How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities | Dr. Adam Grant

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Adam Grant. Adam Grant is a Professor of Organizational Psychology at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. He has authored five best selling books and most recently has authored a new book entitled His Potential. He received his Bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan. Today we discuss peer reviewed studies and tools based on the data from those studies that can enable people to meet their goals and overcome significant challenges including how to overcome procrastination as well as how to see around or through blind spots, as well as how to overcome sticking points in motivation and creativity. We also discuss the research on and practical tools related to the underpinnings of performance in any endeavor, including how to increase one's confidence and how to have a persistent growth Mindset by the end of today's episode, it will be clear to you that Dr. Adam Grant has an absolutely spectacular depth and breadth of knowledge and that knowledge is both practical, it is based on peer reviewed research and he conveys those tools with the utmost clarity and generosity. Indeed, by the end of today's episode you will have more than a dozen new tools never discussed before on the Huberman Lab podcast that you can apply in your academic endeavors, in athletic endeavors, in creative endeavors, in fact, in any area of life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep Tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that getting a great night's sleep really is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. With eight sleep, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning, middle and end of your night. It has a number of other features like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get, things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night's sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for well over two years now and it has greatly improved my sleep. I fall asleep far more quickly and I wake up far less often in the middle of the night and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using night sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, go to Eight Sleep.comhuberman now through November 30th as a special holiday discount, Eight Sleep is offering $500 off their bundles with a pod cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's Eight Sleep.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in your immediate and long term health is your blood sugar or blood glucose regulation. With Levels, you can see how different foods and food combinations, exercise and sleep patterns impact your blood glucose levels. It's very easy to use. You just put the monitor on the back of your arm and then you take your phone and you scan it over that monitor now and again and it downloads the the data about your blood sugar levels in the preceding hours. Using Levels has allowed me to learn a tremendous amount about what works best for me in terms of nutrition, exercise, work schedules and sleep. So if you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor, you can go to levels link/huberman Levels has launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than the previous version. Right now they're also offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's Levels Link Slash Huberman to try the new sensor and two free months of membership. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga NIDRA sessions and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the Waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an appointment. Turned out to be the Waking up app which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much. So I gave the Waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation meditation I do. I also love that the Waking up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations and there's excellent scientific data to show that Yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non sleep Deep rest or nstr can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10 minute session. If you'd like to try the Waking up app, you can go to wakingup.comhuberman and and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.comhuberman to access a free 30 day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Adam Grant. Adam, welcome.

Excited to be here.

Very excited to have you here. Your career, both public facing and academic career have covered an enormous range of topics. So we have a lot to cover.

Look who's talking.

And anytime two professors sit down or even one professor says we have a lot to cover, I think everyone listening braces themselves like oh no. But these topics, I assure everyone, are of the utmost interest and you cover them in such both fabulous detail and you make it very clear. So I'm really looking forward to this. I'd like to start off by talking about something that I'm obsessed by and I know a lot of people are obsessed with and struggle with. And I know you also have a recent publication on this topic which is procrastination. I am a bit of a procrastinator, but a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines. I learned in college that I love, love, love deadlines because it seems to harness my focus and my attention like just enough. I guess you call it anxiety or autonomic arousal for the neuroscience or physiology oriented folks. For me just brings about a total elimination of all of the distractors and it seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time. And it seems to bring out my best to have deadlines. But I would prefer to not have to procrastinate in order to self impose deadlines. I prefer that other people impose those deadlines, in fact. So what do we know about procrastination? Why do some people complete things well in advance? Why do other people procrastinate? Is it that they're seeking deadlines, as I believe I am? And interestingly, and sort of alluding to this recent paper of yours, what is the relationship between procrastination and creativity?

I feel like we should just deal with all that later. Let's put it off.

No, Good one. By the way, there's extra credit for science puns on here, so nicely done.

One of the best articles, articles on procrastination ever written was titled At Last my article on procrastination.

Fantastic. I love it.

Yeah, it just made me smile. So I think the basic question I think to start with is why do we procrastinate? And I thought I was immune. Actually when I came into this topic, I was the person who annoyed my college roommates by finishing my thesis a couple months early. I found out there was a term for me, I'm a precrastinator. So the, you know, the focus and the pressure that you get from a deadline, I get that the moment the project starts and sometimes months or years in advance. And so I was really proud of finishing everything early. And then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on too, which was a little bit disappointing.

Are you willing to share what some of those.

I am. So I procrastinate on anything that's administrative. So I'm right there with you. You want to get time on my calendar. It could take me weeks to respond. You asked me a question about social science. I be back to you in a minute. I procrastinate on grading. Takes me forever. I basically put off a whole bunch of tasks that I thought had nothing in common. It turns out that I procrastinate when I'm bored. Like boredom is, I guess, it's probably my most hated emotion. And so I will do anything to avoid a boring task. And I think this goes to why people procrastinate, which is a lot of people think it's laziness or you're not disciplined enough. But actually the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you procrastinate. In fact, a lot of our procrastination is focused on doing things that involve a lot of energy. You've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task. So it's not that you're being lazy, it's that you're avoiding negative emotions that a task stirs up. So for me, it's boredom. For a lot of people, it's fear or anxiety. I don't know if I can pull this off. I have an extreme case of imposter syndrome in this role. The challenge in front of me is too daunting. For some people, it's confusion. I haven't figured it out yet. And so I can't work on this because I feel like I'm stuck. So what's. I guess the big question for you then, Andrew, is what's the emotion that causes you to procrastinate?

It's hard for me to identify the stick here. I think of it more as the carrot that comes with deadlines. And again, I don't consider myself a procrastinator per se. I just really love deadlines. And procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline. So for me.

So you wait. So you delay starting or finishing a task in order to have a sense of time pressure?

That's right. It builds a certain amount of internal arousal in me to know, okay, I've got 72 hours to complete something, and it's now game time. I like the game time before the game time before a podcast. I'll put in anywhere from, you know, several days to weeks or even months in preparation. So it's really elastic, depending on the topic. But when it came to exams in school, or if it comes to writing deadlines, I consider the shipping of the product or the presentation of the live event that I happen to be doing as the second game or event. The first event is the pressure and the excitement of getting into the groove, of doing focused work. Because for me, that's such a drug. I mean, it feels like having all the systems of my brain and body oriented towards one specific thing is just sheer bliss for me.

So it sounds like then you're actually not a chronic procrastinator.

Thank you. I've never. That's never been the way I viewed myself, but now I'll take that.

It's a strategy for you.

It is a strategy. That's right. And I, you know, I was fairly wayward youth, barely finished high school, etc. So by time I got serious about school, which was my second year of university, when deadlines were presented like, there's an exam, there's a midterm exam on a given date. That was exciting to me. That was exciting. I was like, okay, that's the big thing. That's my opportunity to. To prove myself to myself, because I was really coming from behind. And then the opportunity to. Or I should say the feeling of dropping into that groove. Like, this is the exciting part, is the preparation. Likewise with podcasting for our solo podcast. I love the research as much as I love presenting the material. Maybe more.

Maybe more.

Maybe more. Right. Likewise for university lectures or for traveling and giving seminars. As a traditional academic, I'm sure you're familiar with that, right?

Of course.

Preparation is where you realize. It's almost like I think of it as somebody like a minor in a mine and just finding a gem. And, of course, then there are all the thoughts of what you can do with that later. And you're gonna show people it has a certain value to the world, et cetera. But it's the searching and finding those gems that is, like, even as I talk about it, I feel like my body's gonna float out of the chair a little bit.

I have the same experience. It's the unleashed curiosity and then the rush of discovery. And by the time you're teaching it or explaining it, like. But I already know this. Like, I'm not learning anything anymore. And, yes, I'm excited to share it, and I hope it's helpful to other people. So, you know, I think as you talk about what your process looks like, I don't even think what you do qualifies as procrastination, technically getting better and better. I mean, seriously, if you think about how procrastination is defined, it's. It's delaying despite an expected cost. And you don't think there's a cost. You actually see a benefit.

That's right. And I've tried starting.

That's not procrastination. That's just delay.

Yeah, I've tried starting things earlier, and I should say that my process often begins much earlier than the physical process. Like if I was being observed in an experiment. Okay, Andrew's finally sitting down to write this book chapter, or finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode. But I'm thinking about it all the time. I mean, much to the dismay of people in my life, I'm constantly thinking about these things. I mean, walking to take out the recycle. I'll have ideas, and then I'll write them down. I constantly am writing things down. Voice memos into my phone. I have a method of capture where I basically try and just grab everything and then filter out what's useful. Do you have a process like that for gleaning ideas?

A little bit. I do now. So when Jihe Shin and I started this research on procrastination, she had come to me, she was a very creative doctoral student, and she said, I have my best ideas when I'm procrastinating. And it was one of those moments where I didn't believe her. But I thought it was an interesting enough idea that it was worth exploring. And I said, show me. Let's get some data. Let's see if we can test this. And she ended up gathering data in a Korean company where she surveyed people on how often they procrastinate and then got their supervisors to rate their creativity. And sure enough, found that people who procrastinate sometimes were rated as more creative than people who rarely do. Like me, the precrastinators. And I remember asking her, what about the chronic procrastinators? And she's like, I don't know. They never filled out my survey.

Yeah, as I recall from that paper, there's inverted U shaped function with procrastination on the vertical axis and creativity on the horizontal axis.

Flipped.

Flipped, sorry. Okay, so explain to me then the relationship between procrastination and creativity.

Yeah. So basically the peak of creativity is in the middle of procrastination.

Okay, got it.

And yeah, there's an upside down U curve there. And so then I thought this was fascinating. So then we go into the lab to say, can we replicate this? Can we control it in an experiment? And the hardest part of that was, how do you randomly assign people to procrastinate? To my knowledge, never been done before. And we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of tasks to do and then tempt them with highly entertaining YouTube videos that were sort of placed on their screen. And we put different numbers of YouTube videos there so that if there's only one, you're not tempted to procrastinate much. If there are four, you're probably going to get sucked into a little bit of a YouTube spiral. If there are eight, you might be putting off the task. That's much less exciting than watching Jimmy Kimmel's mean tweets, for example.

And this was done in a fairly naturalistic environment for these tests.

Yeah. People are on a computer. They're asked to solve some creative problems that look pretty similar to what you might do in your job. And then we're going to score your creativity later. And it turned out that the people who were attempted to procrastinate moderately ended up generating the most creative ideas. So why is that? There are a couple of things that happen, and you have to look at both sides of the curve. So what's wrong with the precratinators? And also what happens to the extreme procrastinators? And in both cases, what happens is you end up with a little bit of tunnel vision. So when I dive right into a task, I'm stuck with my first ideas, and I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas. I'm less likely to reframe the problem. I'm less likely to access remote knowledge because I'm just diving right in. And meanwhile, the chronic procrastinators end up in the same boat because they don't get started until the last minute. And so they have to rush ahead with the easiest idea to implement as opposed to really developing the most novel idea. And meanwhile, the people in the middle who are starting to feel that pressure of like, wow, I kind of spun my wheels for 10 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos. I'm running out of time for this task. They still have enough time to work on the ideas that were active in the back of their minds, and that gives them a shot at more novel ideas. So I've tried to adopt this, to answer your question, I've tried to adopt this as my process now to say I will still dive into a project ahead of schedule, but I will not commit to an idea until I've let it incubate for a few weeks and I'm working on other things. Whereas an earlier version of me, when I'd sit down to write a book, as soon as I had the book idea, I would start writing on day one. Now I have the idea, I file it away, and I give myself at least a month before I begin drafting. And I think it feels less productive, but it's far more creative.

What are your thoughts about some of what you described being an unconscious way of seeding the mind and the unconscious with an idea? So, for instance, let's take a look. School academic scenario where students get an assignment, and the assignment is contained within a folder, and it just says assignment. Okay. And it's due in a particular date, and it says due on that particular date, and they're given the folder, but they have no sense of what the assignment is. You can imagine one category of procrastinator that will take that thing and put it down and avoid looking at it entirely, versus another category of procrastinator that will flip Flip it open and take a look at. Okay, this is going to be an essay on, you know, I don't know, something about economic theory in the late 1700s. Close it and then procrastinate. There is an idea which I, frankly, I subscribe to a little bit because we recently did this series on mental health, not mental illness, but mental Health, with Dr. Paul Conti, where he talked extensively about the unconscious and how the unconscious mind is always working with ideas, things that we are concerned about, performance, these sorts of things, even if we're not aware of them. What are your thoughts about the creativity that's seeded by slight procrastination, being related to actually knowing what you're procrastinating on specifically?

I think it turns out to be, I don't want to say essential, but critical. So one of the things we found is in order for moderate procrastination to fuel creativity, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the thing you're procrastinating on.

Interesting.

And so what happens is, if you're bored, for example, by the topic, you're not going to open the folder. You're not going to start thinking about it at all. It's not going to begin. You're not going to do any subconscious processing. You're not going to have any unexpected connections between this topic and something else you've learned about or been curious about. If you're interested in the problem, then when you put it off, you're much more likely to still keep it active in the back of your mind. And that's when you begin to see. I imagine you could explain the biology of this. I imagine, for example, there are probably more neural networks that are connecting. You get access to ideas that previously would have been separate nodes. I think that you want to know what the topic is. You don't want to just see the blank assignment, but you also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you, otherwise you're going to avoid it as opposed to letting it percolate.

That brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation, and I'd like to link that up with the topic of performance. So when I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about. Some more than others, of course. But occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that, frankly, I had minimal interest in. Never zero, but minimal interest. And as a way of dealing with that, I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself and just telling myself, okay, I'm super interested in reading this, and I'M gonna force myself to be interested in reading it. And lo and behold, I would start falling in love with certain things. Maybe it was even the, you know, the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize. And then I would go look it up. And I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time, so I filed that away. I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary wor that I learned in the course of my university courses. That frankly made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy. Which if you ever try and study for that at the end, it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to memory and context. So I could find little hooks and through those hooks I could kind of ratchet my way into a larger interest. And then lo and behold, I'm really interested in Greek mythology. I actually liked that one at first, but I didn't have to trick myself. But maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation. Is it always reflexive? Can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about a given topic or scenario or group of people? And then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to performance. Because there's a rich literature on this, as I recall, and I remember, you know, the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things they were already intentionally motivated to do. Maybe we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it. But I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do. Yeah. And yet succeeding in life, you know, until you can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else, which hopefully you know by now you have find.

A way to get it done right.

This is fundamental to being a functional human being, frankly. Not just successful in air quotes, but functional. We got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing.

Yeah. So I think we can talk about a couple different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation. We can think about how the task itself is designed. We can think about reward systems. And then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others, which I hope are not lies, but rather persuasive attempts. Let's start on that one. Actually, I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self deception.

Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal motivated pursuits. But at that time for me also survival. As I mentioned, I didn't do well in high school. I really wanted to perform well in university. But I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me. It felt catabolic. And I don't know, maybe at that age, I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity. We know it never closes. But I think I also fell in love with the process of learning how to do what I just described.

Yeah. So I think for most people, the best method of self persuasion is actually to convince somebody else. So I'm thinking of Elliot Aronson's classic research on cognitive dissonance, where he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting. And if he paid you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification. Like, I got 20 bucks to, you know, to kind of fib a little bit about this task. You know, the task is bad, but I did it for the. For the payment. When he paid you $1 to go and tell somebody that you loved a task that you didn't, you ended up liking it more. Wow.

And maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised, because I hope people got what you just said very clearly. If they didn't. If you don't like doing something, going and reporting to somebody else how great that thing is. So lying about it to somebody else is one way to increase the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic. And if you're paid $20 to go lie to somebody in the positive direction, so against your true belief, it's less effective in shifting your underlying affect about that thing, your emotions, than if you're paid less.

Correct? Yeah, exactly. Now, I think, obviously in the experiment, lying was an easy way to show the effect. But in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right, I've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me. And then in the process of explaining it to somebody else, I'm going to convince myself because I'm hearing the argument from somebody I already like and trust. I've also chosen. I've chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons. And so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is, if you're trying to find a hook to make a topic intriguing, you've got to figure out, okay, what is it that would make this fascinating to me? And in a lot of cases, what you're looking for is a curiosity gap. I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch that you have to scratch. So there's something you want to know and you don't know it yet. So I would say I tell my students often, like, take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle, like, something that you just do not know the answer to. Like, actually, I've talked with our kids about this. Like, what really happened to King Tut? Do you know? Can you get to the bottom of that? And all of a sudden you're like, I wonder. I need to Google it. And then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this. And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing it becomes. And I think that's the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation.

I see. So inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology, that curiosity as a verb, the act of being curious and seeking information. Where. Well, and I should say I define curiosity, and hopefully you'll disagree with me or agree. Either way, it doesn't matter as long as we can get a deeper understanding. I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome.

Yes.

Is that right?

Yeah. In psychology, it's typically defined as just wanting to know. And that means you're driven by the question, not a particular answer, which is exactly what you're driving at.

Okay, great. And I think it was Dorothy Parker that said the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity, as.

There shouldn't be a cure for curiosity. Right.

And by the way, folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserve curiosity in the brain. It's got to be a distributed network. There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems of dopamine, et cetera, in some way. Because when one discovers something new that satisfies some curiosity, that's clearly there's an internal reward there. Okay, let me back up. So if your child or an adult is dreading exploring a topic or going about an assignment of any kind, you will give them a question that they then need to resolve. What if the assignment is like, rake the leaves off the front lawn, do you say, count the leaves?

Or.

I mean, how does one get past the sort of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads, where it's unlikely that they're going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful for future.

You always start with, okay, what's the first experiment I can run, find the most interesting looking leaf for your favorite leaf. And then that lasts for about two minutes. And okay, now we still have a lot of leaves there, right? I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone. And so when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find, what you want to substitute with is a sense of purpose. Maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you, you need to find a meaningful outcome. So there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning this goes through high school and think, this is not just interesting to me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to help other people one day. They're more persistent in their studying, they end up getting better grades. And so I think intrinsic motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how. A sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why. Why does this matter? And so I'd say with the raking leaves, let's try to connect that task to something else that you care about. Are you going to pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home? Are you going to have a place to play soccer that you didn't before? And I think then the process of getting to that. I guess what I'd say is if you're trying to motivate yourself, it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this. If I was going to motivate somebody else, I would take a page out of the motivational interviewing playbook where I would say, okay, Andrew, actually, let's play this out for a second. So you're gonna rake a pile of leaves. It's a two hour task. Zero to ten. How excited are you about that?

A three.

Three? Really? I'm surprised. I thought you were gonna say zero or one. Why is it not lower?

I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving my body.

There we go. Okay, so you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity. And I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task. I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it. And as you start to articulate it, boom, self persuasion kicks in.

Love it. I'm going to start using these approaches.

Try it at your own risk.

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So there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation and performance. And I think the latest conclusions, if you look at the latest meta analyses, so huge study of studies trying to accumulate what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary and now we're going to give you incentive compensation? There is a boost. So in general, people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output, but these incentives are better for motivating quantity than quality. So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more thorough.

Are they less careful and less thorough?

No, actually, they're still positive effects. On average, they're just weaker. And of course, you could then start to say, well, how do I incentivize being fast and careful? But I think where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. And you were alluding to this earlier, dating back to the early 70s, where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it, you might conclude that you're only doing it for the outcome and you lose interest in the task. So the classic demonstration, Mark Lepper and colleagues, is kids playing video games, and they're playing them because they're fun. And then you start to add in an incentive, and then when the incentive is taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed. And now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it as opposed to I love the process. I think that phenomenon does not have to exist. So we know, for example, at work, if managers, as long as they give people autonomy, they don't present the rewards in a controlling way. So instead of saying, andrew, in order to earn this, you need to do the following work. If they say, hey, look, I'd really love it if you would deliver the following. And in order to make that worth your while, I'm offering this incentive. People react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control. So I think that's, I guess, the starting point in the presence of autonomy. I don't think there's a major downside of extrinsic rewards. I think you also have to be careful that, yeah, I guess that you're not overjustifying the task. In other words, you're not swamping people's intrinsic reason for doing it, but you're adding a reason to try it. So actually, if we go to a different domain for a second, so look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables. Extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time. But then the hope is that they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind, and then they find reasons to keep doing it. And I think that's how I want a lot of rewards to work. I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior. I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior. And if you frame them that way, it's a lot easier for people to say, yeah, you know what? That reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for that reward.

Yeah, you basically answered the question I was going to ask, which is. And you know, at risk of sounding New Agey, but we are sitting in California. I could imagine that when one is focused on the extrinsic rewards. So a physical task or a cognitive task for an extrinsic reward. If I'm focusing on the extrinsic reward, I'm also. Air quotes. Again, not present. Right. I'm thinking about the outcome. I'm not thinking about process. And I think there's. Perhaps you can flesh out some of what this is exactly. But I think there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally present to the task, that we're going to perform better. And presumably our intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well. Is that true?

Yeah, I think so. If we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for. For performance one you touched on earlier, it's focus of attention. It's much easier to find flow when you're intrinsically motivated. You get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away. So you mentioned sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time. You forget where you are. Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just merged into the task. And so that concentration is helpful. There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing, you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles. You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas. And so I think there's a working harder, there's A working longer, there's a working smarter and there's also thinking more clearly effect.

This is a brief but related tangent. One of the things that I found incredibly difficult in recent years is that, you know, most of my life really, since I was a small kid, I was foraging for things. And then I used to give lectures on Monday in class, if they let me, until they eventually stopped me about the stuff I was reading about all weekend. So got an early start on the professorial front. But now if I'm reading something and I discover what I think is a really valuable piece of information or a tool or a protocol, I'm like, wow, this is really cool. These findings are oh so cool. There's a problem, which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world through social media. We all do. This could be.

Wait, I'm sorry, you're on social media.

From time to time.

You're all over my feed.

You and I both do our own social media, by the way, which I really appreciate. I think one can always detect if someone else is handling someone's social media. So yes, I'm on social media and I love that I have the opportunity to, to both send out ideas and information and also receive feedback. I really love the comment section and always encourage comments. I learned from it. Frankly, love is a strong word. I learned from it, you know, and you and I were weaned in the academic culture where frankly, the kind of hazing that one receives in academic culture is very different than the kind of hazing that one receives on social media. But let's just say that if you come up through academia, you develop a pretty thick skin.

I agree with that. I do have to say though that there was a part of me that was really surprised when I started posting on social that I love constructive criticism. I was unprepared for the number of people who will knee jerk criticize a study without even looking at whether the methods are rigorous.

Right.

Like, come on, if I posted this, surely it's at least worth considering the possibility that there's strong evidence behind it.

Right? Well, that's where a brief, I won't call it a retort, but a response of clearly you should read the study further because I think you'll be satisfied with the answer or something. I don't know. But I agree it can be a little bit harsh in there sometimes. But you know, the social media channels are, I think, you know, they have, it's a double edged blade. They obviously have their issues, but can be a wonderful Opportunity to share information and share it quickly. The problem is that it takes me out of what I was doing initially, which was learning, searching for those gems with which to share later. And I think there's a broader landscape to consider this where people, for instance, are. I was at the beach yesterday. It was just absolutely spectacular day at the beach, especially for this time of year. And everyone was taking pictures of that experience on their phone and probably sharing that experience, either social media or with friends. This is very different than taking a photograph and not seeing that photograph until later or not sending it out. And so there are now near infinite number of circumstances where we are taken out of the rewarding experience. I should rephrase that. We are taking ourselves out of the rewarding experience and focusing on a different rewarding experience that I think by definition is an extrinsic reward. So we are taking ourselves out of our intrinsically rewarding experiences and activating these extrinsic rewards. And do you think in any way that's undermining our experience of things that we really enjoy? Again, not to demonize social media or these channels, but I've personally found it difficult to refrain from sharing this knowledge. I'm so excited to share, but I deliberately delay and there's a lot. I have a deep list of folders full of things that I want to post, but I'm just doing it, you know, systematically over time because I really fight the temptation to do this. Mostly because I want to continue to enjoy this learning process and this seeking process so much.

Yeah, I feel the same. The same. I feel torn. I think it was E.B. white who said, I rise in the morning, torn between the desire to enjoy the world and the desire to improve the world. And this makes it difficult to plan the day. And I feel that every day, I think. I mean, I felt it this morning. I was like, okay, it's time to leave to come to the Huberman podcast. I'm like, wait. But I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing. So what do I do? Do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria?

The explanation? I was getting my morning sunlight and therefore I'm X number of minutes or even hours late would have been completely fine.

I figured as much. Yes, that's a built in, acceptable excuse with you, I think. I mean, I think everybody experiences a version of this. And it's definitely gotten worse with social media and with smartphones, I think so. One of the most startling data points for me was Gloria Mark first put this on my radar Before COVID the average person was checking email 72 times a day. How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple minutes if you're self interrupting that often? You can't. Brigid Shelti has a great term for this. She calls it time confetti. And she says we're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into these like tiny little dots of confetti. And not only can we not accomplish anything, we're also eroding our own sense of joy because it's really hard to enjoy the, you know, the 30 second blip of time that you get on a task. And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than how to solve them. But one thing we do know is blocking out uninterrupted time is meaningful. There's a great Leslie Perlow experiment where she takes engineers and she has them. She sets a quiet time policy. No interruptions. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon. 65% above average productivity.

Could you repeat the protocol again?

Yeah. So quiet time, there are a couple iterations of it, but I think the most effective one was Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. No meetings, no interruptions, no slack, no emails before noon.

And during those periods of no interruptions, one could tend to whatever their primary purpose is at work.

Yeah, you have.

So for me, it might be podcasting, obviously I don't have my phone in here and never do, but it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else. It just means focusing on the major task.

The task. Exactly. And you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose. And I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon. It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it that seems to be important. And I think when I think about this, I'd be really curious about your take on chronotypes here, because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple years is that if you're a morning person, you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning. And so the quiet time block would work very well for me as a morning person. If you're a night owl, you probably want that block in the late afternoon. And I was encouraged. There was some evidence during COVID that people have their best meetings right after lunch, that they're something like 30% less likely to multitask in an after lunch meeting. And I guess you could probably unpack the, like the food coma, you know, getting re energized by other people. But it's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few hours and the last few hours of the day for deep work and then doing our core meetings and interactions and kind of off task activities in the middle. What do you think about that as a sequence?

Yeah, well, I have a lot of questions about this for you, but I love that sequence. It certainly fits with my natural rhythms. I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule. When I say standard, I mean going to bed somewhere between let's say 9:30 and 11:30pm waking up sometime between let's say 6:00am and 8:00am, maybe 5:30 or 7:30, something like that. So not highly unusual night owl or super early bird for people that are following that sort of schedule. The first let's just say from zero to eight hours after waking there tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catecholamines. So dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, which generally, okay, generally speaking, lead to increases in alertness, attention and focus that are great for analytic work, great for implementation of strategies that you already understand and you need to churn through a lot of stuff. And of course there's a big increase in the morning, especially if you view morning sunlight. A healthy increase, I should say, in cortisol. Cortisol is not bad, folks. You want cortisol, but you want that peak early in the day. We know that. Okay, so for most people it seems at least my understanding is that that period of time, zero to eight hours after waking or so, is best devoted to the quote unquote most critical tasks. But one of the common problems is that people take that ability to implement a known strategy and they start battering back all the emails or talking to all. By the way, talking to co workers is great and it's often required, but the question is whether or not it's productive conversation or whether or not it's just conversation. And we tend to have a lot of energy early in the day and I'm obsessed with the idea of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy. So there we're talking about neural energy and then post lunch. So really as we get to the sort of nine to 17 hours after waking, there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day, that postprandial dip, there's a post lunch sleepiness that can be partially offset by delaying your morning caffeine a bit. If you have the afternoon crash. But it's interesting that you know that more productive meetings and less task switching and distraction occurred in meetings after lunch, because that makes me think that perhaps being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus. And indeed that's the sort of optimal state. Relaxed but focused. You're not sleepy, but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're tending to a bunch of things. Because I think a lot of people do feel that way. And I'm drinking double espresso right now, late mid morning, late morning and I can sit still. But I think certain zoom meetings, how do I say this? I don't want to offend any of my colleagues. I mean they are boring enough, they are not content, rich enough to grab all my attention. And nowadays of course, there are multiple screens. Typically I've got two phones and a computer and you have to really spend some work to flip over those phones while I'm on a zoom and things like that.

What were you saying?

So it's maybe the reduction in autonomic error arousal that supports what you just described. But I don't know, my thinking or my understanding rather was that creative work and kind of brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon. I've noticed when lecturing I'd be curious what your experience is in university lectures. When I held courses in the evening, I used to like to hold my courses 5 to 7pm or even 7 to 9:30pm when I was teaching undergraduates that people were much looser and more relaxed. And I always thought that that might have something to do with an increase in GABA transmission that's known to happen in late evening, that people are just kind of more relaxed and less social anxiety. They've been around people for much of the day. I send back more reflections than answers. I don't have any firm neuroscience explanations for what you described, but there are some emerging theories about how that might work. And it has this 0 to 9 hours phase one, 9 to 17 hours phase two, and then of course from 17 to 24 hours, I'll call it phase three. You should be asleep. Yeah, ideally.

Well, I think there's a confound in your teaching experience, which is undergrads often sleep in until what, noon? Or they might be up until 4am.

Or at least 10am seems to be a typical rise time for the undergrad.

So a morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake. But there's some brand new evidence that at least on creativity at Work I read a series of, I think it was three studies recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the morning. And in part, I think, again, I don't think any neuroscientist has touched the mechanisms on this yet, but in terms of the psychological processes early on, there seems to be a benefit of the energy level, and some of that energy leads to more divergent thinking. And later, if you're a morning person, you might lose the ability to diverge quite as much, and so you end up in a more conventional space of thought. Does that track at all with your understanding of how it might play out in the brain?

My understanding is it'd be a little bit. It would be individual. But there is something to these liminal states between sleep and waking. So maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said and what you just said, which is that we know that in the transition states into and out of sleep, and it doesn't necessarily have to be within the first half hour, in and out of sleep, that there seems to be more divergent thinking or at least activation of neural networks that are not as constrained as one observes when they're in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode. Right. I mean, I think.

Is that similar to the shower effect?

The shower effect. So people have ideas in the shower or while running or while falling asleep or. My best ideas always come within the first hour after waking. That's why I carry a notebook around. And much to the dismay of people in my life, oftentimes I don't want to hear or talk to anyone first thing in the morning. This is problematic and I had to make adjustments. We'll talk about adjustments between productivity and control and family interactions. This is something I know you've worked on and written about, but those liminal states are interesting and I'd love your thoughts on this. I've had several guests on this podcast talk about their creative process, namely Rick Rubin. He's famous for his work in music producing, also has a great podcast, Tetragrammaton, as well as Carl Deissroth, a colleague of mine, who's really in the 0.0001% of super talented bioengineers, neuroscientists, who also happens to be a full time clinical psychiatrist and has five children. Okay. And I asked them about their creative process because both of them are very creative. Carl's process involves the late at night for him, but it could really be any time of day. Deliberately making his body as still as possible and forcing himself to think in complete sentences. Rick's creative process, although it includes a lot of different things, has a lot to do with also getting very still lying down. Okay. Other folks that I've spoken to, academics and artists have referred to getting their body into motion, but quieting their mind. So these are two opposite processes. One case, the body is still, but the mind is deliberately, very active. In the other scenario, the body is very active, but they're making their mind sort of in free association, not still, but they're not deliberately thinking about any one thing.

Fascinating.

And I'm obsessed with this. Maybe you and I could work on this. You know, I'm due for a sabbatical. Maybe we could figure this out.

Because I've never seen anyone study this before.

Right. Because the nervous system. No, the nervous system. I'm not aware of anyone that's done it formally either. The nervous system, of course, is a brain body phenomenon. And so what happens when we sort of cut off the deliberate operations of brain or body and it doesn't seem to matter whether or not it's brain or body as long as one is deliberately shut off. And so anyway, I'd love your thoughts on this. I don't consider myself like an ultra creative or creative type to any great degree, but me neither.

That's why.

But I'm fascinated. Right. But I'm fascinated by these deliberate tactics that highly creative people have have undertaken in order to bring about ideas. I certainly have some of my best ideas when I'm running. And I'll just be running along like, my goodness, I wasn't even thinking. Now I need to write this down. Okay. And then continue. I tried the Deisseroth approach and the Rubin approach. Actually just spent a week with Rick overseas and indeed he spends a lot of time just still thinking. And it's a very hard practice to get to get consistent with.

I wonder if there are individual differences here on which needs to be stable or steady. I'm thinking about a huge part of creativity is overriding your default instincts. And if you're somebody whose default is to have your mind constantly going, then quieting would probably shift your train of thought to something more original or unconventional. The opposite might be be true. If you have a naturally quiet mind, I would imagine you need to sort of jolt yourself out of that with lots of access to free ranging thoughts. And so it'd be interesting actually to study whether we can predict what you should still based on your personality.

Yeah. And maybe what we could do with that study, I think we have a collaboration brewing. You know, There's a joke, you know, two scientists walk into a room and what comes out is a collaboration. So I'd want to put people in a scanner. It's hard to get people treadmilling in a scanner because of movement artifact. And just look at resting network activation and compare that to resting network activation when people are completely still and forcing themselves to think in deliberate senses. And then look at the overlap in that Venn diagram. That's what's of interest to me. They may be completely different brain states. They might actually have more similarity than differences.

I wonder then if you can tie that to differences in the quality and quantity of output. So I would imagine that one of the benefits of either kind of movement is that you end up increasing the volume of ideas, which we know is good for variety, and ultimately increases the probability that you stumble onto something new. But then I think the being still part is probably better for the filtering process. I think one of the hardest parts of creativity is actually judging your own ideas. Most creative people have many terrible ideas. In fact, the most creative people have the most horrible ideas because they just have a lot of ideas. And I think that maybe there's a way in which quieting either your body or your mind allows you to gain some distance from the idea and see whether it's boneheaded or promising.

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You know, that's a great phrase.

There's no weak sauce in your game. It's incredible. So when do you get your ideas and how do you filter those ideas?

I feel like the. When could be anytime. I think the. I mean, you've clearly experienced this too. For me, the best thing about hosting a podcast is I have an excuse to learn about anything I want from almost anyone I want. And I get to call that part of my job. And so I feel like, you know, that having that built in mechanism for learning means ideas could, could come at any moment. The, the filtering process for me is, it's evolved over the last few years. What I, what I do now is if I'm, let's say I'm starting a new book, I'll write a draft of the first chapter and I send it to five to eight people whose judgment I trust. And by design, some of those people are in my field. They're, you know, deep seated in organizational psychology. Others are, you know, very far outside, but curious about the topics I'm interested in. And I asked them for a 0 to 10 score. This is something I learned to do as a, as a springboard diver, where I would, I would take off and, you know, I'm doing a few flips or twists and I think my dive is good, but I can't see it because I'm hurling in midair and it's, everything's a blur. And so I have to rely on my coach to tell me if it was any good. I feel like creative work is the same way. You're too close to it to know how the audience is going to react to it. And yes, you don't want to create it just for the audience, but at the end of the day, you want it to be interesting or useful to them. So I asked for the 0 to 10, and no one ever says 10. And then I use that as a calibration mechanism. So if everybody is in the 7 or 8 range, I know that I'm onto something promising. And now I need to refine it. If I get a bunch of twos, threes, three and a halfs, I either need to rethink the idea or dramatically rewrite how I'm positioning it. And I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they know they need feedback on their ideas. They go to one or two people and they start to feel a little bit defensive or threatened, and their ego gets involved, and then they don't ask for anymore. What they don't realize is it's actually less painful if you get more feedback. Because when eight different people critique your work, you start to realize that a few of the comments that sort of bruise you a little bit were just idiosyncratic and no one else cared about those issues. But then five people had the same problem. That is not taste. That is a quality issue. And I've got to focus on that. And so it really helps to filter what are the revisions I need to make, what are the problems and complaints I need to pay attention to, versus what can I ignore? Because maybe this product was not for that person.

I'm recalling when I was a postdoc, I had a manuscript fully prepared, and I worked in a laboratory where I didn't work on the same thing as my postdoc advisor. He was very gracious in letting me be the outlier. And he said, well, I don't know anything about this topic. So before you submit it to this fairly prestigious, very frankly, very prestigious journal, I'll be honest, you should probably go down the hall and hand it to so and so. I don't want to mention who it was because I'm still in the same department. And I gave it to him, this individual, and he looked down, he said, yeah, you know, it looks interesting, but I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of interest in this. It's just like, not. I was like, no way. Like this. I think this is really cool. But I was pretty dismayed. So I was like, oh, gosh, so what do I do? So I went back to my advisor, and thankfully, he's a bit of an iconoclast. And he said, that's the best feedback you could have gotten. Definitely submit it to that particular journal. And I must say that paper got accepted faster than any other paper. I've never had an experience like that. I mean, it required some revisions. I remember thinking like, wow, what an unusual response. After having instructed me to go ask a more senior colleague who's at that time assistant professor, and then to get the essentially negative response and then to take that as like you should definitely send it out really taught me a lesson that sometimes one needs to invert their, their action according to the negative feedback they get. Not always, but that was an N of one. Okay, so it's not. Shouldn't be extrapolated to too many circumstances, but basically led me to not seek out feedback prior to submission of things terribly often. I mean, I check information obviously prior to podcasts, I check the validity of the information in podcasts and papers. But it made me realize that people's opinions can be highly idiosyncratic and in some cases outright wrong. And really the opinion of the journal is what mattered most in terms of getting it accepted or not. So how do you, you said give it to the greatest number of people. But if it's anything like comments on social media, there's a salience to negative comments. So how should we filter positive versus negative feedback?

Well, there's a, there's a meta analysis here. This is Kluger and Denisi looking at 100 years of feedback research, and they found that what drives the utility of feedback is not whether it's positive or negative, it's whether it focuses on the task or on the self. So if I tell you that your work is terrible, you're going to get defensive. If I tell you that your work is great, you're going to get complacent. If I tell you here's the specific thing that I liked about your work, you're going to try to learn to repeat that. And if I tell you here's the thing I didn't like, you're going to try to see if you can fix it. So I actually think we should worry less about whether the feedback is encouraging or discouraging and more about how do I make sure that I get input that's going to allow me to learn from my strengths and also overcome my weaknesses. And actually, one of the things I've learned recently is there's some, I would say a growing body of evidence at this point that asking for feedback is not the best way to get people to help you, because when you ask for feedback, you end up getting two groups of people. You get cheerleaders, and you get critics. And cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self. Critics are attacking your worst self. What you want is a coach, which is somebody who helps you become a better version of yourself. And the way you get people to coach you is not to say, give me feedback, because they will then look at the past and tell you what you screwed up or what you did right. What you want is to say, can you give me advice for next time? And then they look at the future and they'll give you either a note on something to repeat or something to correct. And this is such a subtle shift, but it can make a big difference. Andrew. One of the things, I guess I found myself applying this to a lot is after giving speeches, I used to get off stage and say, I would love some feedback. And you get back a bunch of, oh, you know, I really enjoyed that. Thanks. What do I do with that information? I'm trying to learn how to get better. And when I shift the question to say, what's the one thing I could do better next time? It's like, oh, don't open with a joke the audience couldn't tell you were joking. Frequently, it's give me a little bit more of a through line. You focused a lot on a bunch of interesting points, but I lost the connective tissue. And those actionable suggestions are much more likely to come when you just ask for a tip as opposed to an evaluation.