PNTV: Maximize Your Potential by Jocelyn K. Glei (#277)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book, Maximize your Potential by Jocelyn glei and the 99U team Maximize youe Potential Subtitle Grow youw Expertise, Take Bold Risks and build an Incredible career. This is the second and in a three book series by 99U, edited by Jocelyn Glei. We featured the first and the third. We're doing a hat trick here. Love the first two. Read all three and I'm excited to explore some of my favorite big ideas from this one. And I highly recommend all three. Philosopher's Note Bunch of my favorite big ideas. Five of them here. So maximize your potential. This one is all about maximizing your potential as an individual. The first book was about managing your day to day and the third was about building a cool business called make youe Mark. First big idea here is to put yourself into permanent beta. If you want to maximize your potential, you need to realize that you've got bugs that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life. There's always an opportunity to optimize more and more and more and more. Put yourself in permanent beta. The contributing author who created this essay where I pulled this idea, references Google. Google launched Gmail in beta. They stayed in beta for five years. They had millions of users using their platform before they took off the little beta thing. That's how committed they were to truly dialing it in and optimizing it. Millions of people using it, loving it. They're still in beta. Jeff Bezos is another example they use in the book Jeff Bezos writes in his annual letters. I believe every annual letter, it's day one. It's still day one in Amazon. It's just day one. We're just getting started. We're just learning how to really serve as profoundly as we can. Permanent beta, day one. That's how we want to approach our lives. Every day is another opportunity to get better. Not to prove that we're perfect, but to get a little bit better. To respond to what the world is telling us and what we know we can do and step into it. We're going to talk about this in our final big idea. The better you, which is just on the edge of your believable possible. But for now, let's go to the second big idea. Praise plus or minus 25%. Then we'll talk about Spiderman as well. So I've been talking about Carol Dweck a fair amount lately. In this book they reference Carol Dweck again. Heidi Grant, Halvorson does in her essay. Heidi was one of Carol Dweck's students at Columbia University. It's where she got her PhD with and under Carol Dweck, Heidi wrote a great book called Succeed. Check it out. But in this essay, she talks about some of the research done by Dweck and another researcher named Mueller. Right. Where they brought kids into a lab and they had three different phases to the experiment. Right? So they bring kids in first phase, I think they were fifth graders, Right. First phase, they perform. They take a test, an easy test. Right. And they all perform really well. Equally well. Then half of the group is told, you did really well. You must be so smart. Interesting. The other group who did equally well was said, you did really well. You must have worked really hard, you must be really smart, or you must have worked really hard. Two different types of praise, right? And I'm going to write this down because it's worth reflecting on. Two different types of praise. You're so smart versus you worked hard. All right, that's phase one of this experiment. Phase two, all these kids, they just got praised. You're so smart or you work so hard. Phase two, they now are faced with almost impossible tasks. Almost no one can get any of the questions right. Oh, bummer. Right. That's phase two. Then phase three is the real point of the test. They wanted to see what would happen after you praised a kid, and then they faced challenges in one of two different ways. Then in phase three, they took an easy test that was just as easy. That's the first part. What they found was the group that was told, you're so smart performed 25% worse than they did in the first part of the experiment. Same exact quality of questions or difficulty of questions. Right. They did 25% worse after they were praised for being smart, then faced challenges than they did when they first took those same types of questions in the first part. That's an amazing thing. Then what happened to the work hard group? The work hard group didn't do worse. They did better. They did 25% better on equivalently easy questions after the challenge than they did the first time through. What is going on with that? This is huge. Think about that. If they started out and they all did the same, let's say that they had a score of one. Right. They did 25% worse in the smart section. That's about 0.75, let's say. Right? And then if they did 25% better, that's 1.25. That's a huge gap. That's almost twice as effective by simply having a few words changed in the experiment. We can talk about this for a whole weekend. But the idea here is that the praise we give our children, ourselves, our colleagues, our friends, it matters if you're telling someone, you, you did well, you must be so smart. Paradoxically, that diminishes their ability to perform well when they hit an obstacle. They'll do fine when it's easy. But the moment they hit an obstacle, their head starts thinking, oh my God, maybe I'm not so smart. Oh, I better play it safe. And oof. Man, I'm a little bit nervous now. But if you tell a kid or an adult or yourself, hey, you did well because you worked really hard, then, then when you face challenges, your self worth, your smartness isn't at risk, then you realize, well, I didn't do as well in this challenging time because I didn't work hard enough. Let me work harder, which is what these kids did. Who did 25% better after a challenge. And I'll wrap this up with a short story. The day I was working on this, I went to the park. Every morning I go to the park with Emerson. We go on our adventure, right? Dad time. And after putting in a couple hours in the morning, have some breakfast, we go on our little adventure. So I'm at the park and Emerson is climbing up this little tunnel. He goes down this tunnel slide, then he climbs back up it, right? And there's a kid who's a little bit older than him watching with his mom. And he's kind of impressed. And he's like, how did he do that? Right? He's looking at it. He's like, how did he do that? And his mom literally immediately said, he's talented, he's talented. That's kind of the equivalent of saying, he's so smart. And I'm thinking about this, and if I hadn't been thinking about this, I would have said, yeah, he's pretty talented. He's kind of mini spider man, you know, he's just able to climb up tunnel slides at a pretty precocious age. Now, having studied this, I realized, wow, that's super subtle. But he's not talented. He's practiced, he's worked hard at it, he's tried, and he's slid down, he's tried again. And then he figured out he's got to take off his shoes when he takes off his shoes. And then he can do it. So I'm constantly praising his effort. Wow, you tried really hard. You Tried different strategies. I saw that you tried this and that didn't work, and you tried that and it did work. That's cool. Or when he hits a challenge, it's, oh, I think you may need to work a little bit harder on that. Right. What we say in praise matters. It's unbelievably important. I need to do a class just on that. That was a very long second big idea. Third big idea. Peyton Manning has a great, great story about. They share a great story about Peyton Manning, where when he was cut from or released from the Colts, it was the first time in his career after like 14 years that he had to find a new team. So he auditioned for the 49ers and the Arizona Cardinals and the Denver Broncos. And he said that, hey, I kind of wanted to go to each of those places at different times in the process, but I decided de ser cut off. I decided, I'm going to go to the Denver Broncos then rather than think about whether or not I made the right decision and second guess myself. I worked hard to prove myself right. I worked hard to prove that I made the right decision. Think about that. If you are in the process of making a hard decision or you recently did right. You can spend all your time wondering, did I make the right decision? Oh, I don't know. I'd second guess yourself. Weak energy. Or you can say, I made this decision. Now I'm going to work as hard as I can to prove that it was the right decision. That's what Peyton did. Successfully check in on that and see what you can do to prove yourself right. That's the third big idea. The fourth big idea. Another heroic guy, Jerry Seinfeld. One of the contributors shared a story of Jerry Seinfeld I'd never heard before. I've heard the story of Seinfeld writing a joke every day. And I've heard some people say that's actually not necessarily true, but it's a cool story. But this essay in the book, they talked about the fact that the first time that Seinfeld, in 1976, I think it was stood up in front of an audience that wasn't his friends and family, right? He's sitting there at the Catch, a rising star, I think it was in New York City. And he goes up, bright lights are on him and he completely freezes. Can't remember any. Anything he was going to say, right. First show. And apparently he just kind of stumbled through the themes, cars, park, whatever else he was going to talk about super quickly, awkwardly. And then he Just walked off stage. 90 seconds was his total thing. He was paralyzed with fear. Took him a few months, but then he mustered up the courage to go back and try it again. And this time he rushed through it, but he did a better job. Right? But he had this extraordinary experience of being frozen by fear. Now, as a guy who used to be frozen by fear about nearly everything, I find stories like that inspiring. If you, like me, have cultivated your trust in yourself over the years from a place that might have been kind of low, you might find some inspiration from the story as well. Now, what's amazing is after freezing on stage, some people never would have gotten up on stage. We. Or if they blew their first shot that dramatically, they would have given up. Seinfeld didn't. He worked tirelessly on his craft. You can only imagine how freaked out he must have been the second time he tried. Oh, God, I hope this doesn't happen again. And he worked through that again and again and again and again and again. Fast forward a dozen or so years. He launches the pilot for Seinfeld, which goes on, of course, to be one of the most successful sitcoms ever. He, if not the most successful. And that show made $2.7 billion in reruns alone. First attempt at stand up comedy. Frozen in fear. 90 seconds. Rushes off the stage to $2.7 billion in reruns alone. That's a really cool arc and a lot of hustle and a lot of courage through the process. So if you are afraid now or thinking about something you want to do and a little overwhelmed, think about Jerry Seinfeld. Think about his first experience, and then think about all the effort he put in to get better and master his craft in those reruns. He's doing pretty well with fifth Big idea. The better you. As I mentioned in the last episode, Jocelyn has each of the books end with a kind of call to action. A really inspiring kick in the butt passage, right? Or essay on just catalyzing you to go out and take action. This one was on the better you, the better you. The idea here is that there's a better version of you that exists in every single moment. The better you. And the author of this essay says it's the believable possible. It's the you that's slightly better than where you are right now. It's not the unbelievably impossible version of you. It's the believable possible version of you. And this is exciting because literally right now, there's a slightly better version of me. And A slightly better version of you that we can step into. And as I was writing this note out, I literally stood up or sat up rather a little bit straighter and I took a deeper breath and I just felt my energy just slightly dial in a little bit more. There's a slightly better version of us in every single moment. And if we lean into that and step into that consistently over time, that compounds in such a way that fast forward your decade or 25 years from Seinfeld's oops to his wow Cha ching on all those shows over that 10 to 25 year period of time. Believable you. Believable you. Can. Can I get a little bit better? The believable possible, right? The little slightly better you. You compound that over an extended period of time you can do extraordinary things. But if you think you need to be the unbelievable you perfect from where you are right now to just flawless, you're going to constantly fall on your face and give up. So think about that slight 4% better version of you, or even 1% or 2% better version of you, and find that dynamic edge and and lean into it more and more consistently. That's the better you. Believable possible. Seinfeld and his Fear and reruns. Peyton Manning made a hard choice and then worked hard to make it the right decision rather than worrying about whether or not it was praise plus or minus 25%. Unbelievable. Simple praise of you're so smart diminishes performance the moment someone hits a tough spot. And then compound that. By the way, if you have this huge difference minus 25% or plus 25% after six words of praise in an experiment? What happens when you receive that type of praise hundreds and thousands of times by everyone in your life? That compounds this way. And we want to compound it this way. That gap is an extraordinarily powerful thing to be aware of. And then of course, we had our permanent beta. It's always day one. Celebrate your blogs. Try to get a little bit better permanent beta. Enjoy the process of maximizing your potential 99 years. Awesome. I highly recommend this book and the series and I hope you enjoyed this episode. Have another great day. Look forward to sharing more. See you. 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