YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Grant

lines on the record: 106
first: 2019-12-05
most recent: 2019-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And also, don't you want people to respond to your emails? And so I just felt like it was time for somebody to write the counterpoint. And so I sat down and I said, look, I think that if you are a consistent, non-responder to serious emails, that suggests that there's a problem with your process and you need a different way of handling it. If you care about being perceived as somebody who's responsible and reliable and concerned about others, which is really important for your success, even if you don't care about your image. So that was the motivation behind it.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a component of conscientiousness that's about being responsive, which says two things. One, I'm on top of things, and two, I care. And so I'm not look, I'm not saying you have to answer every email that every random person sends you, right? And I think this is complicated for a lot of jobs. But I think that if you are habitually not responding to legitimate emails from people that you have a professional relationship with, it is sending a signal to them that you are either disorganized or that you don't care about their priorities. And people are constantly saying, well, wait a minute, but hold on. My inbox is other people's priorities. And my response to that is, yeah, but shouldn't your priorities include other people?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was stunned by that because I thought, okay, would you, if somebody said hi to you in the hallway, would you just ignore them? If somebody called you, would you never return their voicemail? That seems unprofessional. And so what makes digital snubbery okay? And I started thinking about the research on this. And there's a whole bunch of evidence suggesting that of all the personality traits that matter for job performance, whether we look at your objective productivity as a salesperson or an engineer or your performance reviews and promotions that you get from your manager. The single most important personality trait across hundreds and hundreds of jobs and dozens of countries around the world is conscientiousness being hardworking, organized, disciplined, dependable.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or it doesn't start there. Oh, no, no, it doesn't. It doesn't. Could you share your I feel like bad headlines ruin more good op-eds than I can count. But. Okay, so the reason I wrote this piece is I read two articles back to back, one in the Atlantic, one in the New York.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true. Tim, this makes me think it's interesting. It seems like you had a really sort of literal definition of integrity early on. And over time, you've been more comfortable saying, look, I'm going to be authentic. And sometimes that means past him did not calibrate well with present Tim. So there's a commitment made then that no longer makes sense. And I'm going to try to make that right however I can. I wonder there's all this research on behavioral integrity which says that you're basically supposed to practice what you preach. And I've been wondering lately if we've got that backward. And if instead what we should be doing is only preaching things that we already practice. And then we don't have as many of those gaps.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The phone with you, and so I guess I'm trying to find a way to let the person know that I am dependable for the outcome, even though I was not dependable necessarily for the interaction.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hippy being irreplaceable in that sense. But I guess I would, so I've had that happen at least a few times a year. And what I've usually done is I've either emailed or called the person and said, I've tried to email actually because it's less likely to disrupt my flow. And I've said, look, I'm really sorry. I've had something come up. I know you're counting on me to be here. I'm not going to be able to make it. What you can count on me for is always delivering results. And so you may not always get the FaceTime that I promised. You may not always get me to show up exactly at the moment I said I was going to be there. I will never miss a deadline. I will never fail to deliver something I promise to you when you need it. And so you let me know what your hard stop is and I will stay up as late as I need to tonight to finish what I need to do. If you want to hop on the phone early in the morning, I will be on the phone.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that for me is the only renegotiation strategy I ever feel comfortable with, which is to say, look, my calendar has gotten the better of me or I've overextended myself yet again. And so I promise you that the time you have lost today, I will make up for it in spades for you tomorrow.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when that fails, I had this happen actually recently. I had agreed to travel and give a speech, and I ended up having a conflict with a project that I had committed to earlier but didn't know the dates for. And I felt awful. It's a core principle for me to follow through on my commitments. And I'd never reneged on a speech like that before. And so I reached out to the organizer. I apologized profusely and I said, you have my word that I'm going to recruit someone far better than me so that you will be thrilled that I canceled because you're telling us better talk. And then I made it my mission to find somebody who would either hit a more relevant topic or who was going to give a more electrifying presentation. And then just to be safe, I recruited three more speakers for the event because I was really worried that I was still letting them down.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I would have four hours of office hours back to back. And then I'd do whatever else I needed to do on this. And then I go home. And then the next day I wouldn't go into work. And I work from home all day. And I would now talk to another human being who wasn't a member of my family. And that kind of how I've tried to organize my life. And what it means is Paul Graham wrote a great little blog post about this. He called them maker days and manager days. It means I don't feel like I'm that productive. When I'm on campus or I'm in a back-to-back meeting day. But it also means then that on the day when I'm doing creative work, there's nothing that's going to interrupt my flow because I'm not scheduling anything that might distract. And so I think prevention is always the best cure there. But you wanted to know about also what happens when that fails.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we think what's going on there, this is still pretty early, but it's been replicated a few times now, both in the workplace and in volunteering, is when you do one little act of giving a day, you end up sort of feeling like it's a drop in the bucket. And it also, you know, is yet another thing on your to-do list. Whereas when you pick one day each week as your giving day, you feel like you made a difference that day. And also you're really focused on, okay, what can I do to help these people in those moments? And so, and then the rest of the week, you can focus a little bit more on getting your own work done. And so I took that to my schedule and said, all right, I'm going to have days that are focused on getting my own creative work done. And then I'm going to have days that are focused on being responsive and available for other people. And so early on that meant I would have days where I was on campus and I would teach a class.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my first goal is always to minimize the number of times that happens. And so I read some research early on about the difference between chunking and sprinkling as I've come to think about it. So the research was on doing random acts of kindness. This is Sonia Lubermerski and her colleagues. And the idea was let's imagine, Tim, that you're going to do five, five-minute favors this week. If you're randomly assigned to sprinkle, you're going to do one each day throughout the week. If you're going to chunk, you're going to pick Thursday as your helping day and you're going to do all five of them stacked in that one day in a block. And the question is, who gets happier and more energized? And when I pose this to audiences, about 80% of people on average say it's the sprinkling. Because, you know, you get a little bit of extra bounce in your step. You feel like you did something good every day. It's not a big distraction. And they're totally wrong. Over about three months, only one group gets happier and more energized. And it's actually the chunker's not the sprinklers.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really believe in the idea of intention management instead, which is to say that if I'm choosing people and projects that matter to me, it does not matter how long they take. And so I have a project I want to work on today. And, you know, whenever it's done, it'll be done. But I'm excited to be working on it, and I'm not going to pick up anything else until I feel like I've made meaningful progress on it. And I don't know if that's useful or not. You tell me, did I say anything novel there?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rhythm, and we got a little bit more done. And I think that people are way too rigid about respecting time boundaries as opposed to saying, look, Meta time waster.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're serial processors. It's really not just in the multitasking sense, but in the course of a morning, you're not going to be that productive if you're trying to work on five different things. And so what I try to do is I try to do one project or task at a time until I've either gotten as far as I can go with it and I've run out of ideas or I've physically run out of time that I can't work on it anymore. I find that that's useful. And what that means sometimes is I'm in a meeting one of my colleagues who I asked, okay, you know, is there anything I do that's productive that I don't realize is productive? And she said, yeah, we're in a meeting. We've got seven minutes left. And we've just finished a task. And I'll just start chitchatting. And she said, what you do, I guess what I learned with it, I do is I'll say, well, we've got another task that we could at least start in those seven minutes. And so we end up using those extra minutes, but also then the meeting stretches 20 minutes over because then we got into a”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this time. You know, I hope this person values our collaboration enough or is glad to be able to yell at me about always being late enough that they're willing to put up with it. But I think that for me, I think I'm bad at time management, but I've gotten good at attention management. And I just, when I sit down, I know as a psychologist, we have decades of evidence that people are horrible parallel processors.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I guess they saw it when I was writing my undergrad thesis. And I think I finished it four months before it was due because I just woke up in the morning and I would write until I had said everything I had to say. And I would rarely get up out of my chair. And sometimes I would go to eat lunch. But I think I really, I hate leaving something unfinished. And so this is actually both a blessing and a curse. So the blessing is, it means that when I sit down to start something, I will finish it. What that means is whatever else was on my agenda after that is just going, haywire. So I'm constantly late because I have a chronic inability to disengage from the current thing on my agenda, to go and move on to the next thing, right? And time is sort of an arbitrary human construction. Like, well, I didn't know yesterday when I scheduled this meeting that I was going to be in flow today.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I've asked a bunch of people that question. I got tired of saying, I don't know, I just work a lot, I guess, when it came up. And I think there are a few things that I've learned that I didn't know were maybe useful habits that I guess I either do instinctively or at some point decided were effective. My college roommates used to tell me that I had a productive form of mild OCD.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I beg to differ because there are rules and norms. What I had to do was I had to go into somebody else's system and figure out how to succeed within it. You had to create your own system. I think that's way harder. But we can duke that out later. Yeah, we can duke that out. I will try to answer your question.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first, we have the pot calling the kettle black here, Tim. I was really amused when you texted me and said you were going to hustle so that we could start early because I literally don't think you were capable of not hustling”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I found that it was way easier to write about other people's ideas than my own. And so I decided I was going to leave my ideas out of the first couple chapter drafts and just write about other people's stuff as if I were introducing it to my students with the same excitement that I would in a classroom. And that I found a lot of, that felt really familiar and comfortable. And then from there, the second draft was better. I resuscitated about a thousand words from the first draft and will never show the other 100, 2,000 to anyone.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he read, I don't actually think he made it through the draft. It was so bad. But it was basically like reading 100 research papers thrown together, an academic research papers, they're not interesting for the most part. He gave me some great advice, though. He said, just do me a favor. Don't write like you write journal articles. Write like you teach. And that was a light bulb moment for me. And so it kind of turned around from this is agonizing. I think I will never be an author to, okay, if I were going to tell the story of these ideas in the classroom, what would I do? And then I actually started doing the talk out loud so that I wouldn't go back into the trap of academic writing.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Richard being a great member of my Challenge Network said, I got to be honest with you. I don't even know if your academic colleagues would finish reading this book.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, hold on. All right, continue. No, no, it happens. Here's how it happens, right? So this is 2011. I am writing a book about a topic I've been studying for a decade. I've been living it and breathing it, and I have so many thoughts and ideas about it. And I never really sat down to organize them. And so, you know, I start to write about a study. And then that calls to mind three other studies that I love. And then that reminds me of a story that I think will illustrate the study in an interesting way. And so it just became, I mean, it's literally all I did for that summer was write the draft of the book. And so I sent it to Richard in August. He had actually checked in and said, Hey, where's that proposal? I said, Oh, it's a little long because I think I have a draft of the book.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't want to let them down. So I said, okay, I'll write my book, and then maybe one day Barry and I will do something together again. And so I went through the whole process to find a literary agent and had Richard Pine come in as my agent and he said, write a proposal after we talked about a bunch of ideas. I started working on the proposal in June and I got so into it that I accidentally wrote the book.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Barry had coincidentally reached out and said, Hey, I'm thinking about writing a book on motivation and incentives. I know you do a lot of work in that area. Do you want to write the book together? I was so flattered. And it just seemed like a great way to begin communicating ideas. And I loved working with him. So I had a meeting with my students that day and talk about Challenge Network. They held me hostage and they told me they would not let me leave the lab meeting until I promised them that I wouldn't write somebody else's book before I wrote my own.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I think it was August 2011. And the lead up to it, I think, is important, which is I decided in the spring right after I got tenure that I wanted to start sharing ideas outside of just academia. And one of my favorite collaborators, Barry Schwartz, who you probably know from the paradox of choice.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, you maybe avoid repeating past mistakes. And the reality is I think that you also take on more ambitious projects. And so in some ways, the odds go down. And it's been a reminder to me that I've rarely ever done anything that didn't fail radically before I achieved some success. And it's a good way to do a little bit of mental time travel and say, hey, you know what? I remember throwing away 102,000 words of my first draft of my book, which was 103,000 words. And at that moment, I felt like I was never going to write a book. And I couldn't make it as an author. And, you know, I kind of edited that out of my story in the way that I think about the process of writing a book because I moved past that. But if I remember that, it's a lot easier to cope with today's failure or tomorrow's failure.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's actually an idea I got from a scientist, Melanie Stefan, who said, look, we do such a disservice to young people in any field. Because when they look up their role models, they only see them at their peak. And when you look at somebody's resume or bio, it only has their accomplishments. And not all of the schools that rejected them, not all of the jobs that denied them, not all of the creative projects that failed. And so it can be really discouraging if you're moving into a field to look up at people who seem perfect. And so I just thought it was a clever way to be comfortable sharing all the things that I'd stumbled in. And then also I found it, I thought it was a good exercise for me to say, you know, look, it's easy to get caught up in believing that as you accumulate more success, your odds of success go up over time because you gain experience, you surround yourself with better.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes they say, well, you know, nothing. And I feel like I have to push them a little bit. And so I've started, I guess I've gotten a little edgier about this over the past few years, and I'll say, huh, you know, it's funny I thought you had higher standards than that. You couldn't find a single thing I could improve on. You really think this was perfect? Come on. And then if they won't give me anything, I will criticize myself out loud. And I'll say, look, here are the three things that I think I did poorly. Tell me if you agree with any of those. And then what I'm missing. And then I've never had somebody just completely punt at that point. They always offer something. Yeah.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Liked that. And then for the unstructured, I do this spontaneously a lot, so every time I get off a stage, usually somebody will say, oh, that was great. Or thanks. That's not useful to me, right? So I'll always say, what's the one thing I can do better? And I've kind of drafted them against their will into my challenge network”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting. I think there's a structure for big projects. So when I'm writing a book or working on a podcast season, I'll have a meeting of my challenge network of students that's usually once every two weeks. And there's a pretty regular cadence to the sort of the process of producing episodes. And I know that there's going to be”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Emboldened them in ways that, like, well, you know, I'm not sure that I really needed my outfit to be criticized in that particular talk I gave. That's not the feedback I was looking for, but I think it's been just immensely beneficial. So Tim, I'm curious, do you have a challenge network?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But so it's played out in a lot of different ways, right? So when I was preparing to do my first TED talk, I had a group of people who watched it, and their job was to argue with me about all my points. And then I've done the same thing with op-eds. And so after I went to Bridgewater and the term clicked, and I thought, oh, Challenge Network, that's what I've been trying to build for myself. I actually reached out to some of the people that I've relied on the most in the past decade for that role. And I've said, hey, I just want you to know that I consider you a founding member of my Challenge Network. I know I'm not always as receptive to your criticism as I would like to be. And sometimes that's probably frustrating for you. But I keep coming to you because I know I need it and I value it, even if I don't like it. And I want you to keep providing that because that's one of the central roles that you play in my life and you've made my work infinitely better. And sometimes that's, I feel occasionally that's.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they end up almost competing to see who can give the most devastating criticism. I remember walking into a lab meeting once and a student said, at no point, at any time during reading this chapter, did I feel like I could say the words page turner?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I picked the improving route. And so I typed up all the feedback verbatim. I emailed it out to the entire class. And then I devoted a whole class session to discussing all the suggestions for improvement. And I guess what I'd done was I'd turn the students a little bit into my coaches. But it was very much a challenge network because their job was to tell me everything that was not working about the class. And then brainstorm with me about what we could do to fix it. And so we spent it was funny because we spent then half a semester of a class on organizational change, kind of living an experiment on how to do organizational change in the context of a class. And after that experience, I said, okay, I always want a group of students who are a challenge network for me, which has meant in some cases when I write a book, the first group that sees the draft of each chapter is a group of students. And their job is to violently disagree with every word that I write, try to really try to poke holes in.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She said, What are you insane? They're going to band into a mob of angry millennials once they find out that they're all upset about the same pieces of the class, you know, it's going to be a mutiny. Don't do it. And I felt like it was sort of a crossroads because it left me wondering who do I want to be? Do I want to be the person who's so determined to prove myself that I'm afraid of students finding out what they probably already know about me or am I more interested in improving myself?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I did feedback forums a couple weeks in. And then I did something, I guess, that was sort of radical. I went to one of my advisors and I said, I've gotten all the feedback from the forums. And there is a lot of real criticism in there about things I'm doing very poorly. I was horrible at time management as an example. And a bunch of people said that it would be really nice if I ever made it through even 10% of material I promised at the beginning of the class. But as soon as a student answered a question, I felt like I had to answer it. And so, you know, just get sidetracked from, well, I don't care what my lesson plan was, right? I'm here to serve the students. Anyway, so I went to my advisor and I said, I have all this feedback. And I'm just going to open source it. I'm going to share it with the whole class.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I moved along in the class and I realized that it was really easy to focus on things that were going well because my expectations had been so low. And I needed to figure out what was going wrong because I was a brand new teacher. I was still very nervous. I still did plenty of lecturing in the class. And I was going to have to teach much less receptive audiences than a group of undergrads who signed up for an elective.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I think where it actually started when I transitioned from doing those guest lectures to teaching my first class. So I'm a grad student and I'm responsible for teaching a whole semester long course. I remember being so freaked out for the first class that my wife actually came and sat in and pretended to be a TA just so afterwards she could tell me that people were still going to come to the next class. But I got through it and we met twice a week. It was a class on organizational change. And the students seem to be genuinely engaged and enjoying it. And it was such a pleasant surprise coming from the lecturing to teaching in that way.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That just sounds abusive But I think a great member of a challenge network, and I'll tell you about mine, is somebody who pushes you because they believe in you. And they're not willing to settle for half-baked ideas or for something that's not your very best work.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, to see more potential in you than you see in yourself. And I think that's incredibly important. I think that it's hard to imagine anyone achieving anything without having some kind of support network behind them. Whether that's building their confidence or opening doors for them or helping them build their skills. But Bridgewater really is about creating a different kind of network. And I feel like what they have built is a whole company that's organized around a challenge network. Your job is to say, look, I want you to be as good as you can be, Tim. So that means I'm going to try to tear your logic apart to see if there are any holes in it and try to improve your reasoning and your thinking so that you make better decisions and you come up with more compelling solutions to problems. And in a way, it's a form of tough love, right? I think having somebody who's pure challenge and never gives you any support.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I guess I've been doing it for a long time. I didn't have a name for it or really a structure, a formal structure for it until actually I did my first podcast episode where I went to Bridgewater. And it was really interested in Ray Dalio's culture of radical transparency. And I'd studied it for a few years, but this is the first time I'd really tried to tell the story in audio as opposed to writing about it. I went in and I was thinking, okay, what is different in the time that I've spent at this place where people not only are comfortable with criticism, but they actually seem to enjoy getting it. What is different about that? And I think at one point it just clicked that they are trying to build a different kind of network, that we all know the value of a network, but mostly when we think about networks, we're thinking about a support network, which is the group of cheerleaders that you surround yourself with to motivate you, to encourage you.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so valuable. And also, I think you're often in the position where when you finally finish your keynote and you get to the audience questions, when you hear the first two questions, you realize, oh, if I'd known that's what you were interested in, I would have given a completely different talk.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it possible that if you're not someone who reads about markets for fun in your spare time, that it's not going to be the most joyful thing you've ever done to spend 100 hours a week looking at a spreadsheet? So, you know, a lot of what I was working on was just trying to figure out how to take a message that was provocative to the audience and make it palatable.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just laser focus. My wife tells me I still sometimes don't blink in interviews, which cracks me up. But some of it was really granular kind of nuts and bolts, stage frescence. And some of it was content. I was trying to get students in later other kinds of audiences to question their assumptions. And I think one of the things I learned very quickly was I was attacking their assumptions way too hard. And the moment I said, you might hate your investment banking career. You might not fall in love with management consulting. They got defensive and shut down. And so I was working on finding other ways of landing at the conclusion on their terms instead of mine and saying, okay, how much do you really know about investment banking?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a long list. So, you know, actually, I wonder, Tim, if you've had this experience too, I find teaching way easier than speaking or lecturing. Because teaching is interactive, right? You're having a conversation. You get a lot of questions throughout your presentation. Whereas I think the guest lecturing was a little bit of trial by fire because I had to stand up and perform. And I wasn't a skilled or comfortable performer. And so early on very simple things like pausing between sentences, occasionally breathing. I got feedback at one point that I didn't blink ever.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think what I took away from that was I'd always thought you needed to be really structured in the feedback request that you make. And I think that sometimes that's helpful, right? To say, okay, could you tell me how to make my talk more interesting? Or how could I have kept you awake? But then I would have been limiting the feedback to the things I already knew I needed to work on, right? And I wanted to, I knew I had blind spots. I wanted to figure out what those were. And so I think by asking the broad question, I got much more varied feedback. And then as I design future feedback forms, I would always ask those broad questions. And then I'd follow up with a few targeted questions on specific things I was trying to work on.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I should try to repeat or build on. And I remember, I actually remember getting the feedback forms and looking at them and thinking, wow, there are a lot of letters written on the improve question. There's a lot of white space on the things I did well question.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I actually, when I went to give that first guest lecture, I asked the professor if they could give out their standard feedback form so I could learn how to improve. And the professor said, guest lectures don't do feedback forms. You're donating your time. You're probably pretty comfortable and confident in having something of value to offer. You don't then want a bunch of students telling you why you weren't as good as they wanted you to be. And if that's not the case, you don't need any more praise anyway. And so nobody really bothers with it. And I said, well, I really feel it. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if this is going to be a train wreck or just really bad. And so I feel like I have to learn something from the audience. And so I just drafted a very simple feedback form. It had two questions on it. One was, how can I improve? And the other was, is there anything I did well?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT