[Music]
Tom Bilyeu: Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.
Today's guest is organizational
psychologist Adam Grant. He's a four-time
New York Times best-selling author who's
been called one of the top 10 most
influential management thinkers of our
time. He's been ranked Wharton's number
one professor for seven years running
and is one of the most sought after
speakers on the planet. Additionally, this
former junior olympics diver was named
by Fortune Magazine to their prestigious
40 under 40 list. And everyone from Bill
Gates and Richard Branson to J.J. Abrams
and Malcolm Gladwell have praised his
work. And his Ted Talks together have a
collective view count north of 20
million views. Adam, welcome to the show
man.
Adam Grant: Thanks for that Tom. I can assure you
it's all downhill from here. Tom Bilyeu: That's hilarious.
It's funny how hearing
one's accomplishments strung out like
that can sound very weird at times but
it is pretty impressive man, like what
you've been able to do is
pretty extraordinary. And what I love is
that it comes from
a pretty aggressive approach to getting
people to tell you what you're doing
wrong so that you can get better.
And right now we are living through some
extraordinarily
interesting times, the tables being
overturned, we're in the middle of a lot
of protesting. There's going to be just
tremendous change, hopefully, tremendous
change taking place. And to get us
through that kind of change well, we're
obviously going to need a lot of
tremendous leadership. And I was
wondering in your research, I know that
you've focused heavily on what are sort
of the universal principles of
leadership,
and I'd love to start there, like what do
you think makes for a great leader?
Adam Grant: Oh where do we begin? How many hours do
you have Tom?
Tom Bilyeu: As many as you'll give me
to be honest. Adam Grant: All right, I'm here. I
have not a lot else on my agenda today
so
um, you know when I think about
leadership, the first thing I want to do
is I want to break it down into values
and skills.
And I think that for me the values are
table stakes, right? So you can't lead if
you're a taker, rather than a giver. If
it's all about you as opposed to saying
look, I care more about my people and the
mission we're trying to advance than I
do about glorifying myself.
So that would be the first value I'd put
on the table. The second- Tom Bilyeu: So before we, before we move
off that one, just give people a quick Adam Grant: Yea.
Tom Bilyeu: breakdown of givers versus takers, you
have a whole book on it. It's really
extraordinary. You talk about the
three types, I think it'd be useful for
people to understand that.
Adam Grant: Yeah, happy too. So when I think about
your style of giving and taking the
question is just, when you interact with
somebody new, what's your default
instinct? Is it to give and say what can
I do for you? To take and think about
what can you do for me? Or to match and
say okay can we trade some kind of favor?
And what I found over and over again is
that most people default to matching.
They don't want to be too selfish or too
generous, and yet in the long run the
most successful leaders especially, are
the servant leaders
who are interested in helping others
with no strings attached and who will
put other people above their own narrow
self-interest. And so I think
that's just, that's a must-have in
leadership and it's far more rare than I
would like it to be.
Tom Bilyeu: Fair
Adam Grant: I think beyond that, I think a second
attribute I look for in leaders
value-wise is humility, to recognize
your shortcomings, but also be motivated
to overcome those shortcomings. It's
not that helpful if you can say yeah, I
can make a list of the 19
weaknesses that I have, but I don't care
about fixing any of them, right? I think
being an effective leader is heavily
about striving for self-improvement.
And the third value I'd put on the table
is integrity. It's a consistency
between your words and your deeds
and a lot of people will say look you
know, you have to practice what you
preach. I actually think leaders should
be doing the reverse which is to say I
am only going to preach what I already
practice.
And if we could just get leaders who
value generosity, humility, and integrity,
I would be overjoyed. And then we get to
skills.
Tom Bilyeu: All right, so before we go on to skills,
let's talk about those in a little more
depth. So one of the things I found
interesting in the book
is when you're talking about takers,
givers, matchers, that you said the
interesting thing about givers is that
they represent both ends of the spectrum,
so you see some of the least successful
people are givers and then the most
successful people are givers. And so I'd
love to know how to use it functionally
and when it sort of metastasizes and
becomes a problem.
Adam Grant: Yeah. So if you look at the differences
between failed and successful givers,
they break down into the question of,
actually it's three questions. One, who do
you help? Two, when do you help? And three,
how do you help?
And what you see with failed givers is
they're basically self-sacrificing, so
they're helping all the people all the
time with all the requests which is a
recipe for burnout. It's also an easy way
to get burned by takers.
What you see with successful givers is
they're more thoughtful about their
helping choices and they say look, I will
do whatever I can to support people who
are either generous or fair, right? Givers
or matchers. But if somebody has a
history or reputation of selfish
behavior,
then they might be a taker and so I'm
gonna be a little bit more cautious with
them and set some boundaries.
One, because I don't want to reinforce
that behavior and reward it. And two,
because they're going to take advantage
of me and prevent me from helping the
people who are going to pay it back and
pay it forward.
And then you also see that successful
givers are more likely to say okay, I'll
block out time from my own agenda and own
priorities because I want to be
ambitious around my own goals, not just
around helping other people and yeah, if
it's an emergency I will show up and
help you, but otherwise I have some
priorities that I need to take care of
here. So I will be available to you when
you know, when it's not going to be a
huge cost to me.
And then, they're also careful about
helping in ways that energize them and
where they add distinctive value. So you
see a lot of failed givers becoming
jacks of all trades and you know, pretty
soon they get a reputation for being
capable and helpful and then no good
deed goes unpunished.
Whereas the successful givers are more
likely to say look, I've got a couple
ways of helping that I really like and
that I excel at, and I'm going to focus
on those so that I can add more value
and so when I do help, it's energizing to
me as opposed to exhausting.
Tom Bilyeu: One of the things I found in a company
context and I'm not even sure yet how
applicable this is to
the greater time that we're living
through right now, but when I think
about trying to provide leadership in a
company context, it's a pretty
interesting dynamic when you talk about
humility where you do have to have a
degree of certainty, you have to have a
degree of like being able to step out
front to galvanize everybody's
attention, hopefully not on yourself, but
you're galvanizing it on a vision, and
you have to get everybody pointed in the
same direction. I often talk about one of
the things I think that leaders really
have to do is you have to understand how
to generate momentum, so we're in a
moment right now where if we can
capitalize on the sort of emotional
momentum that we have, point it in a
direction that is
ultimately bringing everybody together
and is thoughtful in terms of the
long-term outcome that we want to have,
that could be such a powerful
moment. But
getting everybody to
move in the same direction
is
is a difficult task without getting
people to stare at you. So you want them
to stare at the idea, right? You don't
want them to overfocus on you, but
somebody has to present it, somebody has
to present it with clarity and get
everybody going, keep them enthusiastic,
keep that energy level up. And
so the type of person, and you've talked
really powerfully about this, the type of
person that is drawn to that can often
spill into the narcissistic, right? They
enjoy the attention and so some of what Adam Grant: Yea.
Tom Bilyeu: they're seeking is that. And I'm just
curious how,
how somebody who really wants to help,
they really want to help sustain that
momentum, they want to be a beacon of
hope in this time,
how do they make it about the mission
and not about themselves?
Adam Grant: I think that's such an important
question Tom and I love how you've
highlighted that distinction.
I think that you know, for me it comes
down to promoting your ideas, not
yourself.
And
when I look at how leaders do that
effectively, one of the things that
really surprised me is sometimes the
message doesn't even come from them.
So as an example, years ago I was
studying fundraising callers, and they
were trying to bring in donations to a
university.
And the leaders were trying to
motivate them because this is hard work,
right? You interrupt people's dinner,
you try to convince them that no your
tuition was not enough, you should keep
sending money into the university and
now you should get nothing back for that
donation. So they got yelled at a lot,
they you know, they shouldered a lot of
complaints. And
the leaders tried to talk about why the
money was important and where it was
going and the callers just they looked
at that and they said
wait, these managers have an
ulterior motive, they want to motivate me
to work harder and bring in more
donations. And so you know,
I don't really buy into this whole story
they're telling me.
So what some of the leaders did then was
they actually outsourced inspiration and
they said okay, you know what, why do we
have to be the megaphone? What if instead,
we bring in some scholarship students
who could talk about being the
first-hand beneficiaries of the money
that's being raised by this call center.
And so we ended up designing some
experiments together and lo and behold
it turned out that that message was much
more compelling coming from the end user
who could say look, you know, I might
not have been able to afford tuition and
because of the work that you all do, I am
in college today and really show that
sense of appreciation as opposed to
managers doing it themselves. And so I
think sometimes one of the best ways to
energize people is to shut up,
and say instead let me find the you know, if
I've got a mission here, it's probably
affecting some group of clients or
customers or patients or end users, and
let me bring their voices front and
center.
Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, I love that notion of sometimes
what you need to do is listen. That's one
of my rules about being a leader is you
really have to listen. I read Nelson
Mandela's extraordinary book Long Walk
To Freedom, and in that he talks about
his father who was sort of a local
chief in his village, and he said that
he would always listen before he would
speak and he would make sure that
everybody else had their opportunity to
air their ideas, to air their grievances,
and only after that would he come in and
say okay here's what I think that we
need to do to move forward. So I'm a big
believer when you read something, if it
hits you and you think that this is a
useful thing that you should be deploying,
that you deploy it immediately. Adam Grant: I love
the reference to Mandela because the
one thing that's always stuck with me
from his writing is the idea that a
leader is like a shepherd.
If you watch a shepherd with a flock,
the shepherd is rarely out front,
right? You will often see a bunch of
sheep leading the way and the shepherd
is kind of taking care of the stragglers.
There's a great organizational
psychologist, Victor Vroom,
who incidentally his license plate says
vroom on it which is just such a fun- Tom Bilyeu: How could it not?
Adam Grant: A fun detail, right? Tom Bilyeu: How could it not?
Adam Grant: I would do that if that were my name, so
one of the things that Victor studied
for years was the tension between
being a directive leader and a
participative leader.
And he said one of the fundamental
mistakes that a lot of leaders make is
they develop a style and then they
stick to that style, but the whole point
of leadership is flexibility and
adaptability. And so you can't just say
well I'm either an empowering
leader or I'm more of an authoritative
leader, you actually have to be willing
to adjust your style to fit the
situation.
And so what he was really interested in
is how do you flex effectively and he
found that there are a bunch of
conditions that really matter, a few that
stood out for me.
One,
relative expertise is huge, right? So when
I look at effective leaders, one of the
things I see over and over again is they
know what they know, they know what they
don't know and in situations where they
have more knowledge than their team
they're comfortable in the driver's seat.
When they don't know what they're
talking about they'll step back and move
into the passenger seat.
Some others were around getting buy in
and saying okay, you know the more
critical it is for people to you know, to
really get behind this mission, the more
I need to hear their voices and give
them a say. If people are already bought
in, then you know, then I can kind
of lead.
And I think that when I think about
leaders who've done this really
effectively, the examples that come
to mind all follow a common meeting
structure which is to open up by saying
look, here's the objective of the meeting.
Does anybody have any feedback on that
before we go forward? Okay, once we're
aligned on the objective, now I want to
go around and hear everybody's
independent view before I share mine. And
then at the end I'm going to try to
synthesize, add my perspective, and then
move us toward a decision. And what I
like about that is the leader is still
providing some guidance and direction,
but the leader is actually not
disclosing hey, you know, here's where I
stand and that way we don't run into
this conformity or group think problem.
I'd like to [inaudible] where the highest
paid person's opinion, the moment that's
known, everyone wants to jump on the
bandwagon.
Tom Bilyeu: Yeah. You cut out right as you said
it, but it's the HIPPO effect if i
remember correctly, I just want to make
sure people hear that. it's such a interesting
concept. So we hit the first part of
your leadership which is super powerful,
now talk to me about skills. Like what
are skills that a leader should be
developing?
Adam Grant: Yeah. So when I break down leadership
into skills, I think obviously
decision-making skills are critical, we
started talking about those already.
And I think decision-making skills have
to do with being willing to hear
dissenting views, right? Being willing to
confront perspectives that maybe bruise
your ego a little bit
in order to learn, and then in order to
gather better information and make
better choices. Uh so- Tom Bilyeu: Can you give people an
example because this may be the most, the
thing that I've taken most deeply away
from your work is this because this, dude,
of all the powerful things that you have
already said and will say in the rest of
this time, this how to
improve yourself
to me is at the foundation of the
human experience. So
why have you become so
dogged in your pursuit of
critical feedback.
Adam Grant: I mean from my perspective, it's the only
way you get better, right? If people just
praise you over and over again, you're
only going to repeat the excellence
you've already achieved,
and you hit a plateau and then you're
done, like great. How exciting is
it to just say okay, I peaked already
and I'm gonna just try to maintain that
level. What I want to do is I want to
keep getting better
and I think to me it's so much
better to be on an upward trajectory
than it is to you know to flatline at
some level or to stagnate. And so
I think that requires short-term
sacrifices and it's a little bit like
the you know, the professional version of
what you just described you know, in
a personal relationship which is if I
want to, if I want to achieve whatever
potential I'm capable of,
I have to be willing to hurt myself
in the moment in order to you know to be
a little bit stronger tomorrow. I mean
it's a lot like weight training, right?
You know you have to tear a muscle
in order to build it into you know, into
a stronger muscle, and so
I feel like we should think about our
skills and our capabilities the same way
that we do
you know, our bodies in that sense. So
I guess this is something I learned
first as an athlete, not a real athlete
mind you just a springboard diver, but-
Tom Bilyeu: I've seen footage of your springboard
diving, it's pretty impressive.
Adam Grant: It would be a lot more impressive if I was
a little bit more talented and a little
bit less,
less stubborn. But one of the things that
I learned as a diver right away was I
couldn't see myself in the air, right? And
so what I would feel when I was flipping
or twisting or even when I was entering
the water was completely different in
many cases from what the judges would
see.
And so you know, very early on I became
extremely dependent on my coach and then
also on video to really try to process
the disconnect between what I thought I
was doing and what was coming across.
And that, as I moved into you know, into
work life, that became sort of a metaphor
for what we all deal with. You know, I
think we definitely have, we all have
bright spots, right, which are strengths
we can't see, but we have also lots of
blind spots which are weaknesses that we
don't have access to, and so what I
wanted was the clearest possible rear
view mirror to say if I can't see in
that then you know, I can't really figure
out what I need to learn and what I need
to get better at. So
I started doing this in the classroom
where you know, I would just have
students fill out feedback forms, first
when I gave guest lectures then when I
started teaching classes. I just say
tell me everything you want me to do
more of and everything you want me to
change.
And then I would just share all the
feedback with them verbatim which was my
own version of radical transparency I
guess, and then we can have a thoughtful
conversation about how I can fix those
problems and improve upon those you know
those areas of weakness. And that became
a conversation that really turned the
students I was teaching into my coaches
which was immensely helpful and made me
much less awful at public speaking than
I was when I started. Tom Bilyeu: Dude I love that.
Going back to what you were saying about
in athletics.
So I used to skateboard, I will put that
very lightly.
I used to enjoy standing on a board with
four wheels is probably a more accurate
description. And I remember trying to
learn how to ollie and I'd finally
gotten good where I could ollie pretty
high, I was really proud of it. And then
the kids that I was skating with were
like you do know that your back wheels
never leave the ground, right? And I was
like
what? What are you talking about? That,
that's not possible. I'm ollieing high.
I legitimately did not believe them. I'm
like, when you talk about how it feels
inside versus what it actually looks
like outside,
I was like I can feel it man, I'm like
really doing this. And so they said let
me film you and they filmed me and I
wasn't. Only my front wheels were coming
off. I could not fathom that that
feedback was real and because of that
disconnect and so getting that objective
look at myself was really transformative.
At the beginning you said that you'd be
a better diver if you were less stubborn,
what did you mean by that? Adam Grant: I remember one
day I was just trying to do a
front dive with a half twist. So you take
off, you're going in the water, and then
you kind of turn into a back dive.
And I had I guess, a mental image of
where the twist happened that defied the
laws of physics and, by the way, my diving
coach was a physics teacher
and I still argued with him, right? I was
so sure that I was right because I felt
like I was turning over one way and he
said okay, I'm just gonna have to show
you the tape because you won't believe
me. And my teammates were making fun of
me and you know, I wasted an hour and a
half of that practice, but that became a
microcosm for a series of mistakes that
I was making which is, I was so
determined to be right
that I was standing in my own way of
getting it right. And so I decided I
was going to be really quick moving
forward
to admit when I was wrong about
something and then try to improve upon
it and that's I guess, that's become a
metaphor for how I try to live my life.
Tom Bilyeu: Oh my god, you have to talk about Shane.
Please tell us that story because it is so
crazy and so perfect for how I think
people should approach life.
Adam Grant: Yeah. So
I think anybody who hasn't heard of
Shane Battier, there's a reason for
that. If you know, if you don't follow
basketball closely, Shane was a
superstar for his whole career. He was
the player of the year in high school, he
was the captain of the Duke national
championship team,
and then he got to the NBA and
discovered that pretty much everybody
there was more physically talented than
he was.
People would complain that he was too
slow, he couldn't dribble,
and this was a real liability, right, if
you want to be one of the few hundred
people in the world who can play
professional basketball. And so what
Shane did, this was first captured by
Michael Lewis in a wonderful article called
the No-Stats All-Star,
was he said okay, I'm going to master the
intangibles. And some of that is obvious
right, I'm going to dive for loose balls,
I'm going to you know, I'm going to take
shots that,
that are really critical for the team
even though they don't bring me a lot of
glory necessarily. But he also said you
know what, I'm going to master statistics
and I'm going to find the one spot on
the court that you know, that the guy I'm
guarding tonight can't shoot from and
I'm gonna force him there,
and I'm also gonna figure out where you
know, where my game is optimized by
studying what the gaps in my team are
and then figuring out how I can fill.
And if you think about that, that is the
nexus of you know, of generosity and
humility, right? Shane is asking how do I
make my team better, right? It's not about
me, I want to, I want to contribute to a
championship team.
And he's asking how do I reinvent myself
in order to you know, to become the
player who adds that kind of value?
And you know, if you look at the data he
was one of the most effective players on
a court in the sense that there's a huge
discrepancy between how well a team
performs when he's on the bench versus
when he's playing,
even though he doesn't have you know, a
crazy number of points scored or assists
or rebounds or shots blocked.
And I think that that's something
we need in every team.
I think it's you know, it's somebody
who's there to say there is no task
that's beneath me,
and if the leader is that person, that
has a huge cascading effect.
Tom Bilyeu: Dude that, like you want to talk about
something that leaders need to be able
to do it's
nothing is beneath you. Another stat in
basketball that you've talked about
which is teams that have the most
all-stars tend to perform the worst
which I think is really pretty interesting.
Adam Grant: If you have a whole team of
all-stars,
they're less likely to want to do that,
right? Everybody wants to take the
game-winning shot and so yeah, there are
studies both in basketball as well as in
in professional soccer
showing that if you have a team of more
than about 60 percent
superstars, your odds of winning a
championship or having a highly
successful season go down because you're
missing the role players. And so whenever
I hear a CEO say well, I only hire A
players, I think well you know what,
there's a lot of important work that A
players don't want to do. And so I think
that's the wrong mentality, I think the
evidence would tell us that an A team is
actually composed of A and B and C players.
Tom Bilyeu: I am so desperate to get Phil
Jackson on the show. I don't know if you
read his book Eleven Rings, but oh man when
he talks about how
we weren't winning championships when
Jordan was just the best player in the
NBA, we started winning championships Adam Grant: Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu: when he became a leader and when he
realized you can't just punch people in
the face and hope that that is going to
take you like that, it will inspire them
to elevate their game, he was like you
have got to find a way to connect with
these guys to bring them together. And he
said when I was able to focus him on
leadership and really being a leader,
then we start taking off and he was like
look, he was still Michael, he was still
super hardcore, but
in recognizing that he wasn't going to
be able to win by himself, and you
know, I think that speaks to your
earliest point about the best leaders
being servant leaders and being able to
recognize how they have to give and
not just take is pretty extraordinary.
Adam Grant: Yeah. One of the questions I've
gotten really interested in lately is
the question of leader emergence. So
you've got a team and you have
different levels of ability and then
you know, somebody steps up and becomes
the the informal leader. What drives that?
And you know, sometimes it's just the
most competent person,
but often it's what psychologists
would call prototypicality which is to
say what does the group stand for and
then who's the person who's most likely
to exemplify the essence or the
identity of the group. And
I think that's something that
very few people stop to think through
when you know, when they either start a
new job or when they build a team, is to
say okay, if I were to make a list of the
values that are distinctive, central, and
enduring to this team or to this company,
what are they? And then how do I make
sure that I represent the most core values?
Tom Bilyeu: All right, now we have to talk and
I fear that I'm misremembering the words
you use but cognitive entrenchment?
That's close Adam Grant: Haha, yeah.
Tom Bilyeu: Um so that- Adam Grant: No that, that's the phrase.
Tom Bilyeu: When I think about
people getting stuck because humans hate
change as you were saying what Larry
Page said I was like, oh good luck man,
like people really hate change, but
it's such a powerful idea. So
how do you deal with cognitive
entrenchment?
Adam Grant: So when I think about cognitive
entrenchment, there was a brilliant paper
that Eric Dane wrote about this and he
said look, you know we generally
assume that the more expertise you gain,
the more creative you're going to be, and
yet if you study the relationship
between expertise and creativity, it's
not linear, it's curvilinear. There's
such a thing as being too knowledgeable,
like wait, how could that be? Wait I just, I
should, I should stop learning?
No. What he's saying is that oftentimes
when you get really deep in a domain,
you start to take for granted
assumptions that need to be questioned
and you don't even know you're taking
them for granted. You're like a fish that
doesn't realize it's in water. And there
are some really funny demonstrations of
this like expert bridge players. If you
change the rules up on them, they
actually perform worse than a lot of
novices do or if you take really skilled
and experienced accountants. If you
look at how they adjust to a tax law,
they're slower to adapt than people who Tom Bilyeu: Woah.
Adam Grant: are just learning the accounting trade
And you know, those are examples of
cognitive entrenchment, right? People get,
they get sort of accustomed to a
particular way of thinking and solving
problems and then they don't want to
undo that
and I worry a lot about that.
I think that you know, organizations,
you're starting to talk about
organizations get entrenched too, right?
This is the way we've always done it.
Well that will never work around here.
And those to me are some of
the great warning signs that a culture
is in danger of groupthink. I think
the first thing to do is to run
the exercise of asking what's missing
from our culture? If you know, if
there's a pattern, a behavior, a routine,
a way of thinking that we wish we had
but we didn't, what is it?
And then how do we go out and find
people who excel at that? How do we
collectively and you know, adjust our
behaviors a little bit to move in that
direction.
I think IDEO did this beautifully so
you know IDEO of course, Tom.
I knew them originally as the
company that invented the mouse for
Apple. And they've done all kinds of
creative work since then as a great
design consultancy. And after a while
they realized you know we have a lot of
engineers and designers,
but we're getting called into these
weird worlds and we're not really sure
how to solve the problems that we face
in those worlds like they were tasked to
redesign a shopping cart in a grocery
store,
and then to reimagine Sesame Street as a
TV show and they're like this is not mouse building
anymore.
We need to figure out how to
learn about a new world really quickly,
and so they actually created a new job
that was called anthropologists and they
said look, this is what anthropologists
do for a living, they go out into foreign
cultures and they make sense of them and
they bring that understanding back.
And so they literally went and hired
anthropologists because they discovered
there was a skill set they were missing
in their culture which was very design
and engineering focused and I think that
exercise could be run in every company
and it's a great way of identifying
those gaps and then not getting
entrenched. What's your take, how
do you think about solving that problem?
Tom Bilyeu: So one, I think everybody has to agree on
what their goal is. So part of what I try
to do is
make sure that core values that are
innate to the person that we hire are
already there, so if somebody
doesn't, like I think that you have to
filter to a large extent and so the
question is what do you filter for and I
think most people filter for skill set.
It's very easy to put on a resume.
It's much easier to test in an interview.
But the thing that we filter for is do
you have a growth mindset? And I feel
like that is one of the most fundamental
things. I get asked a lot about like
hey I want to be in a relationship like
you and your wife like how do i do it?
And I'm like 80 percent of the battle is
selection and if Lisa didn't have a
growth mindset or I didn't have a growth
mindset and we weren't willing to get
better and improve,
then it would be nightmarish and you end
up,
one of you grows typically and the other
doesn't and you know, it becomes this
real drama. So looking for people that
have a growth mindset, so at the core all
I have to do is appeal to that, right? So
as you were talking about what people
have to do to improve a culture,
my belief is
your current skill set or your current
culture however you want to think of it,
has already taken you as far as it's
going to take you. So if you're happy
where you're at and like you said
earlier, and you're comfortable being in
that plateau forever, then hey, yay, you
already won, but my thing is I'm not and
certainly in a business, if you're not
growing the odds of you getting
supplanted by somebody who comes out of
left field with some new innovation that,
you're just gonna get beaten to death. Adam Grant: Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu: So I appeal to those sort of just they
are the physics of being human, they are
the physics of running a company, you
have to be improving. As a person the
meaning of life is to see how many
skills or how much potential you can
turn into actual usable skills, so it's
like I would be asking all right, as we
try to evolve this culture and somebody
offers an
idea, I would say how does it make us
better in any sort of measurable way?
Is it gonna help us innovate so that we
don't get supplanted by a new player? Is
it going to
allow us to do more with less? Like what
is the outcome that you're trying
to get because I find that in life
people steer by a vague sense and you
have to migrate them away from a vague
sense into something that is
articulatable into a very specific goal
with a timeline, how much, exactly what.
Those three elements being critical to a
goal and then having an informed
hypothesis about how to get there and
the informed is the key part and so
we've broken down, so what I call the
physics of progress, and we've turned
everything into
sort of a stateable formula which is the
most effective way to do insert goal is
to insert what i call a lever action, a
binary thing that you either do or don't
do. It isn't incumbent upon the
outside world to give you anything, it's
like either we do this or we don't, and
so that's our informed hypothesis. I know
enough about it you know, to say I think
this will work but I know enough about
the realities of myself and the world to
know I can't guess at whether this will
actually work I have to test it.
Adam Grant: I love formulating that as the hypothesis
because I've seen so many companies
get in the trap of declaring the best
practices and then never questioning
them until it's too late. And I think
what you've just outlined is a really
effective way to keep learning.
Tom Bilyeu: Yeah. And at an institutional level
it becomes
harder because you have so many of the,
a company is not a nameless, faceless
entity, it is entirely the sum total
of the actual human beings that make up
that company. So if at the individual
level you have a
sickness which could be cognitive
entrenchment, then the organization is
going to have that same sickness of
cognitive entrenchment. So it's
trying to find a way to boil this down
where everybody can take ownership of it
and make those changes, be focused on the
same desired outcome which is constant
self-improvement in our company,
otherwise you,
there's so much inertia to staying the
same, you just won't be able to get out
of it because everybody has that vague
sense. And I find that's the most
prototypical human sickness, is a vague
sense. I have like, what do you want to do,
this is perfect to speak to an Olympic
diver, what do you want to do? I want to
win a gold medal and that is where I
promise you most people stop. I want to
win a gold medal. Awesome, in what? The
Olympics? Yes, the Olympics. Amazing! Summer
or Winter? Summer. Fantastic.
Swimming, diving, tennis like where are we
at here? And then you get all the way
down to I want to be you know, the 10
meter springboard champion or
whatever, I'm not even sure if that's a
thing, but like you get the idea.
You know exactly- Adam Grant: I mean a 10 meter board would scare
the hell out of everyone. [Laughter]
Tom Bilyeu: So you know specifically what you
want to do and therefore you know
specifically what you have to get good
at.
Adam Grant: Do you ever feel like people get
exhausted by constant self-improvement?
Tom Bilyeu: I'll speak for myself, I've never, i
haven't been thoughtful enough to ask
that question. So
where I come down on this is like you
talking about okay, somebody telling me
that I move like a muppet, it sucks in
the short term, but obviously your
behavior tells me that you're focused on
the long term like what can be gained
from your improvement. The fact that you
become one of the most recognized
thought leaders in the space, the fact
that you're seven years running the
number one ranked professor at
Wharton, I mean it's, the results
speak for themselves. And so the way I
think about it in my own life is I have
so mentally conditioned myself to get a
dopamine rush from somebody pointing out
a flaw because I'm thinking you have no
idea. My-
Adam I have the chills because I know
how true what I'm about to say is. I'm
willing to
actually take the pain of that and then
go if I can improve this I'll now be a
step farther ahead and on a long enough
timeline I can win at anything because
I'm willing to do that constant
iteration. So
there are definitely things that I do in
my life where for sort of brief periods
of time I'm not thinking about getting
better, but honestly man they're
really few and far between and I have,
I have this thing in my life where it is,
for 15 years because I was trying to
build a business so I could build a film
studio, long story,
I didn't watch movies because it
wasn't the skill that I needed at that
moment. And then I found that that
carried over even when I was building
the studio, I wasn't watching movies
anymore because I'd gotten into such a
habit
and I found that they didn't make me
feel like I was getting better and so I
couldn't do anything that didn't make me
feel like I was getting better because
the conditioning I'd put under myself to
have this huge dopamine reaction, so I
had to flip a switch and say I'm going
to now start deconstructing this stuff
and figuring out why it's good, why it
works, and now dude, I love watching
movies more than I've ever loved it in
my life because before it was passive
and now it's very proactive, it
feels far more creative and it feels
like I'm getting stronger which is
my obsession.
Adam Grant: Yeah. So two things on that. One is I
think you just laid out beautifully
Robert Eisenberger's theory of learned
industriousness which is the idea that
if you look at kids who grow up to be
extremely gritty and hardworking,
one of the things that happens to
them very early on is they get praised
for effort over and over again or
rewarded for effort over and over again
and then the feeling of hard work itself
takes on secondary reward properties, and
so it's like oh this hurts, but it also
feels good and I want to keep doing it
because I've gotten rewarded for it in
the past. And it sounds like you've
taken constructive criticism
as one of those reward keys that
really motivates you to keep getting
better.
The other thing that I thought was
really interesting about what you just
said is I thought you were
actually going to go in a cognitive
entrenchment direction on this when
you said you didn't watch movies for a
long period. It reminded me of a Simpsons
writer that I interviewed once,
George Meyer, who when he was writing for
the Simpsons, he refused to watch
Seinfeld because he was afraid that he'd
fall into this clept amnesia trap and
accidentally misremember one of their
jokes as his and he just, he didn't want
to take that risk.
And I always feel like this is a
tightrope walk because
when you're trying to innovate in
an industry you can't be completely
clueless about what everybody else is
doing otherwise you might miss something
really important,
and yes Blockbuster, Sears, Blackberry, I'm
talking to you, Kodak.
But
on the other hand, if you're too
obsessed with what your competitors are
up to, then you get entrenched and
it's harder to see with fresh eyes. Do
you have thoughts on how to stay on that
tightrope and not fall off either side?
Tom Bilyeu: Yeah so, I would say this is where
self-awareness is going to be really,
really important. I think there are
people that,
they maybe exist better in a vacuum
or they have such strong intuition about
something, and I believe exclusively in
informed tuition, I don't think you're
born with intuition. I think that it's
developed just through your activities
and you give a great example on this
with Steve Jobs and how he had informed
intuition around technology but not
around transportation, and so what he
does in Apple is life altering and
his investment in Segway was a waste. So
that I think is very, very real, but I
think that like anything it's a spectrum
and so there are some people maybe that
intuition is developed more intensely or
it's developed more quickly,
invisibly, whatever the case may be, and
then there are people who I'll call
synthesizers, so and that's me. And if you
put me on a desert island, what I would
come up with would probably not be very
interesting, but if you put me in an
information rich environment I will make
connections that are unlike the
connections anybody else will make. And I
have cultivated a fearlessness over
making unique connections, and so I had
to embrace that I am a synthesizer and
that for me, to take in all this data, to
read broadly like people that I think
that confirm what I believe and people
that violently oppose what I believe and
all of that ends up coming together in a
unique way in my own mind. And so for a
long time I was paralyzed because I felt
like I'm never going to think a unique
thought and that was really discouraging
to me and if you've seen A Beautiful
Mind, that was at least, as portrayed in
the movie, is what he struggled with was
you know, I'm never going to have an
original thought and it plagues him and
ends up being a driver for him and he
ends up obviously having a very original
thought and ends up really changing our
understanding of economics,
but for me what I found was I'm a
process thinker so I need to, I'm not, I
don't sit in a vacuum and have these
amazing breakthroughs, I suffer and then
have a breakthrough based on things that
I've read that finally collide and I put
them in a new context with a collision
that maybe other people would make
filtered through a value system that
other people don't have, and now I know
how to move through in the world because
I'm trying to satisfy my own emotional
needs
and I'm a total slave to the physics of
the world, so what actually moves me
towards my goals. So you put all that
together and I'm sort of unabashed
about like I need to take in all this
data, I'm not worried about klepto
amnesia, I'm happy to celebrate and
champion other people, I
I don't have those fears because I
didn't need it to be my idea in the
first place, so even when I think about
writing like I, when he's a writer
and he wants to say something original,
he wants to be his own jokes, I
understand all of that for sure.
My thing as a writer is I'm gonna
tell, like if I were to try to do
Seinfeld, like literally, I'm going to
make Seinfeld, I'm going to do this, just
Seinfeld, I'm going to try to copy
Seinfeld as hard as I can. As long as I
trust my own intuition and I divert when
I feel something is even funnier, I'm
trying to make it better, it will just
end up being so different that
that gives me sort of that armor around
not really worried about this
and
I would never intentionally go down that
path of trying to mimic it, so then once
you
put in I'm really trying to take this
somewhere new and I'm trusting my own
unique quirks and I'm fearless about
chasing them, you get something that's
original.
Adam Grant: Do you always trust your intuition
though because when you were describing
your hypothesis testing approach before,
it sounds like, to me, you're not
following your gut, you're testing it.
Tom Bilyeu: So I, it's funny. I wouldn't, if I just
gave the impression that I trust my
instincts, the answer is no. So what I'm
saying is when I'm writing something and
i have something that bends me in a
weird direction, I'm going to follow that,
but the only thing I care about is how
do people actually respond. So what I Adam Grant: Right.
Tom Bilyeu: used to tell my students is, because I
used to teach filmmaking. I said
you have a choice before you, you can
be here to masturbate or you can be here
to make love. And if you want to
masturbate go make some weird art house
film that nobody understands and that's
absolutely fine, like you're trying to
please yourself, respect. But if you're
here to make love, you have to think
about your partner, and your partner is
the audience. And you have to understand
how the things you do impact them and so
your obsession has to be not what you
intend to communicate, but what is
actually understood, and so if you don't
understand that, now you're in real
trouble. So I'm not trying to exist in a
vacuum,
I'm trying to say my hypothesis is
that my unique way of interpreting this
will actually have a bigger response
than the other thing and I'm fearless
enough to try it. Now if I get feedback
that it didn't work, then I'm going to
adjust a hundred percent. I'm just never
afraid if I really feel that something
is the right way, I'm gonna do it. And if
I'm unsure, I'll admit that I'm unsure
and I'll try to get feedback from people
to try to orient myself.
Adam Grant: That's such a helpful edit because as a
social scientist, when people say
you know, trust your intuition or follow
your gut,
I generally don't trust things that I
don't know where they came from [Laughs]. And I
want to know why you're so confident
in your intuition. Well let's actually
talk about what intuition is. It's just
subconscious pattern recognition,
right? You've detected some kind
of connection that you're not fully able
to articulate and don't you want to find
out what that is, right? Make the
pattern conscious, so then you can test
whether the pattern that you're seeing
now is actually relevant to the choice
that you're about to make. You know,
Steve Jobs with the Segway example is
such a fun one for me because
he spent all those years in you know, in
the software worlds, building up his
intuition so that he could very quickly
know whether design made sense or not. He
didn't have the subconscious pattern
recognition calibrated for
transportation and so you know, he
quickly got bowled over just by how
brilliant the technology was
and seemed to miss some of the user
applications of it and how difficult it
would be to write a segway down sidewalks.
And I think a lot of people do this,
right? They build up their intuition in
one domain and then they just, they
follow it blindly in another domain not
realizing that the patterns that held in
one world don't apply to the next one.
Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, no question.
Dude I have thoroughly, thoroughly,
thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
I've really enjoyed your works they are Adam Grant: Same.
Tom Bilyeu: incredible. I highly encourage people
to get after it. And man in this time
where i think that
new leaders coming to the surface is
going to be so critical for us
navigating our way to
a positive beautiful end, I'm eternally
grateful for everything that you write
on the subject and helping people
develop self-awareness and the skills um
that they need to lead well amongst
all the other amazing topics that you've
covered, so dude thank you for the way
that you walk through the world. Where
can people find out more about you?
Well first of all Tom, thank you. I've
heard many, many rave reviews of your
passion for self-improvement and I
think I underestimated just how curious
you were even, even having heard that
from lots of mutual friends so it's
really cool to see it in action and soak
it up a little bit.
On your question i would say i guess
adamgrant.net is the place to start.
I host a TED podcast called Work Life
where I try to figure out how we can
make work suck a little bit less and I
do a monthly newsletter called Granted
where I cover some of my favorite new
insights about work in psychology and
would love to see people in either those
places or hear them or have them hear me
if they're interested.
I love it man. All right everybody if you
haven't already dived into his world you
will be richly rewarded and speaking of
rich rewards if you haven't already
subscribed be sure to do so and until
next time my friends be legendary, take
care.
The great irony is the way you build
great companies
is with an infinite mindset. The way you
build great companies is by prioritizing
people before profit. The way you build
great companies is will before resources,
both things important but there has to
be this general leaning.