Because if you're a vegetarian, then just go all over the way. And I think that that's the most clear one I can do. So I apologize to being community, but that's the most clear example because my experience with that as a Muslim woman is You're talking about this, or you did an interview in Playboy. What are you thinking? That hostility and that level of hostility honestly has allowed me to build my own community, but not feel like I can entirely be a part of the bigger one, which is rooted in trauma. But at the same time, and at the same time kind of comes down to this thing where even when there can be two extremes on the spectrum, and I am talking about this, visualizing it. What about when the two middles seem so far away?
Adam Grant (00:44:49):
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's start with vegans. I was riveted by Judith White's research on horizontal hostility, and she found that a lot of vegans do dislike vegetarians more than meat eaters, which doesn't make any sense because vegetarians are much closer to their values and their beliefs and meat eaters are, but the vegans would say, well, at least the meat eaters are consistent, right? They're not hypocrites. Whereas the vegetarians, they're letting me down, they're violating my principles, and this is really bad. They're a threat to our group because they're not clearly distinct enough from the meat eaters. And I think that people do this in so many different walks of life. Judith has studied it in a whole bunch of different places. She sees it in political parties where people will often dislike the more moderate version of their views more than they dislike the opposing side, so to speak.
(00:45:48):
Same for religious groups. Extreme religious conservatives sometimes harbor more hostility toward moderates than they do people who are atheists. And what's so surprising to me about that is what Freud called the narcissism of small differences, that if you were to actually take a step back, if you're a vegan, right, vegetarians are a pretty helpful potential ally for you in your war on meat, right? There are a lot more vegetarians than there are vegans. I think there are people who do sit in that middle position and could maybe draw some of the meat eaters over and toward, it's a step toward less animal cruelty if that's your concern. It's a step toward less violation of your religious precepts, right? If this is a moral issue for you, and yet you're cutting off your nose to spite your own face, nope. These people are not exactly consistent with my principles, therefore, I can't ally with them. I cannot have any kind of allegiance with them. They must be taken down.
Noor Tagouri (00:46:52):
Definitely the same teacher that I told you mentioned the expectations are premeditate. Resentment taught me also this concept of the public minimum private maximum. So the private maximum is how you choose to practice something. So if we're talking about religion, which is kind of my experience, how I choose to be a Muslim at home and in my private life, and the public minimum is what is the very, very, very, very minimum that it takes to call yourself a Muslim. And in our faith, the very minimum is believing in one God. That's the saying, and believing in the last messenger of God, that's it. You can say that and not do anything else, and you're still technically Muslim. But what happens is a lot of people impose their private maximum onto the public minimum and say, well, the way that I believe, the way that I practice, the way that I eat, whatever it might be, is the standard should be the public minimum. And that's just not right. And that also doesn't allow us to build or connect, and it makes people feel alienated and alone, alien.
Adam Grant (00:48:07):
That is such an insightful analysis. I think it's right on target. And I think that one of the things that we ought to do is say, okay, maybe we shouldn't always hold other people to the same standards that we hold ourselves. Maybe sometimes we're being too hard on ourselves and then we're being too hard on other people. In other cases, the standards that we think are appropriate for us may not be appropriate for them. And I see a lot of people land in this position where they're very critical of a public minimum because they have, to your point, a much more strict private maximum in mind. But they're only evaluating that on one dimension, and they forget that life and values are multidimensional and that you might be better than someone on the one aspect that you're comparing on, and then you might be falling short on others. And it's sad to see, I dunno, I keep noticing that. When you think about the people who help you set those standards, they're usually your role models. The closer, the closer you are to them, the better you know them.
(00:49:27):
It's like looking at a car in your passenger, in your side mirror. Objects viewed through this mirror may be distorted. That's true when they're at a distance. And the closer they get, the more you get to see them for real. And I think your role models are rarely as uniformly virtuous as you think they are from afar. The same is true for your villains, that if you see them up close and personal, they are often, their vices are not quite as bad, or they don't define them quite as much or as comprehensively as you think. And I think it's, for me, just a reminder that we could probably show a little more compassion to others, and then also show ourselves a little more compassion too when we fall short of our own private maxima.
Noor Tagouri (00:50:13):
And maybe if we were to look at people with that closer lens, whether it be our role models or our villains, we will have more empathy for them and have more empathy for ourselves.
Adam Grant (00:50:26):
That would be nice.
Noor Tagouri (00:50:27):
Right. The thing I always go back to is that you will have a whole lifetime to work on yourself. You should not have time in your life to be focused on the business of other people because there's just too much for you to do. And that's how I think about it. That's why I strongly, strongly, strongly dislike gossiping. It makes me feel really uncomfortable, but also it seems like one of the biggest waste of time, and I know that some people enjoy doing it, whether it's harmless or not, I just have so much to do, and so I'd rather just sit down and talk to you about ideas and see you for you. And I love getting to know people that up close and personal because it reminds me that I can be me too, and I can be me and not worry about fitting any other standard, because that's what we should be expecting from ourselves.
Adam Grant (00:51:17):
I generally agree with that. I wonder about one exception in the spirit of, oh, tell me. Inviting people to rethink things. The work that really shifted my thinking on this is Matthew Feinberg and Rob Willer on what they call pro-social gossip, which is essentially warning people about the selfish behavior of somebody that they don't know well. So I saw this in the context of the research I was doing on givers and takers and matchers, where if you're a highly generous giver, you are sometimes vulnerable to being taken advantage of by the most selfish takers. And there are these people in the middle of that spectrum. Again, the middle being most common. The people who I've called matchers, whose default instinct is to try to maintain justice and preserve fairness and say, look, givers ought to be rewarded and takers ought to be punished. And one of the ways that matchers protected givers against takers is they would say, Hey, no, don't trust this guy. He's a selfish jerk. Definitely they'd warn you about somebody's history or reputation of manipulative behavior or toxicity. And I started to believe that that serves an important function in the world, and that if pro-social gossip doesn't occur, then the people who are most trusting are the most vulnerable to exploitation. What do you think of that?
Noor Tagouri (00:52:35):
It's not something I can even challenge because my faith, in my faith, it literally says gossip is only permitted when you're protecting someone from someone else. And when you're looking out for someone, which is literally, then it's clear. So to me,
Adam Grant (00:52:50):
Wow, that's amazing.
Noor Tagouri (00:52:52):
I don't even know if I consider that gossip, because I think that gossip to me is talking about other people's secrets or putting other people down. But you know what? I'm so pro, what did you call it? Social
Adam Grant (00:53:05):
Pro-Social gossip.
Noor Tagouri (00:53:06):
Pro-social gossip, yeah. All day.
Adam Grant (00:53:08):
Yeah. I mean, the definition covers you beautifully. I think the place that gets tricky is, I think where it does become gossip is something that I've done a few times in part because other people did it for me. I've said, you know what? I don't know this person well, but my spidey sense is tingling. Totally. There've been a couple of red flags. And then I can't verify that they're takers. I don't know for sure that they're selfish people, but I'm just kind of warning, be a little cautious. Maybe help them a little before you make yourself too vulnerable to them. And in that sense, it feels like a bit of gossip to me, but it's still done in service of protecting somebody. So I think it still qualifies as acceptable in your view, right?
Noor Tagouri (00:53:52):
Oh, definitely. Because that's coming from intuition, which I think is even more divine than just our common sense. That has always been my guide, and it's always proven to be true when I have that feeling about someone or something, or an experience, a crazy story. One time when I first started speaking, I've been speaking since I was 17, touring and speaking, I got invited to this event that was in Pennsylvania. It was promoted as this really big event. I got the biggest speaking feat that I had ever gotten at the time. And everybody that I know was getting invited, something in me just felt like something was off. I've actually never shared this story before, even when it happened, but something in me was totally off. And the way that the organizer was talking, I just felt off. So I pulled out of the event. I was the only person to pull out of the event. Wow. Everybody kept asking, why did you pull out? Why did you pull out? My answer was, I just don't have a really good feeling. I don't know what's going to happen. I just don't have a good feeling about it. The event comes around, people flew in from Europe to do this event. They all show up to the venue.
Adam Grant (00:55:10):
This isn't Fire Fest, is it?
Noor Tagouri (00:55:11):
No, it's not Fire Fest, but it's basically like Fire
Adam Grant (00:55:14):
Fest. It sounds like those
Noor Tagouri (00:55:15):
Stories. No. Yeah. But it is one of those stories. Everybody showed up and no one was there. The woman had taken all of the money from the registers and all of that, and people were stranded. They had to get people to help pay for their tickets to go back home. And I was the only one to pull out, had no reason to pull out. It was the most money I had ever been offered before. And honestly, part of it was just, I've never been offered this much money and something feels wrong with this, and maybe this is my test to see if I'm going to do this because I love this check, but it's just not right. And I never, after that, anytime I have a feeling about something. So I kind of partook in what you were saying, but I didn't have any reason to. And I let other people make that decision for themselves because I'm not going to tell people what to do. But what is your relationship with intuition? Do you always listen to it?
Adam Grant (00:56:10):
No, definitely not. So I think this is so interesting. I kind of have a love hate relationship with intuition because on the one hand I recognize that there are those warning signals that you get and you can't explain them, and you really beat yourself up and regret later not listening to 'em. I also know that there are times when our intuition leads us astray. And the way I would explain that is when I think about intuition, I think about it as subconscious pattern recognition. It's a set of patterns that you've picked up in the past that your subconscious mind can recognize more quickly. So you're a
Noor Tagouri (00:56:46):
Scientist.
Adam Grant (00:56:47):
Yeah. I mean, this is what I do, right? But if you wanted to measure how is intuition being represented? A standard example in research on intuition is you're a firefighter, you go into a burning building and all of a sudden you have a bad feeling about it and you dash out, and a minute later the building explodes. And what happened there is your subconscious mind recognized a series of patterns in the way that the fire was spreading faster than you could have actually processed them and connected it to the last time you saw a building explode. And that split second instinct to follow your intuition saves your life. If you study like crazy, right? Just stop there. Amazing. That
Noor Tagouri (00:57:28):
Actually exists. That is scientific inside of our bodies.
Adam Grant (00:57:33):
Gary Klein, I think is probably the psychologist who's done the most interesting work on this. And he shows that firefighters, if they go on their intuition in a situation like that, they will make better decisions than if they actually stop and analyze it. Nurses also are sometimes able to diagnose illnesses and patients before they're visible on a medical test, in part because their intuition picks up a series of patterns and connects the dots and says, oh, that's what the diagnosis is. And if you stop there, follow your intuition. The problem is there are actually two problems that I worry about. I'm very curious to hear your take on them. The first problem is that intuition is not reliable if you're in an environment that's different from the one that it was formed in. So the reason intuition works for firefighters is there's a limited number of ways that a building could burn or a building could explode.
(00:58:28):
And so the conditions you've been exposed to for the last 10 years of your career are going to be repeated over and over again. If you study stockbrokers trying to use their intuition, it's terrible because the market conditions that you built your intuition in are completely different from the conditions that you're applying it. Now, you see this with venture capitalists too, or one of my favorite examples is Steve Jobs, who is so right with his intuition about software, and then he goes over to a different industry and betts on the segue and is convinced that that's story's going to become a huge hit, right? Yeah, you remember that from originals. And to me that was a classic case of not realizing that the years he built up accurate intuition about software didn't apply to this hardware transportation industry question that he needed to gain more experience in to figure out, okay, what are the patterns that I can trust there? And so I guess that actually it's one problem, not two. The problem is that some are more dynamic and unpredictable than others, and that means that intuitions sometimes get ported into places where they don't belong. And let me give you a different example of this and then I'll shut up and let you react. I think where this really worries me is intuition is also responsible for a lot of bias and prejudice.
(00:59:41):
I once had somebody not hired for a job because somebody said my intuition about him, I didn't feel right. I said, well, I don't believe in making hiring decisions that way. I think we should have criteria for the competencies and skills in the job, and then we should figure out whether this person has the motivation and the ability to master this job. And finally, I pushed and it turned out that the manager just got a bad vibe. Well, guess what? The candidate was autistic. And there's something about the social cues, the lack of eye contact, some of the responses maybe not building the same level of rapport that they were used to, that led to this episode of discrimination. And in that case, the intuition was, well, this person is not socially skilled, and then that gets overgeneralized into therefore they can't do this job. And those are the kinds of situations where intuition really scares me because it allows people, we form intuitions that people who look like us, who come from our culture are more trustworthy than people who belong to an outgroup. I'm like, I don't want people to follow those intuitions. I want them to challenge them. So what do you make of all that?
(01:00:57):
Sorry, I said a lot of things.
Noor Tagouri (01:00:58):
No, no, no. Why would you ever apologize? I'm just a little bit, I'm wrapping my mind around what you said and also wrapping my mind around the fact that I've never had something like that challenged before, and I've never had to think about this. And so thank you for making me think again,
Adam Grant (01:01:23):
Thank you for thanking me for doing the thing that a lot of people find really annoying, which is saying, I wonder if there are times to rethink that.
Noor Tagouri (01:01:30):
Are you kidding? If you could go back and analyze everything I just said and tell me where I should actually rethink things or challenge myself, I would really appreciate that because I don't really get the opportunity, but
Adam Grant (01:01:42):
I don't know. Right? That's the whole
Noor Tagouri (01:01:44):
Point. But you put back, you poke, you poke, you poke. Okay, so intuition.
Adam Grant (01:01:47):
Yeah.
Noor Tagouri (01:01:48):
First you were talking about the environment. And I will say that I don't think I've ever used intuition in an environment sense unless it's not even, unless it's because I'm thinking about experiences of sexual violence that I've gone through. And I didn't really have that intuition that also may have, and I didn't have that intuition, but that also may have been part of why I didn't even realize what it was until a lot later. And maybe intuition comes from having some type of knowledge and then your subconscious being able to do those patterns.
Adam Grant (01:02:30):
No, I think that captures it really well. And I think the Gary Klein, there's a whole debate between Gary Klein who is showing all these benefits of intuition for decision-making. And then Danny Kahneman who won about Nobel Prize in part for showing the unreliability of intuition, and they were arguing for years and then finally said, let's design some experiments together to reconcile our views. And they basically aligned on this idea that intuition is reliable and stable environments, but not in dynamic or unpredictable environments. And I think what's interesting about your observations about intuition is it sounds like you've learned a series of intuitions about people.
Noor Tagouri (01:03:06):
That was what I was confident in until you said that thing about the bias. I wonder if, and this isn't just me trying to si myself and just be really cool, but I'm hyper, hyper hypersensitive to the concept of bias. And that's because I went into journalism. I've been in journalism for over 10 years. I studied journalism, but I was always taught, I was taught objectivity and bias in a way that never felt right to me. So me having to be objective in my storytelling and pitching a story to my news director who is a white man who doesn't know or have my experience, and I say, this is a really important story to tell. And he says, I just don't really understand it. I don't get the relevancy, blah, blah, blah. That is his own bias. And I think that so many of us, and this is kind of the reckoning that's happening in storytelling and media, we've internalized what it means to be objective.
(01:04:05):
We've been shamed, fired, punished for inserting feelings or perspective on the stories and the coverage around our own communities. But how has the misrepresentation, for instance, of Muslim people pre and post nine 11 been considered objective? And Christian Amanpour says, never draw a false moral equivalence. And even then you're still talking about morality and what people think is moral is different. But I think when there's a clear oppressor and an oppressed, then the situation should be just as clear when the story is being told. So I've always asked myself before I go into a story, how is the way I cover this going to impact the people or the communities that we're talking about? Because I've known that the misrepresentation of Muslims has led to deaths in our community to people that I actually know. And I'm really hyper aware of making sure that when I'm engaging with another person, that I am seeing them for them and what they say, how they treat whatever it is right now, I have really, really wild intuition about this person, this random person who technically could really help me in my career, but has said things that feel familiar, that make me uncomfortable, that I know that this just isn't, like the cons outweigh the benefits.
(01:05:35):
And I know that I get a very physical specific feeling when that happens. And you're right, I only really have intuition about my experiences with people directly in front of me, and I am comfortable with that.
Adam Grant (01:05:49):
It almost sounds like a repeat of your speaking engagement story. The window dressing is very attractive, but you're like, I might not like what's inside so much.
Noor Tagouri (01:06:00):
Yeah, I'm going to think about this. If I do change my mind or experience it, I will let you know because I really never did think about the environment part of the intuition. I'll talk to my dad. My dad is a doctor and a pathologist and medical examiner, and see what he has to say about that. And also the bias part. I'm going to be more aware of that, so thank you.
Adam Grant (01:06:21):
No, I think one of the things I take away from your description of how you approach journalism is that when people are in positions of power, they need to be especially careful about what their intuitions are because those intuitions can have real impact on other people's lives. And maybe there's a concrete example of this that's far lower stakes than the prejudice and violence against Muslims, but that I think drives the point home in a very clear way, which is a few years ago, I was in the Daily Show writer's room doing an episode of my work-life podcast, and we were really interested in how they diversified the writer's room. So many late night TV shows were written by white men, and here you have this, not only Trevor Noah as the host, but you have this incredibly diverse cast of writers. And they said, well, what we did first is we followed the orchestra model of blind auditions.
(01:07:19):
We took names and faces and identities off of packets, and we just had people read the writing of the candidates who were applying, not knowing who they were. And that way we were able to strip bias out of it, but we still mostly hired white men. How in the world could that happen? What's going on here? And it turned out that the evaluators were still mostly white men in the early days. And their intuition was the material that the intuitive laugh reaction that they had was activated by jokes that were told by fellow white men. And all of a sudden they realized, oh, well, our intuitions are leading us even when we don't know that this is a white man's joke to favor the jokes written by white men. So we need to diversify our evaluators, not just blind the packets that are submitted. And then once they brought in managers who are not all white men to read the packets, all of a sudden, lo and behold, people found in stories that were submitted by black women and Asian men, and the list goes on and on, and then you start to get a much more diverse pool.
(01:08:23):
And I think one of the things I learned from that example was that sometimes, sometimes it's helpful to surround yourself with people who have different intuitions because they force you to question yours and they test your intuition. And sometimes you'll follow it, and sometimes you'll choose to rethink it. And that's one of the things that I enjoy most about the work that I do, is I get to meet a lot of really interesting people who have intuitions that are different from mine, and then they react to my work and they're like, wait a minute. That does not sit right with me. I'm like, maybe I should rethink what my intuition was.
Noor Tagouri (01:09:00):
How do you notice red flags in that situation? Because I guess I have a really, really, really diverse friend group. But at the end of the day, we all have similar values, ways of thought, ways of we feel the same way, and naturally people aren't gravitating towards spending time with people who don't really align that way. So how do you maintain, especially with friendship, how do you maintain that?
Adam Grant (01:09:25):
I don't know. I'll tell you what I did after I finished writing. Think again. As you know, I wrote about the value of having not only a support network, but a challenge network, a group of thoughtful critics who point out your blind spots and tell you what you should rethink. And I went to a bunch of my most thoughtful critics. They were generally people who were highly disagreeable givers who enjoyed conflict, but were doing it to help who dished out tough love. And I said, Hey, you may not know this, but I consider you a founding member of my challenge network. Then I had to explain what in the world a challenge network was. And I said, look, I've not always taken your criticism well, sometimes I've gotten defensive, other times I've just been on a path and it seemed like a distraction, so I dismissed it. But I've always valued the way that you push me to think differently and question my assumptions, and I know I need that. So if you ever hesitate to give me feedback because you're afraid you're going to hurt our relationship or you're going to hurt me, don't, the only way you can hurt me is by not telling me the truth. And I have gotten much better feedback since I had those conversations. And I think, how's your ego? I mean, my ego is I think intact.
(01:10:40):
I think actually in the long run, I think it's made me stronger because everybody has those moments where they wonder, are people just telling me what I want to hear totally. And are there people out there who said nice things to my face? And then maybe were much more critical behind my back. And I think the more that you validate your challenge network, the more that you really are serious about opening that door to hearing criticism, the less of those insecurities you have. And so I think it's actually kind of stabilizing.
Noor Tagouri (01:11:16):
Hi, I hope you're enjoying the storytelling session. I just wanted to share something with you. If you're looking for a good deeded opportunity these days, my family has been working to alleviate local homelessness for over 10 years. We have a foundation called I See You, and we make care packages for people experiencing homelessness. We make family food bags with food staples and give out grocery gift cards to families in need and more. Everything is done by donation and 100% of the money goes towards community members in need. If you'd like to donate, you can through Venmo at iy Foundation or PayPal to contact@isyfoundation.org. If you or someone you know is in need in the dc, Maryland, and Virginia area and could use our help, please DMM on Instagram Issy Foundation or shoot us an email. Now, back to our story, not so rapid, rapid fire questions. First one, what's your favorite time of the day to write
Adam Grant (01:12:25):
Morning?
Noor Tagouri (01:12:26):
How early?
Adam Grant (01:12:28):
As soon as our kids leave for school.
Noor Tagouri (01:12:30):
Ah, great. Favorite setting to write in
Adam Grant (01:12:34):
My home office.
Noor Tagouri (01:12:36):
What's so special about your home office?
Adam Grant (01:12:39):
Nothing other than whenever I sit down in my chair, I write. So it's a natural, it's like putting on your pajamas and then knowing, oh, I should brush my teeth. Sitting down in my desk is the same way.
Noor Tagouri (01:12:50):
So the practice, the ritual of sitting down. Exactly. What do you do when you are in a creative rutt?
Adam Grant (01:12:58):
I usually call somebody who is extremely curious and tell them what I'm stuck on, and then they ask me a bunch of questions and they either give me a great idea or they help me discover something that I was processing but hadn't figured out how to articulate yet.
Noor Tagouri (01:13:15):
That's so great. Your go-to vacation.
Adam Grant (01:13:20):
I don't have a go-to vacation. I really, in a
Noor Tagouri (01:13:22):
Dream life, if you had an unlimited time, go-to vacation.
Adam Grant (01:13:26):
You know what? I really love skiing with our kids.
Noor Tagouri (01:13:29):
Where do you go skiing?
Adam Grant (01:13:31):
We've gone to a few different places. The Poconos are not far from here, so our default is just to get in the car and drive there. And I didn't learn to ski until I was in my late twenties,
Noor Tagouri (01:13:42):
And I haven't learned to ski yet. I'm so excited to,
Adam Grant (01:13:45):
Oh, it's time. It's time. It was so much fun to learn as an adult and then say, okay, I'm going to teach our kids to do this, or at least they'll learn and then we'll ski together. It's become a great shared activity.
Noor Tagouri (01:13:58):
That's amazing. That's also where my parents went for their honeymoon.
Adam Grant (01:14:02):
Good
Noor Tagouri (01:14:02):
Choice. Yes. What music do you listen to for joy?
Adam Grant (01:14:08):
I'm pretty bad at listening to music. Sometimes I go months without listening to it and I don't even notice.
Noor Tagouri (01:14:14):
What about podcasts?
Adam Grant (01:14:16):
Oh, I mean, podcasts are easy. My favorites include Invisibilia, revisionist history, where should we begin? And everything happens, and there are a whole bunch of others that I listen to as well. No stupid questions. What else am I forgetting? Oh, there's a much longer list, but I'll pause there.
Noor Tagouri (01:14:37):
There's a really cool one called Work Life. I think you might like it.
Adam Grant (01:14:42):
I've heard it a few times. I enjoy making it.
Noor Tagouri (01:14:46):
The book that changed the way you think about something during Quarantine,
Adam Grant (01:14:52):
High Conflict by Amanda Ripley is a great read on how to have better arguments
Noor Tagouri (01:14:59):
And your favorite person to learn from
Adam Grant (01:15:04):
The new author I haven't discovered yet.
Noor Tagouri (01:15:08):
And finally
Adam Grant (01:15:08):
There's nothing, nothing that makes my day more from a learning perspective than reading a book by someone I've never heard of and saying, wow, I want to read everything this person has ever thought.
Noor Tagouri (01:15:18):
Who's the last person that you read that you felt that way about? Do you know?
Adam Grant (01:15:23):
Probably Kate Murphy who wrote, You're Not Listening.
Noor Tagouri (01:15:29):
I heard That was amazing. That's actually on my list of books to read. Finally, what do you know for sure
Adam Grant (01:15:39):
That there aren't very many things I know for sure.
Noor Tagouri (01:15:43):
Thank you so much, Adam. How can we be of service to you these days?
Adam Grant (01:15:49):
It's kind of you to ask. I will try not to make you regret it.
Noor Tagouri (01:15:53):
Stores you want people to support?
Adam Grant (01:15:55):
I love independent bookstores. Whatever your favorite local store is, I'm a fan.
Noor Tagouri (01:16:01):
Amazing. Thank you so much, Adam. And if you ever need a curious person to hear and ask you questions, I'm pretty good at that. That's kind of what I do for a living.
Adam Grant (01:16:10):
It shows this was an utter delight. Thank you for having me.
Noor Tagouri (01:16:16):
I hope you enjoyed this storytelling session for more Adam Grant. You can follow him on Twitter at Adam M. Grant or Instagram at Adam Grant, or listen to his podcast Work Life on the TED Channel. Please, please subscribe to podcast nor rate and review. It is a great way to support and give me feedback. If you'd like to watch the video version of this podcast, it is up on YouTube or Facebook, both slash Noor and to you, our listener, I want to thank you for your listen and support. I'd love to stay connected. Here are some ways I'm telling stories these days. You can text me if you are in the US or Canada. Yes, it is me not a bot. I also text you intentional daily questions of the day. My number is 3 0 1 2 4 6 8 8 9. You can follow us on social, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube at Noor and on Instagram at AYS. My Twitter, snapchat and Clubhouse is N Tagouri. This podcast is produced by the at your service team, Adam and I. It is produced and edited by Molly McKeen, and the amazing music is composed by Portugal, the Man. See you next week.