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Work
What's the best way to impress other people?
Pretty much anything other than self-promotion. There's a lot of evidence that when people toot their own horns it tends to backfire. People will judge them as arrogant, narcissistic, and especially as insecure. They know that if you were really amazing you wouldn't have to work so hard to tell other people how amazing you are. Research suggests that instead of promoting yourself it's more effective if other people promote you because after all you're not a credible judge of your own abilities and accomplishments. But if other people think highly of you and they're willing to talk about that that can go a long way. And so, if you're in a situation where you feel like you have to self-promote, then it's worth asking, "OK, over my career, who are the people that I've really impressed?" "Who are not only willing but maybe even excited to sing my praises." And then, "how can I invite them to do that in an honest and genuine way?"
If you're interviewing someone for a job, or just considering working with someone new, how do you get them to tell the truth about their weaknesses?
I have three favorite ways to get people to answer the weakness question honestly. The first one is to ask, "What's a piece of constructive criticism that you've gotten recently?" And that way they can tell you not just what they're bad at, but also how they're working to improve.
A second option comes from a former student Caitlin Souther who likes to ask people "What's a positive quality that you don't possess?" And what's nice about that is it just reframes the weakness as not something so horrible. And then a third approach is to ask people, "How would others describe your weaknesses?" And that gives them a chance to show that they're not just self-aware but they're conscious of how other people perceive them and you might end up checking the references and you'll find out what those people say and so they might as well score points for knowing what other people would say about them.
When a coworker is struggling, what should you not say to them?
Well the most common, I think, habit is to do what you do in every other situation which is to relate like, "Oh I also love the color blue" but that usually ends up meaning that if you say like, "hey, I have cancer."
Then suddenly they're like, "Oh, my aunt had cancer!" Dot dot dot...
-ouch.
"And then, she..." You know, you're like stuck in this terrible conversation about outcomes, when really all you meant to do is build the bridge. So usually you really don't have to offer them anything from your own life. Just make a little space and say, "I'm so sorry to hear that."
Leave a little minute and see if they want to take the off ramp because usually people just kind of want to talk about reality programming or like how much they hate their suite mates. So it's just like give them the off ramp and they'll probably take it.
-Any other favorite suggestions?
I think that deep desire to explain other people's suffering is so normal. So like, "Oh was it something you ate or maybe it's in your family" just all the kind of free association that people usually do. Usually someone who's struggling kind of doesn't need an explanation.
They maybe need like cookies the next day and just a little bit of space to get their own lives together with a little peace.
-So it sounds like you want to avoid conversational narcissism. If I'm trying to comfort you, it's not about me. It's not my job to explain why you're suffering.
Yeah and a gifted presence is kind of more powerful than people realize it is. Like also just presence, man. I love it when someone is like, "Oh hey I got you this food." I'm like, "Great, we're now best friends."
-Awesome.
Well I'm here with Arthur Brooks an economist whose viral Atlantic article says maybe.
Yeah so I wrote this article, and The Atlantic titled it, "Your professional decline is coming much sooner thank you think" Sounds pretty bad. I have to say, but I'd meant it as a way that we can actually look forward to that back part of our careers.
-This is how economists inspire people right? You're doomed!
But it doesn't suck as bad as you thought was going to be. No, the truth is that people have a tendency to think that when they work in idea professions, which a lot of people on LinkedIn do, a lot of people who are watching us do, they think that their professional life is going to be able to go on and on and on and on and their skills are going to stay at their super high level. What made you successful when you were 30 and 35, you'll be able to do till you're 80, 85 and that turns out to be not true. The data are overwhelmingly clear that particularly after 50, 55 that a lot of idea professions people kind of lose their edge a little bit. This is one of the reasons that people burn out, not because they're sick of it, but because they kind of find they're not as good at what they were doing anymore.
OK here's the good news. There's good news.
-I've been waiting for it!
There's a success curve in your what they call your fluid intelligence. And I'm bringing coals to Newcastle by telling this to a psychologist, but the Fluid intelligence is basically your analytic capacity, your ability to innovate. And that actually does peak when you're in your early thirties and then declines after that. But there's another intelligence curve, which social psychologists call the crystallized intelligence curve, that goes up through your 30s 40s 50s 60s stays high in your 70s
-Knowledge, wisdom, social and emotional intelligence
Synthetic thinking, your ability to creatively explain all the stuff that you know, it's being a teacher. So here's the key thing that we got to understand. You're not going to be able to be on the innovation curve your whole life. It's going to decline, it's going to decline sooner than you think.
The key is jumping onto your instruction curve, to jump onto the curve of becoming a teacher, of becoming somebody who explains. And that's a really great thing. If you're basically in the early part of your 30, 35 and you're an innovator and by the time you're moving into your 50s, you're supervising others, you're bringing other people's careers along. You're explaining ideas. In a way, you and I were academics, it's ideal.
-Sort of. Except we did it backward by starting to teach way too young.
That's true, although, you know you think about it, you and I were writing academic journal articles when we were in our thirties and you know the blinding insight, right? That's the fluid intelligence and now what you're doing, you're younger than I am, What we try to do as we get older is synthesize a lot of knowledge and explain in a big way. I wrote this Atlantic piece because I'm trying to use my crystallized intelligence. I'm 55 years old you know and I'm not going to put stuff into test tubes and come up with you know sort of biotech firm.
It's just not going to happen. However I can go into my library and take out certain books and say gather around my friends because I have discovered by combining all the knowledge of these other people being a teacher and each person can do that. We don't have to write Atlantic articles or teach it at University of Pennsylvania but what we can do.
Each one of us in our own way is figure out how sharing knowledge, how developing other people, how bringing together good ideas is our future.
-Don't you think that's a form of innovation?
Yeah it is a form of innovation including crystallized intelligence.
It's an artificial distinction to a certain extent but we do find if you're trying to invent something that nobody's ever thought of before, you're going to get worse at that if you're trying to bring together the ideas that other people have thought of into something that's better and new you're going to get better at that.
-Oh good. That's the only part of creativity I was ever good at anyway, so this is encouraging!
You're a synthetic thinker.
-I've always been. I do have to say you made a very weird decision, at the end of this article, which is you said basically I'm retiring. Yes. And I was so surprised that a social scientist would make a personal decision based on aggregate data because it's possible that you at 72 are still more of a genius than your peers at 22. So how did you make that call?
Well the problem is not how I compare to others it's how I compare myself. This is what's really frustrating in a lot of people who are watching us. It's not that I'm better than the guy in the next cube or worse, it's that I'm not as good as I was last year and that's intensely frustrating to people who are at a high level.
-You can see that though? You can feel it?
I know that I'm actually a lot worse at writing new papers, you know with brand new insights, than I was able to do before, and I know what's coming as well.
-You don't think that's just a self-fulfilling prophecy?
You know it's possible.
-You've read the data and now you're convinced by them. You're a data-driven guy, as am I.
Absolutely. However, I also don't want to play the odds. And so, when I say I'm retiring, I'm simply leaving my executive position running a think tank in Washington D.C. "retiring is retiring" I mean I'm going to be a college professor at Harvard University. I'm going to teach people I'm going to synthesize ideas I'm going to write books about you know ideas that are the synthesis of a lot of other people's ideas. I'm going to live this out. So it's not really retiring, it's basically saying look, I don't want to play and I might I might defy gravity. You know, this stuff might not be right but if I actually believe the preponderance of my evidence it makes sense that I would live according to this so I have a better shot at being happier as I get older. And that's why I did it.
-All right. Well I can't argue with betting on happiness in the long run although I think that if the article undermines everybody else's happiness that would be a very sad thing. But I was surprised. I actually enjoyed it. I found it uplifting. I was even maybe a little bit inspired by your choice to say,
I inspired Adam Grant. That blows my mind.
-I'm reluctant to admit it but it's at least the second time you've done it. And so you know there's hope for economists.
I honestly believe that those of us in the idea business we have two jobs: lift people up and bring them together. Those are our two jobs. And if you can lift people up so they can be better than they were, So they can fulfill their best selves. They can understand their own dignity and potential and you can bring people together. So there's more love. What's not to like? And you just told me I did that for you and you've done that for me too. You're doing it beautifully.
Read Arthur Brooks' full Atlantic article here: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think
When it comes to their work habits, are Millennials lazier, more entitles, and more selfish than other generations?
There is survey evidence that Millennials score slightly higher on narcissism than other generations. But is that really a generational difference? When you compare generations on anything, and you find a discrepancy, you don't know whether that's because of the birth cohort they're part of, or because of their age and life experience. And there's a psychologist, Jean Twenge, who teases those factors apart. She gets surveys done of every generation - when they were high school seniors and college seniors. So, you can compare what 18 and 21-year-old boomers said against millennials of the same age against Gen Xers of the same age.
And when you do that, you find that every generation is slightly more selfish and entitled when they're younger. Being self-focused is just an attribute of being an 18-year-old or a 21-year-old. And then as you age you tend to gain responsibility and gain concern for others. The greatest spike in generosity seems to exist right around mid-career and midlife and that I think is when you feel like you have more to give, you have less to lose and you also start to worry that if nobody helps that next generation coming into the workforce we are all going to be screwed. So I think there is hope for every young generation.
When somebody pitches a new idea with a lot of confidence, should you trust them?
It depends on where they sit in the hierarchy. In a rigorous new study, managers actually overestimated the value of their own ideas by 42%. Whereas employees underestimated the value of their own ideas by 11%. Managers were overconfident. As they gain power, they privilege their own perspectives. Whereas employees were a little under confident. They said, "Well I don't really know what I'm doing and they second guess themselves." I think that means that managers need to stop falling in love with their own ideas and start listening to the people below them.
One of the easiest ways to do that is to run an innovation tournament - a contest for new ideas. A great example comes from Dow Chemical. They could put out a call for ideas and said we're trying to save energy and reduce waste. We'll take any proposal that costs no more than $200,000 US and it has to be able to pay for itself within a year. Over a decade, they ended up investing in 575 ideas that were submitted into that tournament. And on average they saved the company 110 million U.S. dollars per year. And most of those ideas did not come from people in creative jobs. Often it was an employee on a factory floor who saw something broken and had an idea for how to fix it. But didn't run with it until the tournament was opened. And I think managers ought to run more of those contests.
Should you practice what you preach?
I'm actually going to say no, you should do the reverse. I think the danger of practicing what you preach is that you claim a set of values and then you hope that you're going to live up to those values through your actions. And if you do great you've just demonstrated integrity. But if you fall short you become a hypocrite. I think a simpler rule is to only preach things you already practice. And then there's no risk of a gap between your claims and your actions. There was a cultural critic Lionel Trilling who wrote about a distinction between authenticity and sincerity. He said authenticity was closing the gap between your inner thoughts and what you express to the outside world. But sincerity is the opposite. It's starting by paying attention to the person you claim to be and then saying internally I want to become that person. And that kind of sincerity is really easy if you're only preaching the things that you already practice.