PNTV: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (#84)

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got the classic book Emotional Intelligence by Dan Goleman. Extraordinary book, as you know, if you've read it. And I'm really excited to check out some of my favorite big ideas from it. This book was written in 1997. Kind of kicked off a minor revolution in how we view leadership and, and overall excellence. And the basic premise of the book, the subtitle is Emotional Intelligence why It Can Matter More than iq. And the idea here is, why is it that iq, someone's intelligence as measured by an IQ test, isn't that great of a predictor of their overall success, well being, happiness, etc. In their lives? And what they found is actually IQ accounts for at best 20% of an individual's success in life. So what about the other 80%? And he basically says the other 80% comes down to emotional intelligence. The fact is, it doesn't matter how smart you are if your emotions hold sway and take you from here to there and you can never really focus on a project and move forward. It doesn't matter what your IQ score may be. On the other hand, it really doesn't matter what your IQ score is if you have this consistent emotional intelligence, which he describes as things like self control, which we're going to talk about a little bit more. Zeal and enthusiasm, persistence and inability to delay gratification and motivate ourselves toward or in pursuit of goals that are worthy of us and have meaning for us. So that's kind of the basic construct of the book of Emotional Intelligence. Let's look at a few big ideas on how we can rock our emotional intelligence. Quickly. We'll just point out the fact that Howard Gardner, I talk about it in the note. Great Harvard psychologist, talked about the fact that there are multiple intelligences. IQ is a very, very limited way of looking at intelligence. We can measure it in at least a dozen ways. He talks about visual, spatial, musical, rhythmic, physical, in terms of how we move our body, athletically, etc. There are all kinds of different intelligences. In the note, we talk about the fact that our education system is failing us. We're basically becoming really, really, really good at taking tests and ranking kids in different orders. But we're not doing what education should be doing, which is helping kids identify their talents and figure out how they're going to give them in service to the world. That seems to be what education should be about, right? As it is, we develop a very highly calibrated, as Howard Gardner says, A very highly calibrated skill in a task that will basically become useless the day we graduate. That is taking tests, filling in scantron bubbles or answering questions in a manner that just have no parallel to the way we actually live our lives. Anyway, moving on, big ideas on how to develop our emotional intelligence. The first one is self awareness. This is Socrates, know thyself. And the idea of not only knowing our kind of vision of our lives on a higher level and having a macro self awareness, but also on a micro level, being able to see, to witness our emotions. We aren't just caught up in our emotions. We can step out, have self awareness and see when we're getting a little bit or a lot of it out of control and control those emotions and not get into the outbursts that come when we just don't have any level of self awareness. Really powerful idea that we talk about some more. In the note, he also talks about the importance of self mastery versus being passion's slave. So we've got to have a level of self mastery again. All the great teachers talk about this. We talk about it all the time. We've got to develop our sense of will. Even Lao Tzu, a lot of people say, yeah, but we just want to go with the flow. Lao Tzu, founder of Daoism, all about going with the flow, says it's egomania to think that you cannot. To think that you can attain higher levels of awareness and enlightenment without discipline, without structure in your life. We need the structures to allow the essence of the dao or God, or the divine, or our highest selves, whatever we call it, to flow through us. That requires structure, requires discipline and rituals, which requires self mastery. Of course, on that theme, we talk about a really cool idea. We talk about it once in a while. This idea of 10,000 hours in order to attain a level of mastery. Well, he talks about that and how important emotional intelligence is in excellent performance. Whether it's an Olympic athlete or a musician or a world class chess player. These individuals have incredible emotional intelligence, incredible abilities to motivate themselves with zeal and enthusiasm and persistence to continue to move forward in the face of setbacks and achieve what they set out to achieve. Again, whatever domain they're in. And they found that in fact, they put in about 10,000 hours of diligent practice. It's an amazing number. And I mentioned in the note Malcolm Gladwell's great book, Outliers. Gladwell's the guy with the sweet hair who wrote Outliers, the Tipping Point and a couple other Great books. And in his book Outliers, he talks about those who are outliers. You've got a bell curve and you got outliers way out here. What is it that makes them tick? And he says that there's some variables. They just got lucky. They were in an environment that supported a certain development and they put in a heck of a lot of work. You put those two together, you got some outliers. He talks about the Beatles, he talks about Bill Gates and a bunch of other people. Bill Gates. You may not have known this, but Bill Gates used to sneak out of bed when he was a high school kid to go to the computer lab, one of the few computers in the world at the time. He'd sneak out of bed at 2am, work for a few hours, walk to the library, then come back home, sneak back into bed by 5am so his mom wouldn't catch him. And then his mom would wonder why he was tired. In the morning he's getting out and programming. Well, he logged in his 10,000 hours and was one of the, you know, guys who was doing the most programming in the world as a teenager. And then when the computer revolution really took off, he was in a position, having invested so much energy already in this nascent technology, he was in a position to do some extraordinary things. So really, really cool analysis of how important diligent effort and practice and persistence is if we want to achieve extraordinary things. And that comes again from self motivation, which is a hallmark of emotional intelligence. He says that emotional intelligence is a master aptitude. It's kind of like sitting on top of all the other aptitudes. We can be talented or smart or whatever it is, but if we don't have emotional intelligence, none of those things are going to be at their highest potential. It's kind of like a limiting factor. If your emotions take control of you and you get depressed for a day or a week or a month or a year, there's no way, whatever gifts you have, there's no way your gifts are going to be fully manifest. So it's incredibly important that we develop our emotional intelligence. He talks about the fact that being able to manage our impulses is incredibly important. In the note, we have a little story about some 4 year old kids who were tested with marshmallows and they were offered one marshmallow immediately or two marshmallows if they could wait for the researcher to come back in 15 minutes. You can imagine a four year old having a really challenging time. Oh, I really want it. Oh, okay. I can wait. And there's amazing. Apparently they videotape you and you can watch these kids expression and stuff like that. Long story shorter. We talk about a little bit more on the note. We've got these kids who are making decisions. Some of them went for immediately, some of them delayed gratification. Whether or not they went for it immediately was a better predictor than their IQ at their SAT scores. It's amazing whether they could delay gratification. Now that's an extraordinary thing. We need to develop the ability to delay gratification, to not jump onto the video game or face or ESPN or the wine and beer or whatever else we do that gives us immediate gratification when we really, in our deepest hearts want to do things like study a great book or watch more of these if you're into it, or meditate or take a bath and journal or whatever it is that inspires you. We've got to be able to delay gratification, see our vision and then take it to the completion. Final idea here. We've got some more. We're not going to get to worrying. There's a great one in here. Check it out. It's awesome. But on hope, they talk about the science of hope. And he says that hope is a greater predictor of a college student's first semester grades than their SAT scores. Right. So if you have equal SAT scores, the one who has a better sense of hope will do better in their first semester grades at college. Isn't that amazing? So hope isn't just this kind of wishy washy thing. He says technically, scientifically, it's defined as believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be. The will and the way, that's the essence of hope. Hope is extraordinary. Extraordinary, extraordinary. If you have it, awesome. Keep on rocking it. If you need to develop more of it, keep on hitting the optimism. Hope. Gym and train. Develop it like you would anything else in your life. I think these philosopher's notes is what it's all about. And I hope you get something out of this one. Hope you get something out of all these notes. We're out of time. Hope you dug it. Have an awesome day and look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you.