Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Adam Grant:

It’s easy to be generous. It’s easy to be proactive when things are going well, but whether you have the know-how to stand by your principles when the odds are stacked against you, that’s a skill question more than a will question.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Adam Grant. He’s an organizational psychologist, renowned for his work on motivation and unlocking human potential. For seven consecutive years, he has been ranked as a top professor at Wharton where he teaches MBA and undergraduate courses, but that’s not all, he’s also the host of the hit podcast, Rethinking, an author of five New York Times bestsellers.

His new book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, explores strategies for maximizing our abilities. A friend of this show and of mine, Grant has joined me on Stay Tuned twice and he’s back to share his insights on overcoming obstacles and thriving, regardless of innate talent. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Now, let’s get to your questions.

Q&A

This question comes in an email from Frank. First, it was a $5,000 fine, and a $10,000 fine. What’s going to happen when Trump violates his gag order a third time? Of course, Frank, you’re referring to one of the gag orders that’s in place with respect to the civil fraud trial going on in New York.

In that case, Judge Arthur Engoron has put in place a gag order that, as you point out, Trump has violated now two times. The first time was with respect to a disparaging post he had up on social media. He was fined because he had taken it down from the social media site, but not from the campaign website, a violation of the gag order against disparaging members of the judicial staff.

On a second occasion last week, Donald Trump, during the proceedings, went out and talked to a bank of television cameras and called the judge in the case Judge Engoron, partisan, which is actually allowable under the limited gag order, but then he added saying, “He’s with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.” The judge took that to mean one of the court clerks.

Trump’s lawyers protested and said, “No. He was talking about Michael Cohen,” who was testifying that day against Donald Trump, his former client and boss. What’s remarkable about that is before imposing the $10,000 fine, the judge undertook a limited factual inquiry and what did he do? He put the defendant in the case, Donald Trump himself, up on the witness stand to ask him about the comment, which is highly unusual and more importantly, after Donald Trump himself said no, he was referring not to a judicial clerk, but to Michael Cohen, the judge found him not to be credible.

Now, that’s not good news for Donald Trump given that there’s no jury in this case. On the overall merits of the case, especially if Donald Trump testifies next week, the judge has already found that Donald Trump is not a credible witness. As any lawyer will tell you, that’s not a good position to be in with respect to the judge who’s deciding your fate.

Now, your question is what happens when Donald Trump violates the gag order a third time? I think we’re going to see increasing, ascending fines, first 5,000, then it was 10,000. Maybe, it’ll be 20 or 30 or 40 or something that hurts a little bit more than these piddling fines that have been issued so far. I think also more importantly, the judge is creating a norm that someone who violates a gag order, whether it’s a former president of the United States or anyone else, has to be accountable and has to suffer a consequence.

I think it’s possible, given the norm that’s being established and the track record that’s being set, is that if Donald Trump continues to violate the gag order, again and again and again, the warning that the judge gave a couple of weeks ago could actually come true, some other more serious sanction up to and including perhaps a stint in jail. It’s unlikely. It would be unprecedented, but I think the judge is drawing a line and he should be taken seriously.

This question comes in an email from TJ who writes, “Takeaways from Michael Cohen’s testimony in Trump’s civil fraud trial, is he even a credible witness?” These are great questions. As you know, with great fanfare, Michael Cohen happily testified in recent days in the Trump’s civil fraud trial.

Remember Michael Cohen used to be Donald Trump’s lawyer. He was prosecuted in connection with his participation in the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and prosecuted by my former office, the Southern District of New York, and pled guilty to various crimes including making false statements.

Overall, I think Michael Cohen’s testimony probably helped the Attorney General’s case. He basically corroborated the entire thesis of the case, which is the Donald Trump unlawfully inflated assets when it suited his purposes. He testified among other things, “I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected, and my responsibility, along with Allen Weisselberg, predominantly was to reverse engineer the various different asset classes, increase those assets in order to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us.”

I think an argument could be made that you didn’t need to have Michael Cohen come testify. There are voluminous documents and other bits of testimony that prove the matter as well. As you may recall, the judge has already found, at least on one count, that Trump is liable for inflating his assets in an unlawful manner and that part of what’s being decided at this trial, which is just a bench trial, no jury, remember, is what the penalty should be.

Now, as to your question, is he even a credible witness? Well, certainly he has credibility problems given the testimony he’s given before and given the guilty plea that he entered in the Southern District of New York. It may be that the government lawyers in this case thought that in a proceeding where there’s no jury, it’s a bench trial, maybe the judge would be kinder to the inconsistencies that Michael Cohen presents with, but any witness who has the following exchange, has some problems.

Trump lawyer, Alina Habba, at one point asked in cross-examination, “You have lied under oath numerous times, Mr. Cohen?” and he replied, “That’s correct.” That’s not great testimony for any witness who has lied before and is hoping and expecting the finders of fact will find him credible now and believable now and truthful now.

Another bit of testimony, I think would be problematic for any witness, when he was asked about Trump’s tasking him with doing these things, inflating the numbers, Cohen said in his testimony, he didn’t recall Trump directing him to inflate the numbers on his financial statements. Cohen’s testimony matches what he said otherwise publicly, that is, he wasn’t directly instructed to do these things, but he understood that that’s what Trump wanted.

That may be so, but it opens up a line of questioning and cross-examination and something that would be brought up in the summation as well by Trump’s team. On balance, credibility problems probably helpful to the government. Not essential, but probably okay, I think a little bit because it’s a bench trial rather than a jury trial.

This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user @KristySchnabel, “Hi Preet. What’s your routine for keeping up on everything? It’s a lot. #AskPreet #StayTuned.” Yeah, it’s a lot and it’s never ending. I get my information from a lot of different sources, as I’m sure you do and other people do. I watch cable news channels. I read the New York Times, I read the Washington Post, I read the Wall Street Journal. I read many of the major periodicals on a fairly regular basis.

I also do that thing that’s fallen into some disrepute. I scroll on Twitter and now also threads. I tweet less and I post less and I get into fewer arguments on social media, but I still find it useful to follow lots and lots of different media outlets, traditional and non-traditional, as well as experts in their particular fields, to get a cross-section of news and information and varying points of view.

By the way, I also follow people, people note this from time to time and wonder why I’m following people who they might find odious, I follow people who I don’t always like, who I disagree with, because I like to know what they’re saying. I like to know what their thought process is. I say this all the time on the show, you have to understand what the people you disagree with are thinking and why they’re thinking it and what they’re saying about it, so you can form better opinions of your own and better responses of your own.

Also, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say, one thing I keep up with all of this is a great and excellent team at CAFE, who summarizes the news every week for the Insider podcast and for the Stay Tuned podcast, and for these questions and answers that I do, so a combination. Also, I have friends and associates and colleagues who will send me articles and we have conversations about what we think about things. Sometimes that’s with Joyce Vance, sometimes it’s with other people.

I get my news from a variety of sources, another couple of points to make about how I digest my news. When an initial report comes out about anything, whether it’s an act of war or a shooting or anything else, I try to pause, not post quickly and immediately and ignorantly about it, try to think about what may or may not be true, and wait for other media outlets and responsible media outlets and responsible experts to confirm the news, because often what we hear in the opening moments after something has happened, turns out not to be true, but the indelible image of the wrong thing remains in a lot of people’s brains.

I would urge you, among other things, as you’re trying to catch up on everything and keep up on everything, get your news and information from a variety of sources, get some of your information and news from people you disagree with, and keep your powder dry until you get confirmation of events and actors and everything else. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Adam Grant.

THE INTERVIEW

Most of us want to succeed, whether that’s in school, work or something else like learning a new language. Adam Grant has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers. In his new book, he investigates how exactly people get better at the things they do. Adam Grant, my friend, welcome back to the show.

Adam Grant:

Thank you, Preet. It’s always a treat to be here.

Preet Bharara:

You have another book. You keep writing these books. This one is called Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. There you go again with the Science.

Adam Grant:

That’s my job.

Preet Bharara:

Why always would the science, Adam?

Adam Grant:

Because I like to learn from evidence and I thought as a lawyer. You did too.

Preet Bharara:

I guess, but it’s like a lot of science, which you make very understandable. Why did you, I’m going to ask this question, which will sound obnoxious, but it is not because I know you’ll hit it out of the park.

Adam Grant:

Wait a minute, isn’t this something you were taught not to do in law school? If you are about to do something unpleasant, you don’t want to label the behavior as unpleasant…

Preet Bharara:

No, no, no, no.

Adam Grant:

… because it makes it sound even worse.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you tell me what the science says about this approach because it actually is not obnoxious, particularly, you’ll be delighted that it’s not as bad as it sounded, which I think is a principle you and I have talked about before too.

Adam Grant:

It is. You’re managing my expectations. Okay, go on.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, in a world full of books and articles and treatises about hidden potential, why did you feel the need to write this book and why should everyone read it? You see how easy a question that was?

Adam Grant:

I don’t know. We’ll find out if it was an easy one or not. You shouldn’t prejudge my answer. I felt a need to write this book because there are scores of books out there about people who accomplish great things. I was surprised at how little guidance there is about how any of us can accomplish greater things. I’ve been frustrated for a long time, Preet, that people are encouraged to basically identify their strengths and then develop them.

What that means is we miss out on mastering all kinds of skills that might not have come naturally to us. I am really struck that there’s actually a science of improving at improving, and I wanted to dig into it and figure out what can we learn from that that will not only unlock our own hidden potential, but also help us become better parents, better teachers, better coaches, better mentors in bringing out the best in others.

Preet Bharara:

Because you adhere to science and believe in evidence, obviously, when you’re starting a book like this, you don’t prejudge what your results are going to be. You don’t know in advance necessarily what your conclusions are going to be, but you obviously don’t want to commence on this course unless you know that it’s going to be fruitful. Can you explain how you think about that?

Adam Grant:

Yeah, it’s a really tricky tightrope walk where if you go in without a clear question or some initial hypotheses, you’re just going to be wandering lost…

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Adam Grant:

… but if you go in with too much certainty and conviction, then you might end up…

Preet Bharara:

You’ll ignore some evidence.

Adam Grant:

… inaccurate conclusion. For me, the place, this really started was reading this extraordinary study led by Raj Chetty where he showed that you could predict people’s income in their 20s by knowing how experienced their kindergarten teacher was. You probably know this from the book, but I was stunned, one, that you could do that. I think we all know that kindergarten teachers matter, but the fact that they leave a trace two decades later, was staggering to me.

Preet Bharara:

Could you describe for folks how significant that connection is?

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I mean if you want to quantify it, empirically, if you replace an inexperienced kindergarten teacher with an experienced one, it’s worth over $1,000 per student in annual income in their 20s. If you play that out for a class of 20 students, that adds additional lifetime income of about $320,000.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the reason that this is so?

Adam Grant:

Well, okay, this is where the second surprise is. The first aha was, wow, there’s something that happens in kindergarten that sticks with us and changes us. The second surprise is it’s not what I thought. I thought it was going to be about cognitive skills, that experienced kindergarten teachers would give kids an edge in math and reading and that would allow them to get ahead over time.

It was true that the more experienced kindergarten teachers, did help advance kids in math and reading, but that cognitive advantage evaporated over time. Other kids caught up in the next year or two, where there was a lasting advantage of having an experienced kindergarten teacher was not in cognitive skills but in character skills.

In fourth and eighth grade, kids who had had more experienced kindergarten teachers, were still getting rated as more proactive, more pro-social, more disciplined and more determined. Those character skills, those capacities to put your principles in practice, mattered almost two and a half times as much for your later income as your cognitive skills did.

This is a long way to get back to your original question, but the insight that started me on this path was, wow, it might be true that character skills matter more than cognitive skills when it comes to unlocking our potential.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to come back to character skills and have you talk about what they are and some studies associated with them and you’re writing about it, but before we leave the kindergarten issue, do you have an understanding or does anyone have an understanding as to why the kindergarten age, I guess five or six, is so crucial rather than preschool or first grade or second grade?

Adam Grant:

That’s a fascinating question. I don’t know, is the short answer. The longer answer is, I’m not convinced that kindergarten is the critical period. We might be able to see similar effects.

Preet Bharara:

It’s the one for which there’s an experiment.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

It’s where the data exists. Yeah.

Adam Grant:

One thing I can say is there’s some evidence in western cultures in the US, for example, that kids start to crystallize their sense of identity between ages 8 and 10. When it comes to really instilling a sense of self that you’re somebody who’s going to take initiative, that you want to help others, that it’s important to you to persist in pursuing your goals and overcome obstacles, that sense of that’s who I am, might actually start to form later, but there’s no reason why the behavioral patterns couldn’t be established early on.

Preet Bharara:

If we did this for first graders or preschoolers, we might get similar results because maybe it’s on a spectrum?

Adam Grant:

I wouldn’t bet against them.

Preet Bharara:

Do you remember your kindergarten teacher?

Adam Grant:

I do, Mrs. Baghdad.

Preet Bharara:

Do you remember what kindergarten you went to?

Adam Grant:

Sarita Baghdad, I want to say I was at Green School.

Preet Bharara:

You remember the first name of your kindergarten teacher?

Adam Grant:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t. My kindergarten teacher, I just knew her that she was Mrs. Friday and she was terrific. Let’s pause for a moment and give thanks to our kindergarten teachers. I went to the Meadowbrook Elementary School in Eatontown, New Jersey, a bit of a distance from where you were. I don’t know if anecdotally or not, and hopefully my elementary school teachers are not all listening to this, but I do remember my kindergarten teacher more than my others. Is that normal?

Adam Grant:

I don’t know. I think it would be surprising if you remembered earlier teachers, given what we know of how memory and the ability to form and retain vivid memories, before age five, that is extremely rare. Maybe your first memorable teacher is one way to think about it.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe, it could be.

Adam Grant:

There’s a primacy effect there.

Preet Bharara:

All right, you mentioned this concept of character skills, what are they and why are they important?

Adam Grant:

I used to think about character as virtue. I guess I was an Aristotelian thinking whatever your principles are, you just need to build a habit and practice them and that will make you a person of good character.

Preet Bharara:

That’s not how you mean it.

Adam Grant:

No, not anymore, anyway. When psychologists and economists study character, they find that a big part of it is not just what you want to do but what you know how to do. That’s the skill component of saying, “It’s easy to be generous, it’s easy to be proactive when things are going well, but whether you have the know-how to stand by your principles when the odds are stacked against you, that’s a skill question more than a will question. It’s a can do, not just a will do question.

I think about character skills, for example, as think about the biggest procrastinator you know, if that person manages to deliver on a deadline for somebody who’s really counting on them, that is an exercise of character skills, right? There’s some knowledge and expertise that’s being put into practice to override the normal instinct of putting things off.

Preet Bharara:

If you’re a basketball player, for example, here’s a different concrete example, a skill or a talent might be your ability to shoot, run, pivot, whatever. What would be an example of a character skill for a professional basketball player?

Adam Grant:

If I’m an NBA player, I’m going to differentiate myself on a character skill like having the discipline to study the stats and the game film before I play against somebody who I think outmatches me and then I’m going to be able to take that knowledge and put it into practice in the game.

I think about my friend, Shane Battier, as an example. Shane was the no stats all-star who, despite lacking some of the physical talents that we look for in world-class basketball players, when he was on the court, his team did better. Some of that was he was just a very gritty giver.

He put the team first. He would dive for loose balls. He did things that were not counted statistically, but that counted for team wins, but he also was the guy who was trying to figure out what is the one spot on the court where Kobe Bryant is most likely to miss, and then try to force him to that spot on the court, and doing that…

Preet Bharara:

Science.

Adam Grant:

… takes character skills because it’s not everybody’s idea of fun to watch hours and hours of game film. It’s not everybody’s idea of play to pour over stats and try to figure out, exactly where on the court should I be trying to push this guy?

Preet Bharara:

This is maybe related, I’m trying to understand the definitions and how we think about ways that we can improve, as you point out in your book, let’s say you are a field goal kicker for an NFL team and you come out with three makeable kicks in a row and you miss all three, and then you’re praying that you’re not going to be called out a fourth time, presumably, but you are.

Now, on that fourth kick, you miss three, the fans are hating you, because you’re at home, is the ability to kick the fourth kick through the uprights, is that a skill? Is that a character skill? Is that resiliency, which is something different? How would you describe what it takes for that person to recover from the three misses?

Adam Grant:

Character skills would be part of what you apply to stop dwelling on the past and focus on the next kick. There are obviously a lot of different ways you could apply those.

Preet Bharara:

How do you do that?

Adam Grant:

Yeah, how do you do that?

Preet Bharara:

How do you put yourself in a situation in practice that makes you come back from terrible misses in any, I’m using sports because they’re easy to analogize to, but the same would be true for a student in a physics course who fell down on the first two midterms, et cetera? How do you do that, because it seems to me that’s one of the more important things to succeed after a failure, and that’s one example of an opportunity to succeed after a failure. How do you do that?

Adam Grant:

The way I would think about character skills there is to say, you have to accept imperfections. You have to have the discipline to know that there are some things that you’re going to get right and some things that are going to go wrong.

If you dwell on that and ruminate about them, then you’re going to be beating yourself up about the past and shaming yourself from five minutes ago, instead of taking those three misses to try to educate yourself from five minutes from now. I think when we study emotion regulation and psychology, two of the more effective strategies, they’re pretty basic to describe, they’re harder to put into practice.

One is distraction, the other is reframing. Distraction would be shifting your attention away from the task altogether. You might listen to some music that calms you down or psychs you up depending on what emotional state you want to be in. I think where distraction would be most helpful is to get you back on autopilot as opposed to scrutinizing your every movement, which can actually interfere with expert performance that’s been well studied.

Reframing might be to say something like, “I think I’ve let my team down multiple times,” but this is an opportunity to show that I can really thrive under pressure or this is a chance to show my kids how to bounce back from a bad day and take what feels like a threat and try to turn it into a challenge or an opportunity.

One very concrete way to do that would be to say, “Let me look at the patterns across the three misses. What is the one change that’s most likely to get me back on track?”

Preet Bharara:

That’s interesting because you mentioned autopilot and I thought where you were going was to say, look, you’ve practiced this a million times, your kick, your golf swing, your baseball swing, whatever it is, to stick with the sports analogies for the moment, and it’s just a fluke, it’s a bad streak. If you can somehow disassociate yourself from the three misses and forget about them and go back to the mental state you were in before and during all those practices when you always made the kick correctly, but you’re saying that’s not the case, then in some instances you want to dwell on the three misses.

Adam Grant:

It depends.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. That’s hard.

Adam Grant:

Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is going to depend on whether there’s a pattern across the three misses. You don’t necessarily just want to go back to autopilot because maybe you slept wrong on your kicking leg last night, and so your autopilot is actually-

Preet Bharara:

That happens to me on a regular. That’s why I’m not in the NFL. I’m always sleeping incorrectly on my kicking leg, Adam.

Adam Grant:

I hate when that happens.

Preet Bharara:

I would be in the NFL.

Adam Grant:

I don’t doubt that for a second, Preet, but sometimes your autopilot is not going to be perfectly tuned for the situation you’re in. There has to be a little bit of an analysis there, I think, to try to figure that out. Then, I think that’s where a good coach would come in and help you gauge whether you need to make an adjustment or whether you need to turn your brain off.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you again about what we mean by character skills in this way because you write in the book and it’s a very arresting sentence, particularly right now when we’re talking about artificial intelligence, AI, all the time in every quarter, “If our cognitive skills are what separate us from animals, our character skills are what elevate us above machines.” What does that mean and is that really correct?

Adam Grant:

Do you think I would’ve written it if I didn’t believe it?

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m going to challenge you on it a little bit in a moment.

Adam Grant:

You can definitely challenge me on it. Here’s what I mean by that, I think the cognitive skills separating us from the animal’s observation is, I think, well accepted. We know that our ability to communicate with language to tell stories and pass on culture is a big part of what’s led to major advances technologically, democratically, societally. I think that’s been understood for generations.

I think in an age of AI, the idea that character skills elevate us above machines is new. The reason I’m making this point is I don’t think we can rely on ChatGPT or Claude to write a constitution for us, it’s humans who have to put together the constitution and say, “These are the principles by which AI needs to operate in order to keep us safe, in order to prevent people from engineering dangerous bioweapons, in order to give us accurate information.” I don’t think we want to outsource that judgment to a bot. I wouldn’t say it like that.

Preet Bharara:

Well, not yet. I mean, it depends on how artificially intelligent they get, but artificial intelligence could, using the earlier hypothetical, if you had a robot kicker, could analyze why the first three kicks failed, be emotion-free. I mean, I guess there’s a difference between being someone with character skills and being cold and emotion-free. Machines don’t freeze, right?

Adam Grant:

Well, I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, they do.

Adam Grant:

Not that way.

Preet Bharara:

Has your computer frozen lately?

Adam Grant:

I was going to say they do, but they don’t panic, right? Generally not, but I think what you’re talking about there is execution.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Adam Grant:

I think the judgment part, which may be more knowledge than action, that’s the part that I think is uniquely suited to humans.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Adam Grant after this. The other part about character skills that you talk about, which I find to be really interesting, and every part of your book that I was reading, I was trying to apply it to myself and whether I meet the criteria or I don’t or where I can improve, which is how I think many people will read the book, if not most people. You talked about the need to find the right kinds of discomfort. What do you mean by that and why is that important?

Adam Grant:

Preet, the way you read, it’s almost like you’re still trying to earn your psych degree. I love it.

Preet Bharara:

I should say, every time we talk, I feel like I should have taken more psychology courses.

Adam Grant:

I’m happy to provide that excuse anytime.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe we said this the last time you were on, but my favorite single class in college was Psych 1 taught by Jerome Kagan, who was an expert, I think, on child psychology and other things.

Adam Grant:

Temperament, yeah, a giant.

Preet Bharara:

You and I talked about, we won’t discuss it here, about some of the experiments that I learned about with mice, and I wasn’t sure if I remembered correctly and you sent me the study, so I appreciate that.

Adam Grant:

I was thrilled to find it.

Preet Bharara:

You and my kindergarten teacher are the two people that I owe a lot to.

Adam Grant:

Well, I’m still waiting for you to teach your psychology class in law school, but we can put that on the agenda for a future day. You asked about embracing discomfort.

Preet Bharara:

Yes.

Adam Grant:

I could do this either with example or with evidence. Where do you want to start?

Preet Bharara:

Why don’t we go with evidence? You’d like to talk about evidence?

Adam Grant:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Adam Grant:

There’s a fascinating Woolley and Fishbach paper where they show that if you want to motivate people to learn and grow, giving them the goal of trying to learn and grow is actually not the best option. People actually improve more if you give them the explicit goal of intentionally being uncomfortable.

I think we all know intuitively that discomfort is the key to growth. I don’t think we practice this on a regular basis. I’ve never heard somebody say, “Deliberately make yourself as uncomfortable as possible in order to improve more,” but that’s what you see in the data and you can see it with people doing improv classes where, if you’re encouraged to seek out discomfort, you actually end up improving your skills more, then, if you’re just encouraged to try to learn because you end up stretching beyond your comfort zone more.

By definition, that puts you in an area where you’ve got more to learn. You end up taking more risks, you end up running more experiments, and ultimately that’s better for your progress. You can also see this in politics. If you want to motivate somebody to read a perspective that’s foreign to them to get out of their echo chamber or filter bubble, instead of saying, “Try to learn as much as possible,” if you just randomly assign them to seek discomfort, they will consume more information from the “other side.” Democrats will learn more about Republican’s views and vice versa.

I think that, to me, this is really important because we live in a moment when people are actively avoiding discomfort. I’ve even heard in university settings, “Well, I don’t want to talk about these ideas because they make me uncomfortable.” I’m like, “Well, what’s the point of higher education?” You need to learn to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas to reason your way through them, to examine whether evidence supports them. That’s part of the process of growth, isn’t it?

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Well, look, my view is, and I’ve heard other people talk about this, that this sounds like a deep insight when we’re talking about universities and job growth and all those other things, but there’s a context in which everyone totally intuitively understands this principle, and that’s the gym. You go to the gym, I don’t know about you, and I know you go to the gym, Adam, admirably, when you lift a heavy weight, it’s uncomfortable.

I experienced discomfort like wow. Then, why did they call this a weight? It’s very heavy, but that’s how you strengthen the muscle. Everyone understands that, right? Everyone understands if you go to the gym and you do one jumping jack and you have a Gatorade and you leave, you will not improve. Why is it so difficult? I mean, it’s the same, I know maybe it’s a little facile, but isn’t it the same principle?

Adam Grant:

It might be. I’ve never thought about it this way, but I think we have a really good explanation of how and why physical discomfort leads to health, fitness and growth. I don’t think we have a similarly coherent narrative about psychological discomfort and how that drives growth, but maybe we should. I think that’s what you’re suggesting.

Preet Bharara:

Are there any studies or is there any evidence, and this has occurred to me in a different context, and anecdotally, I find there’s some evidence of this, that people who debated in high school or in college, serious, confrontational debate, are better suited for certain kinds of things or have more character skills than others, because that entire enterprise is deliberately engaging in argument and rhetoric and conclusions with a party, whose job it is, is to diametrically oppose your views and try to win the argument, or does debate in your view or your research suggest that it develop some bad skills that are not helpful? If we don’t have studies, we should really do them immediately.

Adam Grant:

That’s really interesting. I know there have been some randomized controlled experiments on debate training. I can think of one. There was, I think it was Kent Colbert that looked at the effect of debate experience and training on critical thinking and I think found no effect.

Preet Bharara:

Interesting.

Adam Grant:

I don’t think that…

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Adam Grant:

… means that debate training…

Preet Bharara:

Do some more.

Adam Grant:

… is not useful.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, I didn’t do debate. I did a different kind of public speaking. I would imagine, now we’re just speculating, which is anti-scientific, there’s something about the competitive nature of debate that maybe is not conducive to learning how to be properly persuasive later, but I’ve run across a lot of successful people in the law and otherwise, who are very, very impressive. I’m never surprised when I find out that there were serious debaters in high school.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I wonder how much of that is a self-selection effect though.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Adam Grant:

I mean, that’s always the question.

Preet Bharara:

They were going to succeed, otherwise. They were smart otherwise.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, and they were drawn to debate because they already had those skills and wanted to hone them. Now, that I think of it, if you frame it a little more broadly as forensics or communication education, there’s a meta-analysis study of studies led by Mike Allen, which showed that in general, if you get training in debate forensics or communication, you do score higher on critical thinking tests.

I think your instincts are right that a lot of it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and then the transfer of the training that you get into everyday life. You can go to debate, practice to try to basically win arguments, and get really good at confirmation bias and twisting other people’s ideas to preach your narrative or prosecute somebody else’s.

You could also learn debate as a skill in perspective taking, in inquiry to try to understand other people’s reasoning, and then deliver an argument that appeals to the audience. Then, if you’re able to transfer those into everyday life, could be very useful. I know this is a lot of what you do when you’re actually in a trial, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, I make the argument all the time about this scenario in which you were describing before where people and the dynamic where people don’t want to engage with another point of view because it makes them uncomfortable. Why do that? I say to people, “As much as the legal field is maligned and lawyers are maligned, literally, litigation and criminal law is literally and directly and deliberately about the opposition of ideas and conclusions and results to each other.” You cannot be a successful trial lawyer if when the other side is making its arguments, you stick your fingers in your ear, you’re like, “Nah, nah, nah, nah.”

Adam Grant:

I’d actually like to see you try that just for fun.

Preet Bharara:

You literally cannot do that, right? When I talk about the nobility of the profession, which is a very quaint concept, that’s one way in which I think, as much as there’s terrible stuff that goes on in the law, and there are some terrible lawyers also, the basic, the ideal is that you have ideas in opposition and each side presents those ideas, by the way, governed by certain rules of etiquette and evidence, including you can’t use ad hominems, you can’t race bait, you can’t do all sorts of other things, you have to color between the lines, but you have to listen to the other side and engage.

In the US attorney’s offices and in federal court, in the criminal law context, after the government gives its summation and the government goes first, the defense has to have listened to and engaged with the arguments that’s presented, not arguments that it wishes had been presented, but arguments that were presented; otherwise, you’re going to fall flat. Then, once again, the government has a rebuttal which has to be responsive to what the defense’s summation was. That’s what cross-examination is too.

The one thing that I was told when I had my first cross-examination, that defense decided to testify surprisingly, and I hadn’t really prepared for a cross, my second… the more seasoned prosecutor turned to me and said, “Just listen.” I mean, literally, it’s an exercise in listening to the other side.

By the way, sometimes when the other side is testifying or presenting its arguments, it is extremely uncomfortable because you rarely have a situation where it’s completely one-sided, right? That’s why you have a jury to make the ultimate determination. Each side has some points they can score and has some decent reasonable arguments to make, almost always, and the question is, who has the better argument overall, but lack of engagement is not an option.

Adam Grant:

Very well put. I’d say more, but I had my fingers in my ears, so I have nothing to contribute. No, it’s amazing how, I mean, again, this is one of those things that’s common sense, but not common practiced, sadly.

Preet Bharara:

I’m still fascinated by finding the right kinds of discomfort. Let’s say you’re at a job and it’s going well, and you’re a journalist or you’re an academic or you’re a doctor, and for ordinary people who are in some professions or you work in a restaurant, whatever the case may be, and it’s going well and you’re making a decent living, and you read this book and to do better in life and to achieve greater success and happiness, one of the things you want to do is find the right kinds of discomfort. What are some options for someone like that? Should they change their jobs? Should people change their jobs every so often?

Adam Grant:

Not necessarily. I mean, first of all, many people don’t have the luxury of doing that. Even if you do, there’s some research, actually probably the most rigorous of its kind, there was a study that came out in the last couple of years, Suns and Niesen, if I remember correctly, looking at thousands of people who changed jobs because they were dissatisfied. What the study showed was that it took several years for them to recover their existing level of job satisfaction in the new better job.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that?

Adam Grant:

They underestimated probably a few things. One is just the fact that transitions take a toll, both professionally and personally, right? There was a big adaptation period that they had to go through. Secondly, in many cases, they thought the grass was greener and they realized it wasn’t.

In psychology, that’s called the honeymoon hangover effect. The rosy picture of the new job looked really great, and then you found out, nope, it’s a job. There are politics and there are abusive bosses and there are mind-numbing projects in this organization too. Maybe, I should have stuck where I was, at least I was valued there, or at least I thought the work was kind of interesting there sometimes.

I’m not opposed to leaving a job if the work is miserable, if you’re being underpaid, if you’re being disrespected and you have the opportunity to leave, leave.

Preet Bharara:

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m actually talking about the opposite. I’m talking about being at a job that’s fine and good, and I’ll tell you my personal experience again, I hate to keep making it about me…

Adam Grant:

No, you don’t.

Preet Bharara:

… but you are talking to me.

Adam Grant:

You don’t hate it at all.

Preet Bharara:

I do that more with you than with any other guests because I feel like you can provide me advice on how to have a better life.

Adam Grant:

Well, not only that, you’re also, I mean, you apply ideas in a way that’s really useful for your audience.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, and I don’t want to be [inaudible 00:39:25] hidden potential.

Adam Grant:

We like making you the guinea pig.

Preet Bharara:

What about circumstances in which you have a good job, you have a great job even, and it’s going very well, and some other opportunity comes up that may not be as good, may not be as great, may even pay less, but it’s an interesting and different opportunity and you might experience a lot of discomfort, and that happened to me. I had the best job that I could ever have.

The only job I ever really, really, really wanted, which was to be an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York. I got that job and I was only five years in and I was loving every second of it. I was grateful to represent the United States of America in court every day. I had the luxury of this other significant opportunity, which was to go work on the hill and leave a job that I loved, that I thought I would never love any other job as much again, because there was this opportunity to maybe work on Supreme Court confirmations in 2005.

It was going to cause great upheaval to my family. I had a newborn who was just a few days old when I made that transition to work as the chief counsel to Senator Schumer on the Judiciary committee, and I was very torn about whether I should do it or not. There was a lot of debate and deliberation within the household.

I think it’s one of the best things I ever did, even though, no offense to the Senator, it was in some ways not the same dream job. I credit it just as fully with everything that I’ve done afterwards, including being a podcaster, including being the US attorney, but what do you think about that decision or the principle of leaving when you’re comfortable?

Adam Grant:

I think it’s really interesting. The first thing I would say is it’s never my place to judge whether somebody should leave their job or not, but without disclaimer on the table, I would say it is easy to get sort of stuck in a rut when you’re really comfortable.

Preet Bharara:

Rut doesn’t necessarily mean negative. It could be a successful rut.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I mean, you could plateau in a really good place. I think though, that one of the things we overlook is that we’re really bad at forecasting our own happiness, in part because we’re sensitive to the change in our circumstances more than we are the actual level of our circumstances. I think when you ask, “Is this job going to make me happy,” the reality is you don’t know yet. You haven’t experienced the day-to-day.

What you can gauge when you’re making that decision is, is this job going to help me grow? You can say, are there tasks in this job that are going to challenge me and force me to pick up new skills and new knowledge? You can say, are there mentors and collaborators who are really going to stretch me and help me think differently and operate differently? I think if the answer to those questions is yes, it’s worth looking closely at it.

Now, I wouldn’t say, Preet, necessarily that you definitely want to take that job. That’s a personal decision, and it may be the case that there are features of that job that can be replicated in your own current environment. I don’t want to make you regret, of course, your decision. It sounds like it was an amazing decision.

If you were to go back to your assistant US attorney role, you could do what my colleagues, Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton called Job Crafting and say, “Are there ways to become an active architect of this job? Can I add in tasks or projects that are going to lead to more growth? Can I seek out people who are going to challenge me in ways that I’m not currently being challenged?” I think that job crafting experiment is the one to run first before you abandon the job altogether, maybe.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s another fascinating issue, topic, theme of your book that I’ve thought about otherwise too, and that is the idea of accepting imperfection and being against what some people call perfectionism, which I don’t know exactly what that means, maybe you can define it, but is that idea of accepting imperfection, just another way of addressing the old aphorism, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good?

Adam Grant:

I think it could be. Yes. I also though, want to find the great in between, perfect and the good.

Preet Bharara:

When you talk about perfectionism, what is it and why is it bothersome?

Adam Grant:

Yeah, in psychology, perfectionism is the desire to be flawless. It’s problematic because it’s almost impossible to do anything without a single flaw. When people become perfectionists, they end up, it’s a little bit like the football kicker we were talking about earlier, they end up ruminating about their past mistakes. They feel a lot of shame. They’re at risk for burnout. They also tend to stick to their comfort zones. They only do things that they already know how to do well because they don’t want to fail.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Adam Grant:

That sense their growth, I mean, even as I was writing about perfectionism, I came to think that if perfectionism was a medication, there would be a giant warning label. It would say like, “Warning, may cause stunted growth.”

Preet Bharara:

Is part of the issue, it sounded like part of the issue was in your writing, that one has to learn what to let go and what not to let go, how to prioritize. We can use many silly analogies, and I was thinking, if my job is a poet and I’m writing sonnets, you have a limited space and you should be aspiring to achieve perfection in your sonnet, right? That’s your job. That’s your craft, and every word has to tell, and every word counts.

At the same time, if in your day job you work in an office and you’re sending an email to somebody about something mundane, it does not have to be poetry. Is there anything to that observation?

Adam Grant:

Yes, I agree with it wholeheartedly, which is disappointing.

Preet Bharara:

How do people decide? What is practical advice about what to let go, because people take great pride in being perfectionist. We celebrate it. We say Steve Jobs was a perfectionist. I think you would probably say he knew what to be perfectionist about…

Adam Grant:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… and those things are known and the things that he was not perfectionist about are not written about and are not lionized everywhere.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, but even then, I don’t even think he was a perfectionist. He was obsessive about excellence, but when you think about-

Preet Bharara:

That’s different?

Adam Grant:

It’s definitely different. Excellence is achieving a very high standard. It’s not zero flaws. It’s just not fatally flawed. If you think about making the iPhone, the gorilla glass, it doesn’t pass the drop test from a thousand feet and a perfect phone would. It would be unbreakable, but that wasn’t practical. I think what Steve Jobs really mastered was the art of obsessing about practical excellence.

I would think of him as a principled pragmatist. He knew what his standards were, but he also wanted to make sure his products shipped. How do you do that? I mean, really practically, the way that I do that comes right out of something I learned as a springboard diver.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to ask you about that. You were a very highly accomplished springboard diver. Doesn’t every aspect of the dive have to be perfect?

Adam Grant:

That’s what I thought, but no, my coach, Eric Best watched me struggle with perfectionism. He watched me just waste all this time stopping midway through my approach down the board because it already wasn’t perfect. Why should I bother to go? It was not going to be right.

He watched me obsess over tiny details that didn’t matter instead of improving my broader skills. He said to me one day, he said, “Listen, there’s no such thing as a perfect 10.” I was like, “What do you mean? Haven’t you watched the Olympic? You’re a diving coach, you actually trained an Olympian. What are you talking about?” He said, ‘No, look at the rule book. A 10 is for excellence, not for perfection.”

Actually, in another rule book, I think it’s very good, even not excellent. You can get straight 10s and an announcer will call it a perfect 10, but it is not perfect. I can watch a dive that got straight 10s in the Olympics and tell you at least a dozen things wrong with it before I’ve watched it in slow motion.

That was a really healthy realization because what it allowed us to do was to say for each dive, what’s a reasonable high standard goal? If I’m working on a basic dive, we would actually set a target and say, “Your goal is seven or seven and a half, and then we’re going to do two or three of them, and if you hit it, you move on. If you don’t, we’ll maybe do a couple more.”

With a harder new dive, if I’ve got to do a full twisting two and a half, for example, two flips, a twist and then a dive into the water, I’m just learning that, our goal was let’s just do it for fours. As long as it’s not totally deficient, we’ll consider that a win. That allowed me to go on imperfect takeoffs. It allowed me to gauge my progress relative to an achievable standard as opposed to an impossible dream. It took me, it really propelled me from being a terrible diver to getting pretty good.

Preet Bharara:

The one time I can remember in the workbook, there have been several times, but the one time that has stuck with me, this principal that I think we’re talking about, is when I was assistant US attorney, as I mentioned, I had a supervisor who then became a judge, is now on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, who obviously wanted investigations to proceed at a good pace, and he would say, “Look, your Title III application,” in other words, your application for a wiretap, does not have to be perfect, in the sense it doesn’t have to be Hemmingway.”

You have to get the facts right. You have to have your probable cause. You have to have all the sections. You have to be meticulous about all of that, but it doesn’t need to be in the same prose as you were briefed to the Supreme Court. It’s a very obvious point, but that struck me a lot because it allowed me to think about the things you prioritize and what needs to be perfect, like in the sonnet example. Do you have any advice like that…

Adam Grant:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… further to that for people in ordinary workplaces?

Adam Grant:

I do. I think when it comes to, I mean, the real question is how highest should the standard be for the task you’re doing? What I’ve tried to do is I think I actually like to draw a two by two. The first question is, how high are the stakes of what I’m doing? How consequential is it for other people and for my reputation? Then, the second is, how reversible is this? Can I easily undo it? Am I walking through a revolving door, or is the door going to lock behind me?

I basically aim higher when the stakes are high, and it’s also irreversible. When writing a book, for example, I’m like, I need to get a bunch of nines from all the independent judges that I trust who are going to read it and score it for me, because this is a huge project for me. I’m investing a ton of time into it. Hopefully, a lot of people are going to read it.

I can’t just edit it while it’s in their hands or while they’re listening to it in their ears. I have to wait until the paperback edition. I really don’t want to screw it up, but a social media post, I’m like, “Nah, not that consequential unless I say something really awful, very easily reversible.” I’m kind of comfortable aiming for six and a half, seven, on those, and that I think is a really useful two by two to draw. I recommend it highly.

Preet Bharara:

How do we apply the things that you’re talking about and you write about to how we hire people, how we admit people into colleges based on the experiences they’ve had? You write very compellingly about those things. I thought it was important that we not end before you talk about that.

Adam Grant:

Well, there’s, I guess, a lot more detail in chapter nine of the book on this, but my favorite takeaway from an admissions and hiring perspective is for admissions, I think, we’ve got to look at the degree of difficulty, not just the execution.

The idea that somebody who got straight A’s coming from a rich family, going to a relatively easy school would be rated as better than somebody who grew up in poverty and had to take really hard classes and got a B average, that’s absurd. Yet, that’s how a lot of admissions decisions operate. We’ve got to look at the adversity face and overcome, not just the accomplishments reached would be my big note there.

Preet Bharara:

As a practical matter, if you’re going to be judging and evaluating people about how far they’ve traveled, how should we be changing the hiring process, the questions we ask, the application materials, et cetera?

Adam Grant:

Well, if you’re going to look at grades, one of the things you can do is move from grade point average to grade point trajectory. We know that a signal that somebody has hidden potential and that they’ve either already traveled a great distance or they’re likely to do that in the future, is if their grades have improved over time. You’re looking for an upward slope basically, would be one thing you can do.

I guess when it comes to questions, I’m really enamored with what Call Yachol does. They’re a call center in Israel that hires people with disabilities and underdogs with various kinds of challenges. One of the things they do is at the end of an interview, they ask you how you think it went, and if you’re not happy with it, they give you a do-over.

Preet Bharara:

Wait, with someone else?

Adam Grant:

That’s, I think, in some cases it’s with a different interviewer. In some cases, you get a redo with the same interviewer. What I love about that is, one, I mean, talk about character skills to say, “You know what? I actually don’t think I did my best. Let me take another shot at that.” That shows resilience. It shows humility and a desire to grow, but also then, you can actually see the delta, did they improve from the first attempt to the second? That’s a real signal of their motivation and their ability to grow in real time.

Preet Bharara:

I can ask you questions for many more hours. Hopefully, you’ll back again soon.

Adam Grant:

You always make me think.

Preet Bharara:

The book is Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Adam Grant, thanks so much for being on the show once again.

Adam Grant:

As always, honored to be here. Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Adam Grant continues for members of The CAFE Insider Community. In the bonus for Insiders, Adam and I discussed the benefits of audio-only conversations for podcast hosts and remote workers.

Adam Grant:

It turned out that when people had been randomly assigned to have their cameras off, they were less exhausted and more engaged.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week by acknowledging the brutal pain of yet another mass shooting, the killing by a deeply disturbed man of 18 innocent people in Lewiston, Maine. The massacre took place during a youth league event at a bowling alley and at a nearby bar and grill. The perpetrator used a semi-automatic rifle to carry out the atrocities.

In the midst of the two-day manhunt for the killer, who was eventually found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, we heard a lot of the same bland stuff, calls for thoughts and prayers from many Republicans, including new House Speaker, Mike Johnson. Every time this happens, we see and hear the same thing. People retreat to their corners, stick to their guns, so to speak. Now, the mind is changed. Now a thing has changed. This time it seems a mind was changed.

Jared Golden is a centrist democratic US representative who was born in Lewiston and raised in nearby Leeds. He currently represents Maine’s second congressional district, which includes Lewiston. A Marine Corps veteran who has served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Golden has long opposed an assault weapons ban. He was one of only five Democratic House members last year to vote against a ban, which narrowly passed the House but failed in the Senate.

Golden has received A plus ratings from gun rights groups, but at a press conference in Lewiston on the night after the mass shooting, Golden changed course. Here’s part of what he had to say.

Jared Golden:

I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war like the assault rifle he used to carry out this crime. The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown of Lewiston, Maine. For the good of my community, I will work with any colleague to get this done in the time that I have left in Congress.

Preet Bharara:

Golden also directly asked his own community to forgive him for not acting earlier.

Jared Golden:

To the people of Lewiston, my constituents throughout the Second District, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed, I ask for forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings. In the days to come, I will give everything I have to support this community’s recovery. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

All of this, of course, raises a question, what’s different? What’s changed? Tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, and now that it’s in this congressman’s backyard, now the devastation hits his district, he’s had a change of heart? We can derive that, but I think we should welcome it. We need all the allies we can get, Johnny Come Lately’s included, and we need some more conversions too.

One of Maine’s senators, Angus King, an independent, is still resisting the change. King said, “Golden’s reversal took a lot of courage, but refused to join him.” King is planning, however, to introduce legislation banning certain types of especially lethal guns. As legislators debate how to address the latest carnage, the 36,000 people of Lewiston over the weekend, emerged from the two-day lockdown that accompanied the search for the mass killer.

One Lewiston resident, Eve Ali, an immigrant from Djibouti, passed out donuts and coffee to her neighbors at a downtown park. Ali told the New York Times, “I want people to remember we should focus on what brings us together, not what divides us. We make the decision as a community, and together we can choose love and forgiveness.” I agree with that, but let’s also choose action and change.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Adam Grant. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag Ask Preet.

You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-Preet or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The editorial producers are David Kurlander and Noa Azulai. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The audio producer is Nat Weiner, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernández. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.