The Exchanges

Q fascinated in, because you brought this up a number of times in the book, is power differentials, and that's power differentials between people, like, speaking truth to power, people who have less powers, people who aren't in management, but who are contributing original thinking, even power differentials with people who are not represented, like, whether you're underrepresented in the organization. How does those play out in this, in this scenario?

A Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that lots of people who come from non-dominant groups are less likely to get heard when they speak up. So Sheryl Sandberg and I wrote an op-ed last year called Speaking While Female, where we covered a lot of the evidence that when a woman and a man make the same point, the man gets a big pat on the back and people start to rally around him, and the woman is either not heard or punished for being too aggressive. And you see the, the same effect with different kinds of minority groups, because this is not fundamentally a gender effect, it's a power effect. Right. So the, the groups that are perceived as, you know, as not occupying high status positions in society get stereotypes as, you know, sort of needing to find their place. And, you know, they're often perceived as, uh, as stepping out of bounds when they're just trying to make suggestions or get their opinions heard. You know, I think from an organizational standpoint, we need to be especially careful to welcome dissenting voices when they come from people who don't look like everyone else and who don't come from The most common backgrounds in the organization, but I think from an individual perspective, one of the opportunities to overcome these biases is to make sure that you earn status before you exercise power.

AI assessment note: “people who come from non-dominant groups are less likely to get heard when they speak up”

Q that you mentioned, which made me laugh out loud, is that a person's choice of browser indicates where they fit. So if you're like a Chrome user, for example, or a Firefox Mozilla user, you're more likely to be along those lines than not. It feels kind of obvious in hindsight, but it's a really funny thing to come across. Like, how did you sort of come up with that?

A Well, I wish I could take credit for it. I was sitting at a conference one day and an economist Michael Hausman presented the study showing that he could predict your job performance and how long you stay in your job just by knowing what browser you use. And a lot of people don't like the results of this study, obviously. And if you don't know what browser you use, you should check Ask Jeeves right away. Basically what he found was Chrome and Firefox users were on average getting in call center jobs to customer satisfaction rates in 90 days that took Internet Explorer and Safari users a 120 days to reach. And the Chrome and Firefox users also stuck around 15% longer in their jobs. So the first instinct for me was this has got to be a technical advantage, right? Like people who are more computer savvy are the ones who are using Chrome and Firefox.

AI assessment note: “I was sitting at a conference one day and an economist Michael Hausman presented the study”

Q Are there any other takeaways? Like, I'm actually curious, not just for entrepreneurship, but like for education, for, um, raising kids. Like you had an article in the New York Times this past weekend that talked about like the mistakes a lot of parents commonly make, like, you know, overprogramming their kids. I mean, what are sort of the implications of your research?

A One of the things that surprised me the most is when you study originals and look back at their childhood histories, You see that their parents often focus on creating a really strong moral compass. So there are these brilliant studies of creative architects, where you look at the people who are nominated consistently by the most respected people in their field as truly original. And then you compare them to their peers who are technically skilled, but haven't necessarily done anything creative. And the, the, in the original studies, there were extensive interviews, not only with the architects, but their family members. Lots of observations, assessments. One of the things that came out was that the parents of the creative architects tended to focus less on rules and more on values, but that they gave their children a lot of freedom to actually determine their own values. And what happened was the architects then developed their own values, which, you know, were grounded in a moral framework that when other people said your idea was ridiculous, they were much more comfortable standing their ground and saying, well, this is who I am. And I'm going to try it anyway. They also, you know, in addition to just being comfortable with nonconformity, they were much more likely to be concerned about, you know, what is my contribution to the world?

AI assessment note: “parents of the creative architects tended to focus less on rules and more on values”

Q school or, you know, and just paying your bills on time, how does this sort of behavior play out in those scenarios? Like, can you be an original in one aspect of your life and then suddenly be very punctual about paying your bills? The psychological traits we have, it's not like you get to pick and choose what arenas of your life you get to be a certain way.

A Yeah, I think it's hard to be an original without being flexible. In fact, that might be the most central defining characteristic of original people is that they're willing to bring different ways of solving problems to different situations. So of course, there are some tasks, actually take any task where creativity is not important. If you're paying bills, you don't have to come up with novel solutions. And in fact, if you do, the IRS might come calling. That's a task where you want to be structured, conscientious, focused, and, you know, sort of Punch it in as quickly and efficiently as possible. I think that where, where originals end up procrastinating is when they know they're working on a hard problem. One of my favorite examples of this is Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter who's known for the West Wing and the Steve Jobs movie. And he was interviewed once by Katie Couric, who said, you know, you, you basically, you drive your staff crazy because sometimes you're literally about to shoot a scene and there's still no script. Like, how do you put up with this procrastinating? And Sorkin said, you call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.

AI assessment note: “If you're paying bills, you don't have to come up with novel solutions.”

Q mentioned it as being curvilinear. And at the second time you've mentioned the curvilinear as an example. So it sounds like there's always like a sweet spot where there's not too much, not too little, but there's just this one, just right amount of How do you know what that sweet spot is? Like where, where do you sort of fall off into one side of the curve or not?

A I think that part is much more art than science as, as much as it pains me as a social scientist to admit it. I wrote a paper about this a couple of years ago with Barry Schwartz, where we argued that everything in life is an inverted U and that, you know, if you take any strength or virtue or positive experience, you can find too much of a good thing where, you know, like, okay, if you're, if you're too confident, we get narcissism. If you're too generous, we get altruistic self-sacrifice. And you could play this out for, for any trait that you probably see in, in a positive light. I think the, the only thing that we really know at this stage about how to find the sweet spot is that good things satiate and bad things escalate. So the further that you move down the positive end of something, the more likely the costs are to start outweighing the benefits. And I think you can only usually see that by looking at the results. So, you know, in the case of expertise, right, the question is, okay, when you start to generate ideas, are you finding yourself trapped by what you already know in the field? As you're, you know, evaluating different kinds of ideas, do you consistently gravitate toward what's already accepted and proven?

AI assessment note: “you can only usually see that by looking at the results”

Q know you work there, so you may or may not be able to comment on this, but where you have, like, someone like Margaret Sullivan, who plays the role of public editor, and I love reading her stuff. It's fascinating. But even though it's public, and it's a criticism of the New York Times, it's, it's like a siloed thing. Like, do people actually then do anything with those takeaways?

A I have no idea. But, you know, the evidence would suggest that a lot of people don't, because the other side of this is just as you don't take the role seriously enough, your audience doesn't either. They're like, alright, so we know you're just playing the role, so we're just gonna let you give your lip service to it and stick with what we already believed. So what do you do? What you do is instead of assigning a devil's advocate, you unearth the devil's advocate. It's only authentic dissent that, that has the best chance of working. That means you need to find people who genuinely disagree and invite them into the conversation. And guess what? That's more likely to be minority group members, right? Who come from a different perspective and a different background. And that, you know, this is, this is one of those things that's easy to talk about and hard to do, which is you actually have to know what people think. You have to, you have to go out to meet the silent minority and say, look, you know, we really value your input. Let's find out what your reaction is to this idea.

AI assessment note: “evidence would suggest that a lot of people don't”

Q mentioned it as being curvilinear. And at the second time you've mentioned the curvilinear as an example. So it sounds like there's always like a sweet spot where there's not too much, not too little, but there's just this one, just right amount of How do you know what that sweet spot is? Like where, where do you sort of fall off into one side of the curve or not?

A I think that part is much more art than science as, as much as it pains me as a social scientist to admit it. I wrote a paper about this a couple of years ago with Barry Schwartz, where we argued that everything in life is an inverted U and that, you know, if you take any strength or virtue or positive experience, you can find too much of a good thing where, you know, like, okay, if you're, if you're too confident, we get narcissism. If you're too generous, we get altruistic self-sacrifice. And you could play this out for, for any trait that you probably see in, in a positive light. I think the, the only thing that we really know at this stage about how to find the sweet spot is that good things satiate and bad things escalate. So the further that you move down the positive end of something, the more likely the costs are to start outweighing the benefits. And I think you can only usually see that by looking at the results. So, you know, in the case of expertise, right, the question is, okay, when you start to generate ideas, are you finding yourself trapped by what you already know in the field? As you're, you know, evaluating different kinds of ideas, do you consistently gravitate toward what's already accepted and proven?

AI assessment note: “you can only usually see that by looking at the results”

Q Are there any other takeaways? Like, I'm actually curious, not just for entrepreneurship, but like for education, for, um, raising kids. Like you had an article in the New York Times this past weekend that talked about like the mistakes a lot of parents commonly make, like, you know, overprogramming their kids. I mean, what are sort of the implications of your research?

A One of the things that surprised me the most is when you study originals and look back at their childhood histories, You see that their parents often focus on creating a really strong moral compass. So there are these brilliant studies of creative architects, where you look at the people who are nominated consistently by the most respected people in their field as truly original. And then you compare them to their peers who are technically skilled, but haven't necessarily done anything creative. And the, the, in the original studies, there were extensive interviews, not only with the architects, but their family members. Lots of observations, assessments. One of the things that came out was that the parents of the creative architects tended to focus less on rules and more on values, but that they gave their children a lot of freedom to actually determine their own values. And what happened was the architects then developed their own values, which, you know, were grounded in a moral framework that when other people said your idea was ridiculous, they were much more comfortable standing their ground and saying, well, this is who I am. And I'm going to try it anyway. They also, you know, in addition to just being comfortable with nonconformity, they were much more likely to be concerned about, you know, what is my contribution to the world?

AI assessment note: “parents of the creative architects tended to focus less on rules and more on values”

Q What are some of the other counterintuitive characteristics? I think, by the way, procrastination was super interesting to me.

A I think we've all procrastinated at some point in our lives. And I will say, though, I'm pretty much the opposite of a procrastinator. There's a term for me, I'm a pre-crastinator. So I'm one of those people who, when I have a presentation to give in six months, I will wake up tomorrow morning feeling this tremendous sense of urgency to get it done now, so that I don't wait till the last minute and it's not hanging over my head. And as I studied originals, I found that many of them resisted that temptation and used procrastination productively. So look at Leonardo da Vinci, for example, who spent roughly 15 years trying to finish up The Last Supper and kept putting it off and working on these little optics experiments, and he felt like he was spinning his wheels and wrote in his notebook over and over again, tell me if anything ever was done. But ultimately, those diversions led him to make these discoveries in how to display light that dramatically improved his painting and made him the Renaissance man. And there's a lot of research coming out suggesting that when we procrastinate, we give ourselves more time to incubate ideas, we do more divergent thinking, we're less likely to be stuck in linear, structured patterns of thought, and that can be useful if you want to come up with new ideas.

AI assessment note: “when we procrastinate, we give ourselves more time to incubate ideas”

Q What are some of the other counterintuitive characteristics? I think, by the way, procrastination was super interesting to me.

A I think we've all procrastinated at some point in our lives. And I will say, though, I'm pretty much the opposite of a procrastinator. There's a term for me, I'm a pre-crastinator. So I'm one of those people who, when I have a presentation to give in six months, I will wake up tomorrow morning feeling this tremendous sense of urgency to get it done now, so that I don't wait till the last minute and it's not hanging over my head. And as I studied originals, I found that many of them resisted that temptation and used procrastination productively. So look at Leonardo da Vinci, for example, who spent roughly 15 years trying to finish up The Last Supper and kept putting it off and working on these little optics experiments, and he felt like he was spinning his wheels and wrote in his notebook over and over again, tell me if anything ever was done. But ultimately, those diversions led him to make these discoveries in how to display light that dramatically improved his painting and made him the Renaissance man. And there's a lot of research coming out suggesting that when we procrastinate, we give ourselves more time to incubate ideas, we do more divergent thinking, we're less likely to be stuck in linear, structured patterns of thought, and that can be useful if you want to come up with new ideas.

AI assessment note: “many of them resisted that temptation and used procrastination productively”

Q Was the era where Dr. Seuss, like, published Cat in the Hat, like, super high on patents? Like, I mean, those kids were fully defying their parents with, like, the cat in the house.

A Yeah, I think there's, uh, there's a case to be made there, and more recently, Oh, the Places You'll Go, I think, was the most popular children's book of the nineties, which was all about choosing your own path. And what's fascinating about this is, you know, in part, it's just a reflection of the culture, right? So, you know, when innovation becomes more important, we tend to Write and buy and read children's books that are innovative, but there's, I think, a story to be told about how these books actually shape originals. What you will find is that if you talk to some of the great originals of our time, they are constantly saying their favorite books as kids were stories of actually other kids who were, you know, inventing things or accomplishing things that were impossible previously. Um, If you asked Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to name their favorite childhood books, they both picked Lord of the Rings. Jeff Bezos and Sheryl Sandberg both said A Wrinkle in Time.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think there's, uh, there's a case to be made there, and more recently”

Q school or, you know, and just paying your bills on time, how does this sort of behavior play out in those scenarios? Like, can you be an original in one aspect of your life and then suddenly be very punctual about paying your bills? The psychological traits we have, it's not like you get to pick and choose what arenas of your life you get to be a certain way.

A Yeah, I think it's hard to be an original without being flexible. In fact, that might be the most central defining characteristic of original people is that they're willing to bring different ways of solving problems to different situations. So of course, there are some tasks, actually take any task where creativity is not important. If you're paying bills, you don't have to come up with novel solutions. And in fact, if you do, the IRS might come calling. That's a task where you want to be structured, conscientious, focused, and, you know, sort of Punch it in as quickly and efficiently as possible. I think that where, where originals end up procrastinating is when they know they're working on a hard problem. One of my favorite examples of this is Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter who's known for the West Wing and the Steve Jobs movie. And he was interviewed once by Katie Couric, who said, you know, you, you basically, you drive your staff crazy because sometimes you're literally about to shoot a scene and there's still no script. Like, how do you put up with this procrastinating? And Sorkin said, you call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.

AI assessment note: “If you're paying bills, you don't have to come up with novel solutions.”

Q not experts at X, Y, or Z, that they're the ones who go out and do it. And I admire that. I do think it takes a certain amount of knowing that you can do that. So like, what's the difference? Is that a confidence thing? Is that a experience thing? Is that a originals mindset? I mean, where do we figure out like what's making an entrepreneur tick there?

A There's, there's a huge debate about, you know, how much does confidence really drive success? And like everything else, it's curvilinear, right? So if you have too little confidence, you never act. And if you have too much confidence, then you end up getting complacent and missing out on, on threats and opportunities that you underestimate. I think that where I would come down on this is Susan Cain is fond of saying that there's zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas. And that's true empirically. The sad thing is, though, a lot of us take confidence as a signal of competence, and I think we need to stop doing that. I think if we stop doing that, we'll see many more women and minorities rise into leadership positions, because we'll see that oftentimes they are better prepared, but communicating in such a way that didn't always signal, you know, the, the competence behind the idea.

AI assessment note: “how much does confidence really drive success? And like everything else, it's curvilinear”

Q not experts at X, Y, or Z, that they're the ones who go out and do it. And I admire that. I do think it takes a certain amount of knowing that you can do that. So like, what's the difference? Is that a confidence thing? Is that a experience thing? Is that a originals mindset? I mean, where do we figure out like what's making an entrepreneur tick there?

A There's, there's a huge debate about, you know, how much does confidence really drive success? And like everything else, it's curvilinear, right? So if you have too little confidence, you never act. And if you have too much confidence, then you end up getting complacent and missing out on, on threats and opportunities that you underestimate. I think that where I would come down on this is Susan Cain is fond of saying that there's zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas. And that's true empirically. The sad thing is, though, a lot of us take confidence as a signal of competence, and I think we need to stop doing that. I think if we stop doing that, we'll see many more women and minorities rise into leadership positions, because we'll see that oftentimes they are better prepared, but communicating in such a way that didn't always signal, you know, the, the competence behind the idea.

AI assessment note: “how much does confidence really drive success? And like everything else, it's curvilinear”