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Episode: Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of self-correction

Author: TED
Duration: 00:46:16

Episode Shownotes

Malcolm Gladwell joins Adam for a lively discussion and debate, recorded live at the Authors@Wharton series. More than 20 years after releasing his blockbuster book The Tipping Point, Malcolm has decided to rethink his first famous ideas by writing his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. He and Adam

riff on the value of acknowledging our past mistakes, strategies for coping with failure and ways to avoid the traps of homogeneous cultures. They also spar about how to change college admissions and when to stop reading a book.Available transcripts for ReThinking can be found at go.ted.com/RWAGscripts

Summary

In this episode of 'WorkLife with Adam Grant,' Malcolm Gladwell discusses the significance of self-correction and the necessity of admitting past mistakes in organizational cultures. He revisits his seminal work, 'The Tipping Point,' to explore its relevance in light of contemporary issues like COVID-19 and the opioid crisis. The conversation emphasizes the dangers of cultural conformity and the importance of diversity in preventing stagnation and fostering growth. Gladwell highlights the role of self-sabotage, the value of character-building experiences, and the need for open-mindedness and continuous feedback in personal and organizational development.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of self-correction) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_01
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00:01:58 Speaker_01
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00:02:03 Speaker_02
Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective.

00:02:12 Speaker_02
I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. You've asked for more spirited conversations with Malcolm Gladwell, so we've answered.

00:02:27 Speaker_02
I hosted him for a live Authors at Wharton event. The occasion was his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. It's a rethinking of his first big idea a quarter century later.

00:02:38 Speaker_04
I have never understood why people perceive changing your mind as being costly.

00:02:42 Speaker_02
And it sparked big questions for me about building healthy cultures, fixing college admissions, and handling mistakes and failures.

00:02:50 Speaker_04
The fastest way to make something go away is just to say it was wrong. Just the easiest strategy in the world. What's wrong?

00:02:57 Speaker_02
We also riff on topics ranging from when to stop reading a book to how to stop basing self-esteem on success. You're in for a treat. Malcolm Gladwell, we meet again. Hi, Adam. I have some beef with you. Okay, let's go.

00:03:14 Speaker_02
A lot of it, which is why I'm very glad that you're back again to do this. Yeah. You know, this is a very strange friendship we have. I actually think we've had more interaction arguing in front of an audience than we have in all other venues.

00:03:25 Speaker_04
Yeah, I have actually a theory about why you're this way, which I... Wait, you're blaming me? Yeah, it's all about you. I'm not going to share it now because it's inappropriate, but I'll tell you later about what my explanation is.

00:03:38 Speaker_02
I did get some interesting feedback recently. My favorite one was, I just love listening to the two of you fuss and pick at each other. Okay. I've never heard those words used endearingly before, but thank you.

00:03:51 Speaker_02
And then the theme was that people like it better when I interview you than when you interview me.

00:03:57 Speaker_04
Our interactions tend to be pretty symmetrical. So it's not really about they like it better when I talk the most. What they're really saying is they like it better when you initiate the topics.

00:04:06 Speaker_04
Maybe I just bring up boring things and you bring up interesting things.

00:04:10 Speaker_02
Well, that's very sweet of you to say. And it does track with one of my hypotheses, which was like, wait a minute. So are they saying I'm a better journalist than you are? Because they want me to be asking the questions.

00:04:22 Speaker_02
And then I thought, no, it means you're a more interesting thinker than I am. No. Because the answers that you give. Stop, stop.

00:04:35 Speaker_02
So I don't know what to do with any of that, so I'm just going to leave it there, but we are going to disagree on a lot of things tonight. Okay. I don't think there's anyone I have more fun disagreeing with. Okay.

00:04:44 Speaker_04
It's a lot of buildup, Adam.

00:04:45 Speaker_02
Well, let me first just say, you changed my mind about something with the new book. Okay. I was a fervent disbeliever in nonfiction sequels. Oh. Hated the idea. Yeah. You're just going to end up

00:05:00 Speaker_02
being the musician that is perpetually stuck singing your first great hit over and over again. And you made me rethink that. Tell me why you were motivated to do this.

00:05:12 Speaker_04
It was the 25th anniversary of Tipping Point, and my publisher came to me and said, you should just clean it up, modernize it, reissue it. And I got halfway into it and realized I didn't want to do that, and so I just ended up rewriting it.

00:05:28 Speaker_02
As one does.

00:05:29 Speaker_04
25 years is an extraordinarily long period of time. There were things about COVID and particularly the opioid crisis that I really, really, really wanted to talk about. I couldn't see a way to

00:05:42 Speaker_04
fit those two things in a simple revise of the original book.

00:05:45 Speaker_02
I felt like, in some ways, it was a harder book to write than the original, because the original, no one thought about epidemics really at all. Except if you weren't an epidemiologist, you didn't know anything about epidemiology.

00:05:57 Speaker_02
And now, we've been through a pandemic, people are pretty familiar with this language, and so I felt like your degree of difficulty went up quite a bit to write this one.

00:06:03 Speaker_04
Well, the task of the first book was to convince people of the appropriateness of thinking about ideas as epidemics, as viruses. In this book, we've all accepted that, so now the task is to kind of convince people that there is more to be said.

00:06:17 Speaker_04
When I wrote the first one, I was covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, and I was spending all this time with epidemiologists. They're a very special breed, and you need to know this because whenever there is a

00:06:28 Speaker_04
epidemic, they surface and they're in the news. And so I remember once I was having lunch with some guy from CDC. He was a big epidemiologist. And we're in a restaurant that has a salad bar.

00:06:44 Speaker_04
And one of the things in the salad bar is coleslaw with lots of mayonnaise. And the salad bar was configured such that the sun was streaming in the window and landing directly on the mayonnaise.

00:06:57 Speaker_04
Now, as any epidemiologist will happily tell you, that's a sure way to get food poisoning. Salmonella, here we come. Throughout the entire lunch, I just see him going like this. He just can't take his eyes off. the sun falling on the coleslaw, right?

00:07:10 Speaker_04
And the point is those guys are laser focused on the possibility of something going badly wrong. They will almost always err on the side of imagining things will be worse than they were, which is exactly what you want. in an epidemiologist, right?

00:07:28 Speaker_04
The epidemiologist who denies that anything bad is going to happen is useless. They're just like us. They're in denial, right? You want someone who's on the other side of denial.

00:07:36 Speaker_02
Okay, so it sounds like, by your theory, a good epidemiologist is a defensive pessimist, not a strategic optimist.

00:07:43 Speaker_04
Yes, I like that. I wish I knew more about what this turns in. Well, I was going to tell you. Yes, that's right. But no, that sounds right. Yeah, that sounds right.

00:07:52 Speaker_02
So tell me where else this applies then. So strategic optimists studying for a big test, about a week beforehand, they will imagine themselves acing the test.

00:08:03 Speaker_02
And then that positive image of the future is energizing, they study really hard, they do great. Defensive pessimists have a very different emotional experience. This is Julie Norum's research.

00:08:11 Speaker_02
What they do is about a week beforehand, they wake up in a cold sweat, having just had a nightmare that not only did they fail the exam, they did so bad that their professor took away points on all their previous exams, because there's no way they could have earned it.

00:08:24 Speaker_02
And that anxiety motivates them to study really hard, and they do just as well as the strategic optimists, unless you put them in a good mood. If you want to sabotage a defensive pessimist, you make them happy and then they get complacent.

00:08:36 Speaker_02
They don't study hard and they don't have the fear that kicks them into gear.

00:08:40 Speaker_04
You're the defensive pessimist.

00:08:41 Speaker_02
Sometimes.

00:08:42 Speaker_04
I would have thought you were like all the way down the line. You're the one who, when we were backstage just now, someone asked you the question of how did your early experiences as a competitive diver shape you?

00:08:52 Speaker_04
And you said, well, when I was diving as a kid, my coach would grade me on the scale of one to 10 after every dive. And I realized that's the way to live your life. And I was like, wait, what? That sounds, that is nuts.

00:09:03 Speaker_04
That is not even close to what I said. What did you say? Not even close. You said that's a good model for your career or something.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
I said it's a helpful skill for your career, yes. And you said there's too little grading. Yes, far too little. If you only get evaluated once a quarter, that is a terrifying event full of judgment.

00:09:22 Speaker_04
And Shelby, you're talking about being evaluated multiple times over the course. How many dives would you do in a typical diving practice? 50? You get 50 evaluations.

00:09:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, and none of them, like no individual score hurts, and you know exactly where you stand. And then you can talk about how to move closer to your target score.

00:09:38 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:09:38 Speaker_02
I do this every time I do anything that matters to me. Like, after we get off stage, I will ask anybody who's nearby and trustworthy, give us a zero to 10. And then what can we do to get closer to 10?

00:09:48 Speaker_02
The people who work with me closely are going to offer it without even me asking, because they know I want it. Really?

00:09:54 Speaker_03
Yeah. What a way to live your life. Do you... Wait, Malcolm, hold on a second. Are you a cook?

00:10:01 Speaker_02
No. Definitely not.

00:10:02 Speaker_04
Well, that's why you're not a cook. Because... You can't be a cook and have somebody giving you a grade of one to 10 after every meal. That's debilitating.

00:10:11 Speaker_02
Not at all.

00:10:12 Speaker_04
It's motivating because... I'm a cook. I come home, I'm exhausted. My partner does not cook. So it's up to me to cook the meal. So I cook the meal. I actually enjoy doing it. The last thing I want is feedback on it once it's finished.

00:10:25 Speaker_04
I'm like, I'm sorry, I did this. It took me an hour. That's your prize right there.

00:10:31 Speaker_02
Then you have no aspirations of getting better as a cook, do you?

00:10:34 Speaker_04
No, because I, no, that's not true. I have gotten a lot better because privately I critique myself, but I think- Oh, and you trust that judge? I do trust that judge. So this is a difference between my family culture and your family culture.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
Is it?

00:10:50 Speaker_04
Yeah, it is. So in my family culture, father is Englishman, mother is Jamaican, you did not give feedback on stuff like that. You were polite to a fault. If you had a problem with it, you kept it to yourself.

00:11:06 Speaker_04
This is a version of this thing that I really love, the difference between sender and receiver cultures. Right? The Japanese are a receiver culture. It is up to the person listening to make sense of what the speaker is saying.

00:11:20 Speaker_04
America is a sender culture. If there's a misunderstanding, it's the fault of the person speaking. Right? I'm not sender. I'm receiver. I say it, you figure it out. Right? And I'm talking about in the family context.

00:11:32 Speaker_04
If I extend that to, I make dinner, you say it's lovely. That's, those are the rules.

00:11:40 Speaker_02
I expect the people who care about me to be honest with me.

00:11:43 Speaker_04
I think you made us tougher stuff than I am.

00:11:45 Speaker_02
I don't think that's true. I just, this is partially a defensive pessimism thing. I know that people are making those judgments privately. And so I'd rather know what's in their head than have it be a secret. Oh, I see, okay.

00:11:57 Speaker_02
Are you saying, when you sent me the early draft of Revenge of the Tipping Point and you asked for comments, you didn't want me to give a zero to 10 along with the notes?

00:12:05 Speaker_04
I wanted you to be as critical as possible, but that's because I sent it to you early in the process. Writers always make the mistake of sending something out too late.

00:12:16 Speaker_04
The mistake people make is they think it's embarrassing to show their work when it is unformed, but in fact, that's the only time to show your work, because how else are you going to form it?

00:12:26 Speaker_04
We do this thing with my podcast, which I really love, which is I do a first draft of revisionist history, and then we do the table read, and we bring in as many people as we can, and it's supposed to be early, and they just let loose.

00:12:40 Speaker_04
You know, I go, what do you think? Like, tell me, like, you know, because I think people think that they don't have standing to weigh in on someone's writing if they are not themselves an experienced writer. But that is the exact opposite of the truth.

00:12:55 Speaker_04
You actually want someone who's not in your little world to be giving you feedback about that.

00:13:01 Speaker_02
Disappointed to find we agree on that.

00:13:03 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:13:04 Speaker_02
They will often give you solutions that are not right for your problem. And so I find that sometimes they jump too quickly to here's the thing you need to do to fix this. Why are you giving that suggestion?

00:13:16 Speaker_02
Oh, that's the problem you're trying to solve. I was too close to it to see the problem, but you're too far from it to see the right solution for me.

00:13:23 Speaker_02
I actually find the process of tell me what the holes are, point out the flaws, and then I want to fix them on my own to be much more helpful than solve it for me.

00:13:31 Speaker_04
No, I agree with that.

00:13:32 Speaker_02
So this goes to what I think is the meta theme of the Revenge of the Tipping Point, which is self-correction.

00:13:38 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:13:39 Speaker_02
We live in a world that does not do enough of it, where people are afraid of it, where people base their entire professional careers on avoiding it. Why are you so enthusiastic about admitting that you're wrong?

00:13:51 Speaker_04
My father, sort of intellectually the most important figure in my life, he died a couple years ago, and I wrote in his obit He was an expert on three things, mathematics, the Bible, and gardening. And on everything else, he was open to correction.

00:14:06 Speaker_04
Even on those three things, actually, he was more than open, more than willing to be. He sort of modeled a way of being in the world that, to me as a kid, was incredibly exciting.

00:14:17 Speaker_04
I just love the fact that you really never knew where he was going to land on a, Question. I have never understood why people perceive changing your mind as being costly.

00:14:29 Speaker_02
They're afraid of getting judged as stupid or there's a risk of being seen as a hypocrite. How dare you change your mind? You're not who I thought you were.

00:14:38 Speaker_04
I came to Penn doing a podcast episode on what I got wrong about crime in the original Tipping Point.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
This is the broken window and stop and frisk episode, yes.

00:14:49 Speaker_04
In my original book, The Tipping Point, I had a chapter that it opened with this very famous story from New York in the early 1980s. It was a case involving a guy named Bernie Goetz.

00:15:00 Speaker_04
And this is when New York is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. It's just a hellhole. And this is the absolute nadir of New York's fortunes. It was a very, very famous case where teenagers, young African-American,

00:15:14 Speaker_04
come up to a guy named Bernie Getz on the subway, and they ask him for money. And Bernie Getz pulls out a gun, shoots them. And one of the kids is down on the ground, shoots him, and paralyzes him for life. It's this huge story.

00:15:28 Speaker_04
He becomes this tabloid hero and a symbol for New Yorkers of like, we've had enough. We can't take the crime anymore. So I open with this story of Bernie Getz.

00:15:39 Speaker_04
My point, the point of the chapter is, in order to understand why Bernie Goetz would do this, you have to understand the effect of the environment of New York in those years on the people who live there, right?

00:15:49 Speaker_04
I come to Penn and I'm meeting up with a woman named Eugenia South, who's an ER doc in the hospital, just across the way. And she had a bunch of folks who she was going to have me meet with, and then we're going to go out around.

00:16:00 Speaker_04
Anyway, at lunch, she said, I read your chapter. And there's something that just struck me about it.

00:16:07 Speaker_04
And that is that when you write that chapter about the Bernie Getz case, you spend pages talking about Bernie Getz and why he thought the way he thought. And you have two sentences on the three kids who confronted him. And I was like, really?

00:16:22 Speaker_04
I went back, I was like, oh my God, I did. She said, what was fascinating to her and problematic about the chapter was that here I had an encounter between two sets of people. And I thought that,

00:16:34 Speaker_04
The white guy who was, quote unquote, the victim, although he was actually the assailant, was the interesting one. And the black kids, two sentences. I just kind of wrote them off and didn't return to them again.

00:16:45 Speaker_04
And she was like, that's why you got it wrong, right? That's what she was saying. You got it wrong because you bought into a narrative that said that the white people of New York were the victims of what was happening in those years.

00:16:59 Speaker_04
Black kids were just stand-ins for criminals. I was like, Jesus. My first thought was, whoa, that is about as devastating a criticism as anyone has ever made of something, particularly since I am half Jamaican.

00:17:12 Speaker_04
I wouldn't have thought I would have fallen into that trap, but I did, right? Now, it never occurred to me, though, that that criticism was, she wasn't saying that I was stupid. Right?

00:17:26 Speaker_04
She was saying that you were blinded by something when you wrote that book. And she was also saying it to me 25 years later. And the test of whether I was open or intelligent or whatever was in how I responded to her, not in what I wrote 25 years ago.

00:17:43 Speaker_04
Right? I never thought I was being personally threatened by that. I've thought about it a million times. I mean, it's, I want to find every copy of the tipping point out there and just rip out that chapter. I mean, it's mortifying, but it doesn't,

00:17:56 Speaker_04
diminish me as a person. That's it, that when I was 36 years old, I like fundamentally misunderstood. So that's just the way I thought about it. She's offering me an opportunity to redeem myself by pointing out what I did wrong.

00:18:10 Speaker_02
There's a difference between saying, okay, I want to learn from this, and not make this kind of mistake again, and even correct the past, and saying, you know what? You know what would be more fun than that?

00:18:20 Speaker_02
Let me just broadcast some of my biggest failures and dumbest mistakes to the world.

00:18:25 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:18:26 Speaker_02
You go to unusual lengths to make your embarrassments public.

00:18:30 Speaker_04
You did it with the monk debate? Oh my God, yeah. There's a thing in Toronto called the monk debate. It's a big deal in Canada. They bring in people and they broadcast it all over. You debate some question. I came in about a year and a half ago.

00:18:44 Speaker_04
Not only did my side lose by an absolutely devastating margin, but I was So terrible that afterwards, the amount of vitriol that was directed my way online was unprecedented.

00:18:57 Speaker_04
And so I did a podcast, episode of my podcast, basically saying I was terrible. And then I went to debate school in Brooklyn, in some high school, and they taught me how to be a better debater. If it's out there,

00:19:09 Speaker_04
that you were embarrassing and terrible, the best thing to do is just embrace it and say, own it, and then just say, wow, I was bad and here's how I'm trying to get better. You can't run away from it.

00:19:19 Speaker_02
I agree in principle. I think in practice, I still thought it was extremely courageous of you to do that because you also made that failure visible to a lot of people who didn't know how bad you were.

00:19:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, there's that, but it's fine. The audience of these things is not that large. There's 330 million people in this country. How many listen to a podcast? It's like this many. It's fine.

00:19:40 Speaker_04
The other thing that people forget when they screw up and then they apologize for it is you're the only one who remembers it. Everyone else just moves on with their life. This is a good question for a psychologist.

00:19:50 Speaker_04
And that is, what is the effect of an apology on the listener's memory of the event?

00:19:56 Speaker_04
And I think that when someone does something wrong and apologizes, what that does is implicitly give the listener the permission to file that away, to remove it from everyday consideration.

00:20:11 Speaker_02
I think, though, there's a wrinkle, which is Peter Kim's research suggests that apologies are good for failures of competence, but not for failures of character. You can admit that you didn't know what you were doing, which is what you did.

00:20:23 Speaker_02
Not so helpful to say, you know what, you're right, I lacked integrity. Or, you're right, I didn't care about you at all. Because people doubt that your character is gonna change.

00:20:33 Speaker_04
Memo to self, in the future, stay away from saying I was failure of character.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
I'm a big fan of the, what's the maxim, the best apology is changed behavior. Let's shift gears a little bit. I want to ask you about something in the book that blew my mind. And it's an afterthought. Yeah. But it could have been a whole book.

00:20:52 Speaker_02
I was so curious about it. Tell me about what you learned about punks and goths.

00:20:56 Speaker_04
I ran across this book or these papers that had been written by these two sociologists, Anna Muller and Seth Arberton. They were people who were studying teen suicide.

00:21:07 Speaker_04
Someone had called them up once out of the blue and said, Oh, you guys study teen suicide. You've got to come to my town. They go there and they discover it's this perfect upper middle class enclave. It is gorgeous. It is

00:21:20 Speaker_04
Got the best high school in the state. Everyone loves each other. It's a close-knit community. And they discovered that this high school, at the center of this community, had been in the grip of a suicide epidemic for 10 years or more.

00:21:33 Speaker_04
And they couldn't figure out how to stop it. And their conclusion was that one of the problems that led to this suicide epidemic was that the high school and the town was a monoculture.

00:21:47 Speaker_04
that it was a school where there was only one social group that had any kind of standing. And that social group was, I'm a great athlete, I'm an incredible student, I'm super attractive, and I'm gonna go to Penn when I graduate, right?

00:22:01 Speaker_04
And that if you didn't fall into that very, very narrow definition of success, you were a failure, right? So you set up this situation, and not only that, because it's a monoculture, when one person in that realm, tragically, takes their own life.

00:22:21 Speaker_04
It can race to the whole community. There's no natural kind of barrier. Anyway, so I'm talking to Seth Arberton, one of the two researchers, and we were comparing our own high school experiences. Because in my high school, there wasn't one social group.

00:22:33 Speaker_04
There were multiple social groups. And the effect of that was that everyone who came to the high school could find their own place, right?

00:22:42 Speaker_04
So you had the goths and the punks and the jocks and the geeks and the what have you, like the classic 50s high school typology where it doesn't matter how weird or dysfunctional you are, there's a home for you.

00:22:55 Speaker_04
And that was true of my high school, right? And I suspect it was true of most people's high schools. And I had always thought of this as a, problem with my high school.

00:23:06 Speaker_04
My high school was so resolutely non-achieving that 20 people out of my graduating class went to college every year. But I didn't realize the extent to which having multiple different kind of pathways for students would be protective.

00:23:19 Speaker_04
If I asked you off the top of your head, what kind of community or high school would be prone to a suicide epidemic, you would say, oh, it's probably a place where the kids feel isolated and anonymous, where there's no strong sense of community, where there's no support.

00:23:34 Speaker_04
And their point was, this high school was the opposite of that. It had every support in the world, and that's what made it so problematic. It could have been a whole book. This is the kind of be careful what you wish for paradox.

00:23:48 Speaker_04
I think parents moved to that community because they thought they were leaving these kinds of social problems behind and instead they created an even bigger one.

00:23:58 Speaker_02
I thought it was shocking also because we think about building a strong culture. And the idea is we should have no factions, no fault lines. We want everybody to buy into the same values and the same interests.

00:24:08 Speaker_02
And you're saying, wait a minute, there is a dark side to that kind of uniformity.

00:24:11 Speaker_04
Some really interesting questions come out of that. One is, is this kind of diversity that we're talking about Is it specific to high schools? Or are we talking about something that will be true of all organizations?

00:24:24 Speaker_04
Do you want your army battalion to have multiple factions who are, I don't know. I mean, I don't know the answer to that. It's clear to me that it's very, very problematic to have a monoculture

00:24:38 Speaker_04
at a time when kids, adolescents are trying to find their place in the world and come to develop some sense of self.

00:24:45 Speaker_02
I think that pattern holds at different stages of life. I'm thinking of a Barron and Hannan study of biotech startups. Hundreds of biotech startups where you look at the cultural blueprint that the founder had.

00:24:55 Speaker_02
And some of the founders are hiring on skills. They want to know, can you do the job today? Others are looking for star potential. Are you going to be a genius tomorrow? And then there's some that put culture fit above everything else.

00:25:05 Speaker_02
And it turns out if founders put culture fit first, their startups are dramatically less likely to fail and significantly less likely. Culture fit wins in terms of startups surviving and then going public.

00:25:17 Speaker_02
But then after they IPO, the culture fit firms grow at slower rates. And I think what's happening there is early on when you have a really clear mission, it's very helpful to have a bunch of people who are bought into that.

00:25:28 Speaker_02
But then once you become a bigger organization, you end up too homogeneous and you have a lot of group think and it becomes harder to change and innovate.

00:25:35 Speaker_04
Yeah, I come back to this idea a lot in the book and some part of the book, trying to understand what we mean by diversity. Diversity is a matter of numbers. It's not just about having people who are different within an ecosystem or a community.

00:25:49 Speaker_04
It's about having the people who are different in sufficient numbers such that they can be themselves and can change the culture of the group that they're belonging to. That notion that diversity is really just about

00:26:03 Speaker_04
numbers about people being present in critical mass is the one idea about diversity that is so routinely ignored and suppressed.

00:26:13 Speaker_04
People want to make it about symbolic representation, and symbolic representation is almost as bad as no representation at all. One thing I've changed my mind about is

00:26:22 Speaker_04
Before writing the book, I was deeply suspicious of the use of quotas in any context. Now I'm totally down with quotas. Fine. Deal with it. So I don't understand why we had this aversion to just saying, look,

00:26:37 Speaker_04
There is a difference between having one woman on a corporate board and having three. There is a difference between having one non-white person in a community and having five.

00:26:48 Speaker_02
I want to talk about this in the context of college admissions, a topic that you've never ranted about before. and have no controversial views on.

00:26:55 Speaker_02
Before we do that, though, there's a quick aside on the punks and goths in particular that I thought was so strange, which is you wrote in the book that people who dress like punks and goths are shy.

00:27:06 Speaker_04
Yes. I found this completely counterintuitive, so explain it. If you're shy and you look super approachable, people are going to come up to you and talk to you, and you're going to be really bummed out because you want to be left alone.

00:27:19 Speaker_04
The better strategy if you're shy is to look so outlandish that people avoid you. Right? How is that hard?

00:27:25 Speaker_02
Shyness in psychology is a fear of negative evaluation, especially by strangers. So if you're afraid that people are going to judge you negatively, why would you dress in a way that guarantees that they're going to do that?

00:27:36 Speaker_04
Oh, no, no, because then you take the uncertainty off the table. Right? Like, think about it. I'm dressed like this, and I'm deeply shy. I'm spending my whole time worrying about, what does Adam think of me? Does he think I'm a little geeky?

00:27:51 Speaker_04
But if I came in in full-on goth gear, the uncertainty's gone. I'm like, I know that Adam can't stand the way I look, so we can get on to other things. We can have a real conversation.

00:28:00 Speaker_02
You're saying that there's a group of people who would rather have certain rejection than face the possibility of not being liked.

00:28:06 Speaker_04
I can't believe I am telling a psychologist this fact. Absolutely. That's what people do. I mean, that's just a kind of extension on a classic self-sabotaging strategy, right? That I am so afraid of failing that what do I do? I guarantee my own failure.

00:28:24 Speaker_04
So I take the issue off the table.

00:28:26 Speaker_02
Never thought about that socially, only academically and professionally.

00:28:30 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:28:30 Speaker_02
But you're right, it is an extension of self-handicapping.

00:28:34 Speaker_04
Self-handicapping, but I think it's everywhere. It explains so much of the world. In fact, if I had one, if there was one psychological kind of insight that I wanted to take with me to explain the world, it would be that.

00:28:45 Speaker_02
Let's say you're going into a difficult math test, and you're afraid of finding out that you weren't smart enough to do it. So what do you do? You don't start studying until the night before, or you don't study at all.

00:28:57 Speaker_02
And then if you fail, you can say, well, I didn't try. And you don't have to face the threat to your fundamental aptitude.

00:29:03 Speaker_04
Yeah. Yeah. Which is why I think sports are such a useful thing. to be engaged in as a kid or any kind of activity where some kind of daily investment is necessary, because it is a mechanism for thwarting self-handicap.

00:29:23 Speaker_04
If you're a member of your high school cross-country team, there is a whole ecosystem that is sitting there working to prevent self-handicapping on the part of anyone on the team.

00:29:33 Speaker_04
You go out every day and you run together and there's an ethic that says you don't get wasted the night before a cross-country meet. They really take one self-handicapping possibility after another off the table.

00:29:46 Speaker_02
Well, by that logic then, it sounds like you think we should admit lots of athletes to Penn and other Ivy League schools. Because they've had a chance to go through those character-building experiences.

00:29:56 Speaker_04
Adam, I think athletics are absolutely essential to being a healthy, fulfilled, whatever human being. But I don't think you need to be good at it. If you're a slow miler, you get all the benefits of being a runner that you get if you're a good miler.

00:30:12 Speaker_04
This fixation with Being good at it is just preposterous. No. All the benefits of being an athlete are the discipline, the camaraderie, the balance to your day, the physical fitness, the I could go on and on and on.

00:30:26 Speaker_04
You don't have to be good to have any of those advantages, right?

00:30:30 Speaker_02
Leave it to our favorite Canadian to replace meritocracy with mediocrity.

00:30:34 Speaker_04
No. No, Adam, no, no, no, no, no, because I'm also a merit crack. I'm a merit crack when it comes to the principal function of universities, which is the education and the construction of sophisticated intelligence. It's not about sports.

00:30:50 Speaker_04
If Penn wants to decide that what we really want to be is a feeder for all the professional sporting associations of the world, then fine, then it matters. But that's not what your state of purpose is.

00:31:00 Speaker_04
No, your state of purpose is to produce a class of intellectuals who go out and change the world. So don't get distracted by someone's 1500 meter time.

00:31:08 Speaker_02
I think you have this completely wrong. You have gone on the record saying that the key to success in a career is to be good at things that other people aren't.

00:31:17 Speaker_04
Well.

00:31:17 Speaker_02
Right?

00:31:19 Speaker_04
Did you not just say this? You put in just. At the 92nd Street Y. In reflecting on my career, yes, it was my observation in the various stages of my career that one should always zig when other people are zagging.

00:31:35 Speaker_02
I'll use my own personal example. The fact that I got halfway decent at springboard diving. was not a sign of anything athletic.

00:31:42 Speaker_02
I think it was an early sign that I had, I guess, a little bit of initiative and resourcefulness when I wanted to be an athlete, to try enough sports to find one that I actually could stand out at, and then whatever grit it took to get good at that sport.

00:31:56 Speaker_02
And those are qualities we want.

00:31:57 Speaker_04
I know, but Adam, you can learn the exact same qualities of grit and resourcefulness and discipline and still not be good. I changed my mind on this. When I was in high school, I was a very, very good runner.

00:32:09 Speaker_02
Very good. National champion. I was a national champion.

00:32:11 Speaker_04
And I was a running snob. And I would look down my nose at anyone who wasn't super fast, and I would say, why would they even bother? Then I quit running for a long time. And then in my 50s, I joined up with a running group again.

00:32:23 Speaker_04
And now I was no longer national caliber. Now I was mediocre. And I realized the beauty of mediocrity then. I realized running was way more fun. I realized I had a connection with everyone else that I never had when I was super good.

00:32:41 Speaker_04
And I also realized that every positive ancillary benefit from being an athlete, I still got, even though I was mediocre. The universe of people who are super good is this small, right? Why would we get obsessed with this few,

00:32:59 Speaker_04
this like the four people who are amazing and neglect the 1,000 who can be pretty good and get all the same benefits.

00:33:06 Speaker_02
I'm not saying we should neglect them. I'm just saying that one of the better predictors of future behavior is past behavior.

00:33:12 Speaker_04
Yeah, but no, so when it comes to university admissions, do I think it should be a checkmark in your favor if when you apply to an elite school, you demonstrate that you have participated in some kind of athletic activity that requires discipline.

00:33:28 Speaker_04
Yeah, absolutely, 100%. Does that mean you should deserve a break in admissions? No, and they should be blinded to your times.

00:33:39 Speaker_02
Whoa, hold on. Wait a minute. If you take this outside of the sports domain, this is absurd. Just think for a second about, you put down on your college application, I play the saxophone, but you can't actually play a song.

00:33:52 Speaker_04
It's more complicated with the saxophone. I'm sure that the saxophone gives me the kind of benefits I'm interested in here. Let's put saxophone aside. You don't give breaks at admissions to people in the marching band.

00:34:04 Speaker_02
Not breaks, but we want to count their excellence as a signal.

00:34:07 Speaker_04
Yes, and I do too, but you don't have to be Louis Armstrong to get into Penn if you play the trumpet.

00:34:13 Speaker_02
No, but we also don't want you to be doing the saxophone equivalent of jogging when other people are running. One beef I have with your books is a set. Yeah.

00:34:23 Speaker_02
Is I think that sometimes you trick people into thinking that success is going to come more easily than it does. Okay. So you wrote a whole book about how you can think without even thinking. Yeah, but that's not what the book was about. You know that.

00:34:35 Speaker_02
Of course not. Of course not, but that's part of the hook. The tipping point, like all you need to do is get to that magic third and then Voila, things will change.

00:34:44 Speaker_02
Even with 10,000 hours in Outliers, which I know you have self-corrected a number of times, it's like, okay, if I put in that critical mass, my work is done, and then I can coast as an expert.

00:34:54 Speaker_02
Do you ever worry that people are taking the wrong message from those highline conclusions?

00:35:00 Speaker_04
Well, first of all, I would point out that in all those cases, you're just talking about a title or about a, the discussion, I think, is a little more nuanced than that. I don't think as a writer you,

00:35:11 Speaker_04
You can control how people make sense of your work, and nor should you try. It's not our job. These kinds of books are intended to be kind of conversation starters, to prompt people to think about their world in different ways.

00:35:24 Speaker_04
If I were to gather together all of the things that people have told me about my books over the years,

00:35:31 Speaker_04
First of all, the range of things they have said, the range of meanings they've extracted from my books is way, way, way, way wider than I would ever have imagined.

00:35:40 Speaker_04
And many of them were things that I did not think that meaning was explicitly in the book itself. They were taking it and applying it in their own way to their own life, and that is beautiful. And I never would like to stand in the way of that.

00:35:55 Speaker_02
So it's on the receiver now, not the sender.

00:35:58 Speaker_04
I believe in receiver cultures.

00:35:59 Speaker_02
I think if somebody has a reaction to my book that's different from what I intended, then I want to learn from that reaction and communicate more clearly next time.

00:36:07 Speaker_04
I guess I object to the notion that someone who writes a book has a very, very narrow prescription. And if people don't accept that prescription, they failed.

00:36:15 Speaker_02
You've been doing some fun magic wand experiments on revisionist history. I wanted to give you a magic wand in a few areas and ask what you would do with them. You're put in charge of the 2028 Olympics. What's the biggest change you're going to make?

00:36:28 Speaker_02
The best proposal I've seen so far is Dan Pink, who said we should make relays multi-age or multi-age range. So every relay should have a teenager, a 20 or 30-something, a 40 or 50-something, and one person over 60. That's a great idea.

00:36:43 Speaker_02
I thought that was genius.

00:36:44 Speaker_04
I think it's time to break up the Olympics. I think it's too much stuff going on at once. and we should kind of cut it in half. And half should be on one summer, the other half the other summer.

00:36:56 Speaker_02
I actually think it's a really good idea because after going to Paris, I thought everyone should go to the Olympics and they should happen every year.

00:37:02 Speaker_02
Because it's the only place I've gone where people are genuinely rooting for athletes regardless of what country they belong to. If you get to do a constitutional amendment, what would you pick?

00:37:12 Speaker_04
You know my favorite magic wand thing? This is not mine. This is my friend, Lily, has this idea.

00:37:17 Speaker_04
If there's one thing you could do that you think would have the biggest positive effect on the way we live our lives, she said, everyone in the world puts their name in a hat, and you pull out a new name, and you have to live in that person's house for a year.

00:37:34 Speaker_04
Fantastic. It's fantastic. So you've no idea where you gonna end up and you got to do it for a year We just scramble the whole system for a year. I mean obviously that would mess everything up but Assuming you could do this.

00:37:49 Speaker_04
Don't you think that'd be an incredibly useful exercise? Everyone gets ripped out of their comfort zone for like a year

00:37:58 Speaker_02
What I like about it is that it forces you to imagine a real-life version of the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance.

00:38:04 Speaker_02
So, those who aren't Rawls fans, the test of how just a society is was, would you accept a place in it if you didn't know what that place was? And it turns out, by that standard, they really want to live in Sweden. not so much the US.

00:38:19 Speaker_02
And the idea that you could be dropped into anybody's life, I think, makes the staggering inequities that we have in this country a little bit harder to stomach.

00:38:28 Speaker_04
One of the weird things that I've always thought about privileged people, rich people, is the asymmetry of complaint.

00:38:36 Speaker_04
You would think, wouldn't you, intuitively, that the biggest complainers in society would be those on the bottom, and the people who complain the least would be those on the top.

00:38:48 Speaker_04
You would think that as people acquire wealth and privilege, they should whine less. If you have a billion dollars, you should be completely indifferent to your tax rate. You've got a billion dollars. Why do you care what your taxes are?

00:39:02 Speaker_04
If you've got a billion dollars, why do you care if someone wants to build an apartment building next to your house? Just buy another house. You have a billion dollars. But this is not what happens. It's the reverse.

00:39:14 Speaker_04
It strikes me people on the bottom don't complain that much at all. And all of the complaining takes place at the top. And the more people, the closer people get to the top, the more they complain.

00:39:26 Speaker_04
I've never in my life, I remember once reading about this English hedge fund guy. who, super rich, and if he lived in England more than half the year, he would have to pay English taxes.

00:39:40 Speaker_04
So he went and established his place of permanent residence in one of those little islands off the Scottish coast.

00:39:48 Speaker_04
He was so upset about the prospect of giving up some of his money that he left his family behind in London and went to live 160 whatever days a year in the Shetland Islands or something like that.

00:40:01 Speaker_04
I just thought, that is the stupidest man I've ever met in my entire life. He is rich and has forgotten that fact, and is behaving as if he has no money at all, and who has organized his entire life around a complaint, right?

00:40:18 Speaker_04
My point is that making everyone live someone else for a year would, I think, solve the asymmetry of complaint problem. Can't they just enjoy the fact that they're rich? You should ask them.

00:40:28 Speaker_02
I should. That is a book I would enjoy seeing you write.

00:40:36 Speaker_01
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00:40:49 Speaker_01
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00:41:06 Speaker_02
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00:41:19 Speaker_02
Connect to an audience of 36 million, unlock growth opportunities, and expand your reach with first-party audiences from Intuit SMB Media Labs. Learn more at medialabs.intuit.com. Let's take a few of our audience questions here.

00:41:38 Speaker_02
One question is, have you ever thought about writing fiction?

00:41:41 Speaker_04
Yes. I tried to write a screenplay once, and it was a disaster. But I enjoyed it. And I would like to write a spy thriller, because that's all I read.

00:41:50 Speaker_02
OK. On spy thrillers, I heard you say once that sometimes you stop reading before the end. Oh, all the time. What is wrong with, what, the whole point of the thriller is to find out the twist at the end.

00:42:05 Speaker_04
No, no, no, no, no. Yes. The whole point of the thriller.

00:42:08 Speaker_02
Malcolm, I don't think you understand the point of a thriller.

00:42:11 Speaker_04
No, no, no, Adam, here's where you're wrong. The whole point of a thriller is to delight in the little act of magic that the writer creates at the end of the book, where they've set up a puzzle and they resolve it, right?

00:42:28 Speaker_04
And the reason you read your 300 pages to get to the end is you want to participate in that magical moment. If you suspect that the magic is not going to happen, there is only one rational response, and that's to bail. Get off the train.

00:42:46 Speaker_04
The train is going to crash. Get off the train. could not disagree more strongly. You finish things even though you think it's going to be a disaster.

00:42:54 Speaker_02
No, I get off the train on page 20. I don't read 295 pages and then say, well, now I've realized.

00:43:00 Speaker_04
No, I'm much more hopeful than you. Also, I suspend.

00:43:03 Speaker_02
But wait, why would you trust the author for 295 pages and then say, you lost me. I'm not going to do the last five.

00:43:10 Speaker_04
No, because the hard thing is the last 10 pages. Right? There could still be a possibility that this magic could happen on page 290. It's still real. But there comes a point where you're like, oh, it's not. No, it's not happening.

00:43:24 Speaker_04
Like when they kill off a character who, in your own mind, you're thinking this person is central to the, I've invested deeply in this character. Are you the guy who gets up in the beginning of a movie and walks out?

00:43:38 Speaker_02
Depends how bad the movie is.

00:43:39 Speaker_04
Wow. Adam, you pull the trigger quick on these things.

00:43:45 Speaker_02
I mean, why would you waste your time? There are lots of great books and movies out there. It's an hour. Wait, it's the next hour. Says the person who's complaining that your biggest regret is you don't have enough time.

00:43:55 Speaker_02
All right, a couple other things that I think I have to ask you about here. How does a high achiever disidentify with accomplishment? How do you stop basing your ego and your identity on success?

00:44:06 Speaker_04
That's a really good question and a serious question. There's going to be a point where you're not going to have the same success as you had when you were younger, and you have to figure out how you're going to deal with that.

00:44:18 Speaker_04
Trust me, I think about this all the time. I think it's the central question of getting old. If you belong to multiple social worlds, you have way better defenses against that kind of defeat.

00:44:31 Speaker_04
So if you have a terrible day at work, you still have the choir you belong to, and you still have your kids.

00:44:39 Speaker_04
If you have multiple social worlds, you have multiple ways of getting, and if you have one world and it's just work, when that goes badly, you have nothing.

00:44:46 Speaker_04
I guess one response is I need to develop more worlds as I get older to defend myself against the inevitable dimming of the day.

00:44:55 Speaker_02
I should say that tracks also with the psychology of the self. I think about self-affirmation theory. I think about self-complexity theory.

00:45:02 Speaker_02
A huge body of research showing that if you put all your eggs in one identity basket, if that basket spills over, then it's devastating.

00:45:09 Speaker_02
Whereas if you have a diverse set of values and groups and goals, then it's a lot easier to tolerate a threat to one of them.

00:45:17 Speaker_04
Look at my mother who is 93 years old and is doing fabulously. That's the story of her life.

00:45:26 Speaker_04
She's actually a very interesting case study because she's an identical twin and her twin stayed in Jamaica and had a relatively, a much narrower and less dense social world just by virtue of living in Jamaica.

00:45:42 Speaker_04
My mother constructed for herself in Canada, a very, very dense social world. They're both exactly the same age. They are identical. When I was a kid, I confused them. That's how identical they were. My aunt is suffering from dementia, quite advanced.

00:45:56 Speaker_04
My mother, you know, she, if you talked to her, you'd think you were talking to a 40 year old. My mother had always had multiple social worlds to sustain her. And when one fell away, she added another.

00:46:06 Speaker_04
I don't think it was conscious, but I think she understood on some level that that is what it means to be healthy in the world.

00:46:12 Speaker_02
What's the idea of yours that you've written about that you live by the most and least?

00:46:16 Speaker_04
That I've written about? I once did a podcast episode where I was talking about lists. And I have a list. I only ever drink five liquids. Milk, water, tea, espresso-based beverages, and red wine. That's it. I never deviate.

00:46:35 Speaker_04
And people made a lot of fun of me for this. But I believe this very strongly. Things like that, arbitrary acts of self-discipline, are enormously clarifying. Everyone else, when you go to a restaurant, they're like, oh, what should I have?

00:46:48 Speaker_04
Do you want to have a drink? I don't want to have a drink. I'm like, it's totally clear. If it's 2 o'clock, I'm having a cappuccino. If it's dinner, I'm having a glass of wine. If it's morning, I'm having tea.

00:46:57 Speaker_04
When you stand behind a person in the coffee shop and it's their turn to order and they act like it's never even occurred to them what they might order, this drives me bananas.

00:47:08 Speaker_04
Just take some disorganized corner of your life that you don't have strong feelings about and just create an arbitrary decision structure and stick to it. It's fantastic. I do live my life on that.

00:47:23 Speaker_02
What's something you'll never change your mind about?

00:47:26 Speaker_04
Never change my mind about, I don't know. It's very hard to say. How can I say that? I don't, why would you take a stand like that? No, I don't think there's, I don't think there's anything I wouldn't change my mind. How?

00:47:43 Speaker_02
Well, I don't want to call you formulaic or predictable, but I did write down no as my expected response to that question.

00:47:50 Speaker_04
I will never change my mind about the observation, the belief that my daughters are cute. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, as always.

00:48:07 Speaker_02
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective. And this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar.

00:48:20 Speaker_02
Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton-Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Highlash, Benben Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers.

00:48:39 Speaker_04
I got really fixated at one point with looking at the members of the Caltech track and field team. What is hilarious is- Caltech has a track team? Caltech has a track team.

00:48:53 Speaker_04
In your universe, Ivy League universe, the track team is filled with people who are very, very, very, very good. There's a guy who goes to Harvard right now who is a world-class 5,000 meter runner. My point is, Why is he there?

00:49:10 Speaker_04
Why does Harvard need to have a world-class pilot? I look on his Strava. He's just running all the time.