How to Believe in Yourself

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've all heard the urban legend of the mother who, upon finding her child trapped under a car, is able to summon superhuman strength to lift the vehicle from the ground and save her child. It turns out there's truth to the legend. In 1982, Angela Cavallo's son was working on a Chevy Impala when it fell on top of him. Angela lifted the car high enough off the ground that 2 neighbors could pull her son to safety. A similar event happened in 2019 when an Ohio teen lifted a car to save his neighbor's life. In 2006, a Canadian woman saved a group of children, including her own 2 sons, by fighting off a polar bear. It's unclear biologically how people can summon godlike strength in scenarios like these. But it raises an interesting question: are we all capable of more than we think? You often hear echoes of this theme in the biographies of famous people. At 21, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS and given only a few years to live. He not only defied the odds and lived to the age of 76, He also went on to become one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of all time. Bethany Hamilton was 13 when a shark bit off her left arm. She went on to become a professional surfer who has won multiple championships. It makes you think, doesn't it? What can I accomplish if I really set my mind and heart to it? What am I keeping myself from accomplishing by believing it to be impossible? The science of human potential and psychological insights on how to discover our potential. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states.

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Practice, practice, practice. What keeps us from reaching our true potential in life? Well, that's easy. We should figure out what we ought to do and then do it. But like that joke about Carnegie Hall, the devil is in the details. At the University of Pennsylvania, organizational psychologist Adam Grant has studied how, when, and why our minds get bogged down by obstacles. In his book, Hidden Potential, Adam explores the psychology of how we can become the best versions of ourselves. Adam Grant, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

So glad to be back, Shankar. Thanks for having me.

Adam, many years ago, you were starting college, and you knew you had an interest in psychology, but you were also really interested in physics. You signed up for a class with a very eminent astrophysicist. Tell me what class this was and how it went.

It was a cosmology class, and it was about understanding the universe. I remember there was a shopping period where we got to sample all the classes we were interested in before they officially started. And I went to the Intro to Astrophysics day, and this professor seemed so dynamic. He loved physics. He was clearly an expert. He'd won tons of awards. He had many publications. And, you know, I walked into class and thought, this is gonna continue to ignite my interest in physics. And it did not go as I hoped. I didn't understand it at all. I felt like an idiot. And I gave up on physics.

The first reason we fail to reach our potential is the obvious one. We never get started. Something knocks us off course at the beginning of a journey, And we don't go down that road. Years later, we look back and ask, what if? Then there are situations where we do get started, but quickly get stuck. This happened to Adam, believe it or not, as he was writing the chapter in his book on how to get unstuck.

It's ironic, isn't it? I'm writing a whole chapter about how to get unstuck, and I just completely stalled in the middle of it. I cycled through so many different metaphors for getting unstuck. Some of them were embarrassingly bad. Getting unstuck is like having to demolish and renovate a building. And then it was going to be like you have to uproot a plant. At one point I was digging a tunnel. Then there was a wall that you're trying to break through. And these metaphors were really forced. And I spent weeks and weeks spinning my wheels on this. And finally, I just gave up and I said, I have to put this chapter away and move on to something else because this is not moving forward and I'm driving myself mad.

I understand that you spent a lot of time watching the TV show Friends during this period.

Yeah, it was definitely— I was chilling with Monica and Chandler, which, you know, mostly happened late at night. So I was definitely guilty of what's been called revenge bedtime procrastination. Putting off going to sleep because I had a really miserable, monotonous day, and now I'm going to get revenge and do something fun. And it did no good whatsoever.

The feeling of being stuck comes with a psychological cost. It's not just that you are making no progress, you are acutely aware you are making no progress.

Languishing was first defined by the sociologist Corey Keyes, but immortalized by everyone's favorite philosopher, Mariah Carey. Keyes defines languishing as a sense of emptiness and stagnation. Most of us would say, I feel meh or blah. You're not burned out, you still have some energy, but you're not at peak motivation. You don't have a full sense of purpose and progress. It's a bit of a vicious cycle because when you're languishing, you feel like you're stuck, but then it keeps you stuck. If you look at the evidence, one of the sort of the challenges of languishing is that it disrupts focus and dulls motivation. So, you know, in my case, I stopped trying new ideas. I stopped writing, and then I just stay stuck.

I want to talk about a final way we create mental blocks for ourselves. Let's say you do accomplish something big. You manage to push through obstacles. You reach a goal. Once you get to what feels like a top, it can be all too easy to go sliding down. Let's talk about an athlete, Adam. In high school, R.A. Dickey was making a name for himself as a highly skilled baseball player. He looked like he was headed somewhere. Tell me his story.

Arie Dickey was a phenom.

He—

I think he gets to his sophomore year of high school, and there are already pro scouts showing up at his games.

Wow.

He gets to college, and he wins an Olympic bronze medal. He's a starting pitcher for Team USA. And he gets drafted in the first round by the Texas Rangers. He's offered a signing bonus of nearly $1 million. And he knows he's going somewhere. He's gonna start off at the very top of their minor league system, and then, you know, give it a year or two and he'll make the major leagues.

So he shows up to sign his contract in 1996, and a team trainer notices something odd about an X-ray. Tell me what he found.

Well, the trainer notices that his arm, it hangs at a strange angle. They do the X-ray, and they discover that R.A. is actually missing a ligament in his right elbow. He's born without it. He never knew. And it didn't seem to hold him back up until that point. But if you want to throw a blazing fastball, that ligament turns out to be pretty important. And it seems to put a ceiling on his potential, that he's never gonna hit 100 miles an hour. And the difference between throwing in the low 90s and 100 Is a huge deal for a major league pitcher.

Did he still get his million-dollar signing bonus?

No, he did not. They cut it to less than $80,000. And they sent him to the bottom rungs of the minor league system.

So clearly, this is someone who, again, felt like he was going somewhere, real spark, sort of had caught lightning in a bottle, and then suddenly feels like he's sliding back down Down the mountain. In his late 20s, A-Rae gets a break. The Rangers bring him up to the majors full-time, and it looks again like he had achieved his dream. Tell me what happens this time around.

Well, this is after 7 years of toiling away in the minors, trying to figure out, all right, if I can't throw as fast as I want to go, I'm going to mix up speed and spin, and I'm just going to trick batters, and that's going to be my competitive advantage. So he gets called up. He's in his late 20s. This is supposed to be the prime of his career. And he just bombs. If you read the coverage of his performance at the time, and also his potential, people say he's mediocre. He loses more games than he wins. People start calling him a has-been. And worse yet, a never-was.

Hmm. And at some point, his managers bring him in for a Tough conversation. How does that unfold, Adam?

It doesn't go well for him. They say to him, look, you're going nowhere. And he agrees with it. He realizes, you know, this is— this is not panning out for me. They send him back down to the minors. And yeah, I think it looks to a lot of people like his dream is over.

What happens next?

Well, R.A. Dickey is a determined human being. He's full of grit, so he spends his entire offseason throwing pitches against cinder blocks. He actually drives around in his car with a baseball in his right hand so he can practice his grip. He pushes himself harder than he's ever pushed himself in his life. And the next season, he gets another shot. His first game back in the majors, he ties a Major League record. But Shankar, it's not the kind of record that you want. He gives up 6 home runs in 3 innings.

Wow!

And over a century of baseball, no pitcher has ever done worse. He gets booed right out of the game and sent back to the minors again, which feels to him like strike 3, you're out.

Most of us are not professional athletes, but many of us have had this feeling. We catch a break, accomplish something, but then it seems like there's nowhere else to go but down. But it turns out there was more to R.A.'s story, as there is to yours. When we come back, the most common strategies we all use to reach our potential and the science of whether they work. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. What are your wildest dreams? Do you want to write a book someday? Run a marathon? Maybe you've always wanted to climb Mount Everest. Sometimes our dreams seem so outlandish we don't even voice them. They seem grandiose. Of course, dismissing a goal before we get started on it is a surefire way to never achieving that goal. But when we do decide to work on an ambitious goal, there are common strategies most of us turn to. Psychologist Adam Grant says these solutions often don't work the way we think they work. Adam, when you were a freshman in high school, you played a lot of video games. One summer, your mom dragged you to the local swimming pool. Tell me what happened that day.

I saw a lifeguard on his break get up on the diving board. And I remember watching him leap off the board and do a front 2.5— 2 flips and then a dive— and then just vanish into the water. And I guess I'd seen diving on TV in the Olympics a few times. I'd never seen it up close, and I was mesmerized. And I said, I want to learn how to do that.

So you spent the rest of the summer learning some basic dives, and then you show up at fall tryouts for the diving team. Your coach has both good news and bad news for you. Why don't we start with the bad news?

He basically told me that I lacked a lot of the things that you would normally look for in a diver. I walked like Frankenstein. I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. I couldn't jump high at all. I basically lacked the explosive power, flexibility, and grace that you expect in a diver.

So what's— what's the good news here?

That's what I was wondering. I was like, wait, is there good news? And the coach, Eric Best, said to me, listen, diving is a nerd sport. It attracts the people who weren't quick enough for basketball or strong enough for football or fast enough for track. If you work hard at this, by the time you're a senior, you can be a state finalist.

Hmm. All right, so you said there's a path for me here. I might not have the natural athletic skills, but I have the grit and the determination. Tell me what happened next. Did you apply yourself and learn to become a diver?

I spent a lot of time walking down the board. I would do my approach, I would jump to the end of the board, and I'd feel like I was off balance or it wasn't going quite right. So I'd stop and turn around and start over. And I probably wasted at least half of every practice not ever taking off. I would balk on a basic front dive pike. Like, I would still stop and start over because, as I learned later, I was a perfectionist.

Hmm. Tell me about that. You were trying to perfect aspects of your dive as opposed to sort of the overall— your overall ability to dive.

Yeah. Like, once I realized I was a perfectionist, I thought it was gonna be an asset in diving because it would Help me work toward perfect 10s. But what it did was it led me to stop every time my approach wasn't perfect. It also led me to focus on the wrong things. I focused on the things that I actually could perfect, like taking my already good rip entry where I would hit the water and go and disappear without a splash.

Hmm.

And instead of working on getting better at harder dives, I was just obsessed with perfecting the tiny details of my existing easy dives.

Yeah. So in other words, you didn't have a very high vertical leap, for example, and you could have spent time working on that, and that could have helped you with any number of dives, but that's not what you were focused on.

No, I should have spent a lot of time improving my vertical leap, stretching to increase my flexibility, working on the big flaws in my diving as opposed to taking the skills that I was already pretty good at And refining those.

You say there are 3 things that perfectionists often get wrong that in some ways get in the way of people accomplishing their potential. What are those 3 things, Adam?

The first mistake that perfectionists make is they obsess about tiny details that don't matter, and they miss out on the big picture. Second challenge is that perfectionists end up narrowing their areas of growth. I think if perfectionism was medication, it would actually come with a warning label. Warning, may cause stunted growth. If you're a perfectionist, you want to, you want to be flawless. And that means if you're not going to be good at something initially, you don't want to try because you might fail. And that means you stay within your comfort zone. You don't stretch beyond your strengths. And you don't take on new challenges. And then the third issue is that perfectionists are master ruminators, constantly berating themselves for their past mistakes. What they forget is that beating yourself up doesn't make you better. It leaves you bruised.

So besides perfectionism, Adam, a second thing we do when we're trying to unlock our potential is to turn to experts for advice. And in some ways, the reasoning is obvious. When we're interested in a subject but not sure where to start, why not seek out people at the top of their game and learn from them? It makes intuitive sense. Does it work, Adam?

Not as well as I expected. The research that really blew my mind on this was looking at students at Northwestern. I think it was about a decade and a half Looking at students in every possible subject, taking an intro class. And the question is, what happens to their grades in their next class in that subject?

Hmm.

Based on whether they learned from an expert. If you had a tenured or tenure-track professor for your intro class, you do worse in your next class than if you have a teacher who's less of an expert, a lecturer or an adjunct instructor.

That seems very surprising, doesn't it? Because the person— you're saying that the person who actually knows more has a worse effect on you than the person who knows less?

I think that's what the evidence suggests. And I think Einstein was a great example of this. Einstein obviously was brilliant, but he really struggled to teach elementary physics. In fact, he only attracted a few students for one of his early courses and then was forced to cancel the class the next semester when he couldn't recruit enough to fill the room. He came across as disorganized to his students because he knew too much, and all the dots connected in his head, and he could not relate as a genius and an expert to what it was like to be a beginner. And Shankar, I think that's part of what happened to me in my intro astrophysics class in college. I showed up, there's this very knowledgeable expert teacher, And he's great at teaching PhD seminars, but not so skilled when it comes to, you know, freshman astrophysics when we've never seen any of this material before, because it's been for him 40 years since he knew what it was like to not know.

So we've talked about the downsides of perfectionism and the downsides of seeking out experts. I want to talk about a third thing that many of us do when we try to achieve our potential. We tell ourselves that we should push through roadblocks by becoming our own drill sergeants. You've actually put this question to people. What do they tell you, Adam?

I've heard time and time again that if you want to reach your potential, it's all about the daily grind. You have to push yourself as hard as you can.

Yeah. Did you try and do this while you were getting stuck on your book? When you found yourself procrastinating, did you say the way to do this is to essentially whip myself and Try to, try to finish up?

I did. Yeah. I thought, okay, what I need to do is I need to focus all my attention and energy on the stuck chapter and get unstuck and block out distractions. Maybe the problem is divided attention. I'm doing too many projects right now. And so let me clear the deck. Let me just focus on this one thing. And you know what happened? I'm sitting there at my, you know, looking at the blinking cursor and it kind of feels like staring into the sun.

Why do you think this doesn't work? Why do you think that being harsh on ourselves and saying, I'm going to be single-minded in what I'm doing, why do you think it doesn't have the effects that we think it's going to have?

I think there are a couple of reasons it can fail or even backfire. One is burnout. You just exhaust yourself at some point. Two is what psychologists call bore-out. You're literally bored out of your mind. by doing the same task over and over. And 3 is that you're not opening yourself up to fresh perspectives and new ideas. If you just keep staring ahead, you're never going to see things through a different lens.

There's a 4th error that you talk about that people often fall into when they try and achieve their goals. And this one is rather subtle. People imagine that the path to their goals What do you mean by this, Adam?

I think that most people think about success as a straight line. And they think, OK, I've got to go through the following steps, and then I'll land where I'd like to be. But if you look at the evidence, success is much more likely to be circular than linear. We often go in loops to get where we want to go. It's much more of a squiggly or jagged line than it is a direct path. Which is frustrating. But as you recognize that, it becomes a little bit easier to accept the fact that not every step is going to take you forward. Sometimes you actually need to go one step backward to go 2 steps ahead.

There was a study by the cognitive scientists Wayne Gray and John Lindstadt called Plateaus, Dips, and Leaps. Tell me what it found.

I think this is such an encouraging pattern for anybody who's ever plateaued or gotten stuck. They find this pattern across people trying to improve in all kinds of skills. What they show is that when people get stuck and then they end up making a leap, usually there's a dip before the leap. In other words, they get worse before they get better. And I think an easy illustration of this is typing. If you, if you want to get faster at typing, if you like to hunt and peck, You're probably going to max out around 30 to 40 words a minute. You can keep practicing, but you're going to run into a wall because that method is only so good. If you want to get faster, you have to backtrack and learn a different method, which is you're going to type by touch. You have to learn the home keys and not look at your fingers, not look at the keyboard. And what's frustrating to a lot of people about that is it's going to take you a little while to get comfortable with that method. And in order to speed up, you actually have to slow down. And that's, I think, an illustration of what happens in so many tasks is you get stuck not because you've maxed out on your potential, not because you've hit your peak, but because you've reached the limits of the method that you're using. And you need to go back to the drawing board and learn a new method to get better.

When we want to accomplish big goals and reach our potential, we usually think we need to do certain things to get there— pull ourselves up, focus on the task, and seek expert advice. It turns out those strategies are not as effective as we might think. So what does work? When we come back, better techniques for tapping into our potential. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, Determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've all encountered them— overachievers, the students who score near-perfect SATs, colleagues who consistently knock their milestones out of the park. Athletes and entrepreneurs who start out looking no different from us, but end up looking very different. At the Wharton School, psychologist Adam Grant says there's less separating us from these high achievers than we might think. In his book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, Adam offers a number of strategies that can help us get where we want to go. Adam, when you were writing the book, you told me that you felt like you were languishing. You were bored, and the project felt stagnant. You found it very easy to get distracted. We talked earlier about how most people think the solution to this is to just block out those distractions and power through. But you learned a different lesson from playing Scrabble?

I did. I was actually playing Words with Friends. At some point, I just threw my hands up and said, I cannot. Make progress on this chapter right now. And I picked up my phone, and I went into a Words with Friends game. And then I remember I had a bunch of letters. I had—I think it spelled out Ragnoy, if I remember correctly—and I realized if I rearranged those letters, I could—if I could find an open I on the board—I could make the word original. And I did it. There was an I, and I scored this bingo. And all of a sudden, I got this jolt of, wait a minute, I'm not completely incompetent. I'm not incapable of everything. I feel like I just made a little progress there. How did you know this was not just more procrastination, Adam?

I don't.

It might have been.

But I found in my research with Jihae Shin that sometimes there are unexpected benefits of procrastinating. A lot of people think that procrastination is caused by laziness. And you feel like, well, you know, I'm just— I'm not motivated enough, or I'm just not willing to work hard enough, and you berate yourself for that. But psychologists like Fuchsia Serwa have found that procrastination is actually not caused by laziness. You're not afraid of hard work. What you're avoiding are negative emotions that a task stirs up. In some situations, it's boredom. In others, it's confusion. For many people, it's fear and anxiety. I don't know if I can do this. For me, it was frustration and confusion in that moment. I feel like I've hit a wall. I don't know where to go. I can't figure this out.

You cite research that shows that when people take on serious hobbies, their confidence climbs at work, but only if the hobbies are in a different area from their jobs. Can you talk about this work, Adam?

Yeah, if you take a detour to try to master something completely unrelated to your job, it tends to build your sense of self-efficacy. This is exactly what happened to me playing Words with Friends. You come away thinking, all right, I can do that. And so it's a completely different task that gives you a chance to sort of recharge your confidence and reboot your motivation.

And in some ways, is this really about feeling like you can notch some wins in some domains? So even if you're stuck in a primary domain that you care about, being able to notch a win in a secondary domain tells you, sort of sends you, gives you a little psychological jolt, and maybe helps you when you come back to the primary domain.

It does. A sense of progress in one part of your life really reinforces your belief in your own capability in other parts of your life.

You once ran a study that looked at the relationship between procrastination and creativity. Tell me what you found.

We basically found that there's a sweet spot of procrastination for creativity, that people who didn't procrastinate were less creative than people who would put things off a little bit. And then when Jihae first showed me those results, I remember asking her, what about the chronic procrastinators who put things off a lot? And she was like, I don't know, they didn't fill out my survey. No, they did fill out the survey eventually. And they were less creative too.

Interesting.

As rated by their supervisors. And I think what's going on here— we designed a series of experiments to get to the bottom of this. What's going on here is that if you dive right in, you're rushing ahead with your first idea. As opposed to waiting for your best idea. If you wait till the last minute, you're also rushing because you now have to implement your easiest idea as opposed to your best idea. And the sweet spot in the middle is where you have time to incubate. You're more likely to reframe the problem. You're more likely to access some unexpected ideas and take some random walks and maybe have a eureka moment. But you still have the time to really work out the most promising idea. But there's a really important caveat here, which is that a little bit of procrastination only contributed to creativity when people were intrinsically motivated by the problem they were putting off. So if you're just completely bored by the task, guess what? It's not going to be active in the back of your mind when you're procrastinating. It's only if you're interested in the problem. And you're putting it off because it's hard, or you haven't figured it out yet, that you do the subconscious processing that can be helpful with unlocking a solution.

I'm reminded of a story involving the late, great psychologist Amos Tversky. When he and Danny Kahneman were developing the foundations of what would become behavioral economics, Amos and Danny would spend a lot of time just chatting and joking. People would say, how come you guys are not writing papers? You just seem to be having a good time. And Amos said that people sometimes waste years because they're not willing to waste days. And I might be paraphrasing what he said. But basically, the point is, in their zeal to jump in and get stuff done very quickly, people sometimes are not giving themselves the room to actually figure out what it is that they should actually be working on. And yes, you might be making progress in the short run. But in fact, that progress comes at the cost of how far you can get in the long run. Right.

It's a really wise observation. And there's actually a term for it now. It's called the plunging-in bias. My collaborator, Reb Rebele, I thought, had a great way of capturing how to overcome that. He said, you could still be quick to start, but make sure you're not too quick to finish.

So I want to go back to the topic of perfectionism that we talked about earlier. We think of highly skilled people as perfectionists. This is not always the case. You say that elite musicians, for example, are less driven by an obsessive compulsion to be perfect and more fueled by something that you call harmonious passion. What do you mean by this term, Adam?

When psychologists talk about harmonious passion, they're basically talking about having the task in harmony with your own level of interest. So you're not pushing yourself to do it because you have to. You're not an obsessive-compulsive workaholic. You're doing it because you love it, because you enjoy challenging yourself at it, because you want to get better at it.

In other words, you're actually— it's not just that you're playing the music and saying, I want the music to be perfect, but at some level, you're actually enjoying the music, which, I mean, at one level seems sort of self-evident. How can you be a musician if you don't enjoy the music? But I suspect there are probably many musicians who are no longer enjoying the music because They're just going through the technical act of producing the music.

Yeah. Or they're focused on the outcome, and they're less likely to get absorbed in the task. They don't find flow. It's like there's a shadow over them of constantly feeling like, well, I should be practicing more. I should be studying, as opposed to, I want to study. I feel like practicing. This is exciting.

One of the insights you talk about is that we're all looking for roadmaps to success. But you say the right tool might not actually be a map, but a compass. What do you mean by this, Adam?

I think that so many people, when they look to an expert guide or a mentor, they think they're going to get a set of directions. But you can't follow somebody else's map. Because no one is starting from the same place that you are. None of the experts or mentors that you look to for guidance began their journey on the exact same starting point that you did. They just have different skills, different strengths, different challenges, and that means their map is not going to be tailored for you. There's also the issue that they may not have all the directions. They may not remember them. They may not know them. So I think what we're looking for is a compass, not to give you directions, but to give you direction. A good compass tells you whether you're on the right heading. And that's what I think you want from a mentor to guide you.

We talked earlier about the story of R.A. Dickey, the rising baseball star who had not just one fall from grace, but 3 falls from grace. So it looked like his career was over after the third time he got relegated to the minor leagues. But then he got some advice from pitching coaches that acted as a sort of compass. What did they tell him, Adam?

Well, they basically sat him down and said, this career is not going to work for you. You don't have the physical ability that you need to succeed. And if they had stopped there, he might have just retired. But he was lucky to have some pitching coaches who gave him a compass. They said, look, you're going in the wrong direction. You're not going to make it back to the major leagues on the course that you're taking right now. But there might be another path for you. They said, you know, we've seen you throw this pitch. It was a strange-looking pitch, but the pitching coaches recognized that he was holding the ball very similar to the way that you would grip if you were gonna throw a knuckleball.

And for our non-baseball fans, what is a knuckleball, Adam?

So a knuckleball is where instead of holding the ball in the palm of your hand with all your fingers wrapped around it, you take your index and your middle finger, and you actually dig your fingernails right into the ball. So it almost looks like your hand is a, is a part claw, and you're holding the ball with your 2 knuckles, your first and second finger knuckles sticking up in the air. And the knuckleball is a rare pitch. There are not a lot of pitchers who have used it successfully. But it can be pretty deadly because the way that you grip it stops it from spinning. It actually flies pretty flat. And that means it's going to go slower. But it can also zigzag and just confuse the heck out of batters. And they said to R.A., because the knuckleball is a slower pitch, it's pretty well aligned with your arm strength. And because you've thrown this thing, you have a little bit of a feel for the way that you would release a knuckleball. And maybe you can master this pitch, and maybe it could salvage your career.

Hmm. So did he decide to take that advice?

He decided to give it a shot, but he did not know where to start. None of his pitching coaches had any experience working with a knuckleballer. All they could do was give him a compass and say, general direction, if you want to make it back to the majors, learn how to throw this pitch that does not spin. And he decides to go for it.

So at one point, he pictures himself standing in a doorway and executing the entire throw without letting his body touch the doorframe. So what I find interesting here is he's not just learning to throw this knuckleball, he's actually developing a system that can teach him to throw the knuckleball.

That's right. And it feels completely wrong to him. You know, it reminds me of something that my diving coach Eric Best always said to me. He would say, Adam, make it feel wrong. I don't want to make it feel wrong. I'm trying to do it right. He's like, yeah, but if you always do it in a way that feels right, then you're going to undercorrect. You're not going to make a big enough change. Make it feel wrong, overcorrect, and that's how you get it right. And that's what R.A. had to do. So he's picturing himself standing in a doorway, and basically that means he's almost pinning his elbow to his body when he throws. So he kind of looks like a T-Rex. By making those radical adjustments, he's able to unlearn the way he's always pitched, which was to try to maximize spin, and learn to take the spin off the ball. But it's a long road.

So you interviewed A-Rae for your book. Tell me what— how his story turned out. What happened after he learned to throw this knuckleball?

Well, he went in circles for years, basically 3 years. You know, he's backtracking, he's undoing all of the things that have made him good enough to be a minor league pitcher. And he feels like he's getting worse and worse at many steps along the way. But after all this effort, all this going backward and having to learn a new method and kind of reinvent his entire technique to pick up a different skill, he ends up moving forward. He spent the vast majority of 14 years toiling away in the minor leagues. And he gets called back to the majors again. And that year, his earned run average makes him one of the 10 best pitchers in all of baseball. And he signs a multimillion-dollar, multiyear contract with the Mets. And what's crazy about this, Shankar, is that in the year he was drafted, there were 9 pitchers picked ahead of him. 8 of them have already retired. And the 9th is never coming back to the majors. But R.A. is kind of just scratching the surface of his prospects. And at 35, he's beginning to unlock his hidden potential. You know, he ends up with a very, very triumphant finish. 2012, he's 37 years old. He makes his first All-Star Game. He sets a Mets franchise record for pitching 32 scoreless innings in a row. He leads the whole league in strikeouts. And he becomes the first knuckleballer in Major League Baseball history to win the Cy Young Award for being the best pitcher in the whole league.

One of the things that he did that's very striking is that he didn't go to one expert, one guru, and basically say, teach me how to do this magical thing, which is, I think, what many of us do. He went to many people and tried to learn many things from many people. Some years ago, there was a study by Monica Higgins at Harvard who looked at the career paths of lawyers lawyers who were navigating the path to partner. That study found something very similar to the path that R.A. Dickey took. Tell me about that study, Adam.

Yeah, it turned out that if you wanted to predict which lawyers would get promoted to partner, getting guidance from a single mentor didn't predict. So in other words, if you had one mentor in your court, that was not enough to increase your odds of getting promoted to partner. If you wanted to get promoted to partner, you actually wanted to have multiple mentors guiding you. Different mentors are going to give you different directions. They all have different maps. And if you even had 2 or 3 mentors, you were more likely to make the climb to partner instead of seeing your career stall. And that, that seems to be because in part, multiple mentors are able to, you know, to point out different landmarks, different turns along the path, and then you can cobble their suggestions together into your own map that works for you.

I want to talk about how having a sense of purpose can also inspire us to accomplish great things. You tell the story of Alison Levine, who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. At an early age, she got interested in climbing mountains, very cold mountains. But it didn't really look like a mountain climbing career was really on the cards for her. Tell me her story, Adam.

Well, Alison was born with a hole in her heart. And she would, as a teenager, just pass out and have to go to the emergency room. After a series of surgeries, the hole was closed, and she got the thumbs up that she could climb. But she also had a circulatory disorder where in freezing weather, basically her arteries would stop sending blood to her toes and fingers. She would go numb, and her risk of frostbite was heightened.

Hmm. So in 2002, Adam, Alison's dream comes true. She overcomes many of the physical hurdles that she was born with. She's named captain of the first expedition by a group of American women to climb Mount Everest. Tell me what happens during the climb.

It's a very treacherous climb. There's one part where they're stuck at the Khumbu Icefall. So you have— she has 2,000 vertical feet of ice above her. And they've got to go really fast because as the sun comes out and it starts to melt, There's a possible ice crack. There might be an avalanche. They've got to move quickly. And Alison is not able to go fast because of her physical disabilities. And there's actually a guy behind her as she's putting her foot on the ladder who says, you're never going to make it at this pace. If you can't go faster, you shouldn't be here. Like, maybe you should quit and go home. She keeps going slowly. Eventually, they get past the icefall. And not long after that, a section ends up actually collapsing in an avalanche, and another climber almost dies. But after almost 2 months, they get to the final stretch. They're in the death zone. That's the altitude where most people can't actually absorb enough oxygen to live. So they have supplemental oxygen. But Alison, because of her condition— has to take 5 or maybe 10 breaths just to take one step. And so they're still moving slowly. They can see the peak. And then they run into another problem. A storm blows in.

So they've spent 2 months getting to this point. I understand at this point they're less than 300 feet from the summit, and that's when the storm blows in?

Yeah.

And they've got a whiteout. The winds are extremely heavy. It's so dangerous that not only can they not go forward, they can't even wait it out. They have to turn around and go back down the mountain. So they end up climbing nearly 29,000 feet, looking at the summit, and having to quit less than 300 feet from the top.

Alison swore she was done with Everest, but a close friend urged her not to give up.

Her friend Meg kept telling her to try again, and Alison said to her, I'll only do it if you go with me, but knew that Meg couldn't do it because she'd had lymphoma and her lungs were damaged. And then sadly, in 2009, Meg had a lung infection and died. And Alison wanted to try to honor her memory. And extend her legacy. And she said, all right, I'm going back to Everest. I'm gonna climb it in Meg's memory. She carved Meg's name on her ice axe. She flew to Nepal and picked up as part of an expedition with a bunch of mountaineers who were complete strangers. She ended up getting to the point where she had had to turn around before, and she was starting to doubt herself. And she heard a voice behind her. It was a guide from another expedition. His name is Mike Horst, and he'd actually stayed behind to give her some encouragement. And he said, promise me you're going to go farther than this. And she, she felt like, all right, like Mike summited Everest a bunch of times. If he thinks I can do it, I can do it. And she keeps going, and she reaches the top. But that's actually not all she accomplishes there. So she's summited the tallest mountain on Earth. But this is also the last step for Alison in completing what's called the Adventurer's Grand Slam, where she's one of a few dozen people on Earth who's not only climbed the tallest peak on all 7 continents, but she's also skied to both the North Pole and the South Pole.

Wow. So she's made it to the top of Mount Everest. I mean, it's seemingly an impossible goal given that she had many health conditions as a child. She faced down obstacles in reaching this goal. She doubted herself. Other people doubted her. The odds were stacked against her. At one point, she quite literally got stuck. Looking back, she says that her proudest moment was not reaching the summit. It was the distance she traveled from Everest before she got back to the spot where she had to turn around. What does she mean by this, Adam?

Well, I think it's so easy to think that climbing a mountain— and this is true for any goal— is about reaching the destination. So she had a target of getting to the peak, and she thinks the most meaningful thing that she could do is get there as a climber. But she realizes after going back to Everest a second time That this challenge is not about performance. It's about progress. And I think we misunderstand progress. Most people think about progress as moving forward. I think sometimes it's about bouncing back. So it's not just the peaks you reach, it's also the valleys you cross. And Shankar, I've come to believe that resilience is actually a kind of growth. That when you run into an obstacle like Allison did, and you have to turn around, that progress is actually reflected in the fact that she was able to get back on the mountain and get right back to the place where she had to turn around.

Psychologist Adam Grant works at the University of Pennsylvania. His book is called Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Adam Thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Honored to be here. I think hidden potential clearly needed to be on Hidden Brain.

Do you have follow-up questions for Adam Grant about achieving your goals? If you'd be willing to share those questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. And email it to us at ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line Potential. That email address again is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Corell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. As we approach the final days of the year, we wanted to say thank you for making Hidden Brain part of your life in 2023. We know your time is a valuable asset, and we really appreciate that you chose to spend it with us. We're looking forward to bringing you many more interesting ideas and conversations in 2024. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional.

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