what do you make of all this I I feel that we need to do a lot of thinking about the structures involved the incentives and uh just the way that the data infrastructure in a way that that the the the process of of funding research is going to be big enough to make any sense the the support for sharing data and and you're right it's not just social psychology I mean psychology has has taken the BR of this but um talking to uhep ologists they're worried that basically all basically all the medical trials are too
small and they're too small because there have various um very high standards and we like high standards but the very high standards make the trials incredibly expensive to run and if the trials are very expensive to run you run the smallest possible trial that you could and there are ways to to patch that up you go well you know we'll do a meta analysis we'll put together a bunch of Trials but that's not as useful as just doing the first trial really well um and I feel I've been doing a lot of thinking about this
recently but I I I feel that there is there are some amazing things we could be doing with the right C of data infrastructure the right sharing of tools the right transparency uh that could just lead scientific progress ahead in Leaps and Bounds and at the moment we're still fumbling towards that uh much more slowly than I would like I I think you're spot on there and it's I think one other thing we should add to the table is the questions we really care about it's hard to track people long enough to know what the
lasting effects are I I read a synthesis of research recently we don't even know if dental floss is useful like like EX four out of five dentists tell you to floss your teeth the empirical evidence is not it's not conclusive I still floss my teeth but I don't know that that's good for me yeah and no one does yeah and we do have there's amazing so the National Health Service in the UK has got data on basically every every interaction you've had with the with the Healthcare System every time you went to the doctor whatever
what you were prescribed it's all it's all there in these big data warehouses did you um did you maybe contract a sexually transmitted infection after you got married interesting did you did you used to wet the bed when you were 15 years old it's all there and the question is how to draw an unbelievable amount of insight can be drawn scientific Insight can be drawn out of that data how do you do it while protecting people's privacy and I think we know the answer people are nerdy enough go and read the Ben gaker review for
the UK government there are solutions to this but they involve an investment in I've used this phrase infrastructure before just the way you structure the data the way you protect the data the rules you have the Norms you have for um querying that data um which enables the science to be done openly so every time you make a query of that data every other scientist with permission sees what query you made so they can Pro oh you actually there's a bug in your code you made a mistake so we can fix that at the same
time you don't ever actually get the data you get the answer to your query so you're protecting people's privacy while at the same time having much better structures for open science so that's sort of thing that we we could be doing and and we aren't and yeah it's not just about kind of cute social psychology research that is um you know possibly not true at all um but um anyway there we go thank you for answering that question I I realized I got a slightly slightly off track I I had another slightly off track question
I don't have a track let's be clear we we can talk about whatever you find interesting so so I just wanted to get your Reflections on on Cheryl Sandberg because she's just stepped down from meta's board this amazingly powerful uh businesswoman um all this influence on on Facebook uh she was kind of worshipped and then um Facebook book fell out of fashion and so she fell out of fashion and and I I found her absolutely fascinating from a distance but you actually wrote a book with her so I wanted to to ask you what was
that like what what did you learn working with Cheryl well actually La last time I was in the UK for Intelligence Squared um Cheryl and I did an option b event that um Malala was kind enough to host and I think you know I I do want to say there are huge problems in social media to fix um it has been sobering as uh we watch what's happened to Twitter as Elon Musk runs it to see how much worse Facebook could be um I will say uh and yes there are many ways it could be
better uh and I've given a lot of input over the years uh and so I think Jer is out on how we solve a lot of the problems that social media creates um I think the the biggest thing that I learned from working with Cheryl is she is the highest standards of anybody I've ever met so I was used to writing a draft and then doing a couple visions and seeking you know getting the 0 to 10 score and then revising some more based on the advice I got and then I'm done for Cheryl um
a chapter would not see the light of day until there were at least 100 revisions like that that was a minimum in most cases and she she was so determined to get the data right um and also to be as clear as possible in her communication and it it fundamentally transformed me as a writer um and I I don't know if you can see it Tim but when I go back and read there's like a before working with Cheryl and there's an after working with Cheryl um give and take remains my favorite idea I've ever
worked on um it was my first book it's oh thank you for those of you who are familiar with it um it was it was the thing I'd spent two people loved it no one else has read it um no no I mean I I i' chosen it as the one thing I wanted to study and I I poured a decade in my research life into it and so it was like it was like my baby um I would write that book so differently now and the post cheral books think again in Hidden potential I'm
much prouder of the writing um and I think they're far better books because of the way that she raised those standards for me and I think we should all be lucky to collaborate with someone who uh who believes enough in our potential that they're willing to to say it's not done yet even when we're ready to turn it in yeah I wanted to ask you about uh about your writing you have this story in the book about B Harvard saying well yeah you can come to Harvard but you really need help with your right in
because it's bad uh and you you make it look very easy as a writer you you've got a you're very you're very accessible it's very easy to follow um there it's definitely you there were certain turns of phrase that only you would use that another writer wouldn't and that's that's good there's that it's not kind of all just smoothed off um so you're a great writer and you were once a terrible writer apparently so talk us through that process well uh thank you I think the remedial classes worked right but you never went to theed
no I skipped it cuz I I couldn't I couldn't stomach the idea of taking a class that I was told was for people who spoke English as a seventh language and heavily recruited athletes and the by the way the I got I got to Harvard already worrying that I was the one mistake who you know admissions took and I didn't belong there and I wasn't smart enough and then they fail me on the writing test which is the the first test I take in college my roommate welcome to Harvard yeah no no but it gets
worse because my roommate was the heavily recruited star quarterback on the American football team and he passed the writing test like I I should drop out I do not belong here but uh one of the pieces of feedback uh that I got actually this was more advice from the writing office was they said you really need to work on structure because we could not follow your argument and that this is something that still is a challenge for me which is um I suffer more and more now from what psychologists call the curse of knowledge which
is when you know something you can't imagine what it's like to not know it and and that means it's really hard to explain it to other people who don't understand it um it's why so many like the worst physics teacher you could have for intro physics would be Einstein because he cannot relate to what it's like to not understand relativity um and actually he was a terrible teacher and had to cancel his classes uh because he couldn't draw enough students uh despite his Brilliance or maybe because of his Brilliance and his expertise anyway so um
one of the things I had to learn to do was to actually explain my ideas out loud before I wrote them to somebody who knew nothing about the subject and it's probably my most useful exercise today still yeah so what advice would you you give me I'm 10 books in I I'm working on 11th it's hard how how can I become a better writer how can Tim Harford become a better writer that's like David Beckham asking how he can become a better footballer uh I dispute the premise but still but uh geez I I I'd
have to think more about that to I think to do it justice but if you want an off-the-cuff reaction yeah I think one thing that I would love to see you do is um stay with your amazing Stories longer I your story about Keith Jarrett to this day when I sit down to write a story or to prep a TED talk like the Tim Harford standard is what I'm trying to hit and sometimes it's over too soon for me like it's so rich and so interesting I I think and you can correct me if I'm
wrong but I feel a little bit of you and I have the same instincts which is we love the data and the science more and the story is just a vehicle but as a reader I'm less like myself and more like the audience I think and I I want you to go into the full narrative more than you do and you do that beautifully on cautionary tales and I think you could do more of it on the page okay noted thank you I think now see now you have to do it we have we have
a whole room full of people that are expecting it you're accountable Tim yeah no no and and actually the process of of writing the cauy tales podcast which is very story driven has I think changed the way I think about about story I think another thing another idea from the book that I want to do more is uh is to get more advice earlier for more people there are there are a couple of people who who see everything and work over everything uh but I could show I could show this the writing to more people
at an earlier stage and try it at your own risk yeah and I don't well and I don't do that because it it because I feel because I'm scared right I'm I feel uncomfortable how many how many successful books will you have written go of that fear yeah well but I feel like I don't want to show it to you before it's ready right but actually it's the process of of course I I do in fact want to show it to you before it's ready because that's why I'm showing it to you and that's how
you get it ready yeah I think and this links into the the uh you got this lovely story about these these linguists who were just unbelievably good at learning French and Italian and and all kinds of obscure languages many of whom were told did you just call French and Italian obscure languages did anybody else hear that I would excuse an American for doing that you have no excuse my friend it's not how it sounded in my head but okay that sure that's what I said and in an addition obscure languages yes I'm with you so
so um and and many of them are uh were just told at school they they they were terrible at languages or I think one of them the father spoke Spanish at home uh was a native speaker of Spanish and they couldn't learn Spanish despite that advantage and and and it turns out the Secret's all about discomfort yeah I I I actually didn't know where this chapter was going to go so I um I happen to stumble across uh a polyglot uh this is somebody who speaks at least six languages fluently and can converse proficiently in
another five and I I just think that's endlessly interesting how did you learn to do that like did you have a language Gene were you exposed to a ton of different um different languages early on during a critical period and no it turns out that this guy Benny Lewis could not learn a foreign language in school and only started learning them successfully as an adult but how did that happen and then I'm like well is Benny alone and no I find Sarah Maria hasbun who had the same problem and couldn't learn Spanish despite the fact
that her father Salvadorian and she grew up her in her childhood um so like how did they learn to do that and what did they know as adult Learners that we can all learn and it turns out their their their core Insight is really simple which is most of us when we're taught languages in school we read them and we write them and we don't speak them yet because we don't feel comfortable and we think we've got to master it so we don't embarrass ourselves and sound like idiots but actually the way to master it
is to speak it and Sarah Maria told me she said she said learning to speak a language without talking day in Day Out is kind of like trying to master the piano by reading like a Shuman biography or trying to become a great basketball player by watching videos of Steph Curry and LeBron James not going to happen and um in order to to get over this hurdle that they face they had to not only Embrace but amplify discomfort so Benny uh he's he's Irish and he he sets a goal he moves to a country and
he says I want to be proficient in 3 months and his goal is to make 200 mistakes a day when he talks to you and so he literally will memorize a script in a language he doesn't understand and walk up to strangers and introduce himself and say hi I'm Benny I'm trying to learn a language and I don't speak this language and then see how they respond and every time he makes a mistake in a script somebody gives him a tip and every moment that he makes a mistake he remembers the lesson better because he
had that little Pang of oh this is awkward why am I doing this and um I think the better you get at embracing that kind of discomfort the faster you learn yeah so seek discomfort I'm going to come back there's I think there's an interesting tension or contradiction in the book but before I ask you oh good we're gonna fight about something I've been waiting for this fight about wait a minut Tim Tim hold on a second you you won the national debate Championship Once Upon a Time yeah it was 1992 okay you were like
6 years old at the time I was 11 okay but I I really thought that part of what I was signing up for tonight was a chance to uh to test my debate skills against a master and you're just you're not challenging me enough I mean you're agreeing with things I say what kind of debate Champion does that okay I'll I'll so hold that thought I'm going to come to you guys Adam clearly wants your most hostile questions no no no I just I I want to learn from you debating really and I want to
have my arguments pressure tested so what's what's something you disagreed with in the book so so it it's a rather than disagreement a contradiction so something that something that puzzled me uh you have this really interesting I think compelling argument that in order to learn you need to seek discomfort like these these polyglots who go who just humiliate themselves who who are just hungry to make the maximum number of mistakes and you build on that and explore that a couple of chapters later in the book you're talking about the importance of Play and play is
not gamification it's not giving yourself little scores play is like really having fun just kind of messing around and just enjoying yourself uh so you're telling us that in order to learn and grow seek discomfort and you're also telling us in order to learn and grow like have fun like have a great time so isn't is that does that not strike you as somewhat contradictory now we're talking okay yeah no I I don't I don't see that as a contradiction I see it as a tension and you're the first person to raise it and it
bothered me me while I was writing the book and no one who read it pointed it out and I decided it was just in my head and now I know it isn't and I'm mad and I want to go fix it um but here here's here so I tried to what I tried to do is I tried to write the resolution of it and I think where I landed is there there there are different kinds of discomfort and some are beneficial and some are not um the kind of discomfort I think is not beneficial is
uh either burnout or bore out so you do not want to push yourself to Chronic emotional exhaustion uh where you feel like you have nothing left to give um and you're just completely drained of your energy you also don't want to do something that's so monotonous that you can't imagine a reason to get excited about it um and you're just pushing yourself and um and using up all of your self-control um what you do want I think is the the more manageable discomfort of um of social fear of uh what are other people going to
think of me can I give them this draft because they might judge me they might think I'm stupid or they might think I'm not as smart as I was on the last book and then I've either lost it or I've sold out or um I'm on a decline um It's that kind of discomfort that I think helps us the the hesitation to try something new and the hesitation to put our ideas in front of other people that's what we need to get over but I don't want you to suffer constantly okay did I resolve may
maybe maybe yeah maybe I mean maybe the resolution is simply you can't be you can't be uncomfortable all the time and you got to have some fun right and but you can also you can learn through fun as well this is the Goldilocks theory of psychology yeah everything in moderation yeah yeah everything in moderation including questions from me we should have questions from uh from you I've got a a couple of questions from the from the internet hello I don't know where the internet is at the moment but hello internet thank you everyone for listening
and for sending in your questions but um let's take some questions from uh the room maybe if you take your hand up um have we got we' we've got a we yeah okay so there's there's question over there very enthusiastic questioner over there I see a couple of questions here as well so hi oh my um super briefly three um advices tricks that you would give for people that really struggle in finding self-discipline okay I don't know reading the newspaper I want I put tried every single sort of trick not happening okay great U Can
We There was a question here as well hi um it's about uh I guess your your talk about perfectionism and your recovery from perfectionism but then I also think of you on the treadmill trying to get better and better and better so I wonder how do you balance out that that habit with another contradiction one more question let's see there's somebody here or right hi thank you um in a moment sir thank you just what was an idea that was Cannon to your early thinking that you thought was absolutely true that now you've completely dispelled
um and as you think the opposite of or perhaps vice versa are you asking me to think again Adam never anything um okay so yeah yeah we'll have a f question as well you can hold them all in your mind I'm sure okay I'm Anon from Indonesia so my questions is uh your suggestion is like always nonintuitive uh yeah you do not say like a counterintuitive it's so cont counterintuitive for me uh when we uh should start to like make a progress by like a uh have a strength of like a bom of uh everyday
struggle like what what Kobe bran said that train more or like a Michael pep say train every day it's so obvious not like a hidden or like a Ching again things so when we we need to the newness and when when we need the like a a Str of per thank you all right so we have discipline perfectionism we have rethinking and then when to make a change where do you want to start wherever you want to start um okay well let's just go in order uh discipline I honestly I think the most useful book
I've read on that is atomic Habits by James Clear if you haven't read it I've heard more people say it changed their ability to exercise self-control than anything else uh I also really liked Charles D Charles doig's book The Power of Habit uh and so rather than giving you three random tips uh I think those resources hopefully are more helpful if you don't already know them do you do you view yourself as suffering from a self-discipline problem uh yes in excess of it yeah yeah what it takes discipline for me not to work actually which
is a weird problem okay maybe we talk about that in a second but yes so we had what else did we have we had the we had the okay so we had you're going to be a perfectionist and yet there you are on the treadmill so yeah so I I wrote a whole chapter about recovering from perfectionism and it turns out I'm still in recovery um I I find it I find it really challenging but I do think there's a difference between aiming for perfect and aiming for better and so what I've tried to do
is try to get more thoughtful about which goals are worth pursuing and what I discovered on the treadmill is um a lot of running is really boring I don't like it and if I have a goal to get a little bit better that keeps me motivated um I I like I like Improvement that that for me is intrinsically exciting and so um I don't ever expect to hit like a result I'm proud of or that could win a race um but I I like the feeling of progress uh and so I'm trying to anchor on
that as opposed to well here's a mistake I made and I screwed that up and now it ruined my day because I had a bad workout um something I used to believe that I thought was Canon that I no longer think is true uh I here's here's a really core one um okay this is embarrassing um you know how like you can have a like an email signature and some people like to have quotes that are inspiring in theirs maybe that's just an American thing but when I was in college uh my email signature for
I think all four years said I am a great believer in luck and I find that the harder I work the more I have of it Thomas Jefferson and I'm embarrassed for multiple reasons one Thomas Jefferson never said that it turns out and I failed to fact check it um I just trusted as geves at the time um two I think I carried around um first of all an excessive confidence in the the the onetoone relationship between effort and results and I really underappreciated the importance of opportunity and Circumstance um in shaping the returns that
you got on hard work um if you were lucky to have a great coach um if you were fortunate to be born with a lot of natural Talent right your hard work was going to lead to different kinds of results the other thing that I guess I I found myself really turning upside down is I loved that quote because I thought that hard work was a sign of virtue like I equated being a hard worker with a good person uh and I guess like that that is the Protestant ethic um it's what Martin Luther brought
uh it's what vber wrote about I don't believe it anymore I don't think hard work makes you a good person I think sometimes depending on what you're working at working hard can make you a worse person um because either the ends you're pursuing are harmful or because um your work ethic uh really undermines the way you treat other people and so uh I've just abandoned my obsession with hard work altogether and making a change um yeah when to make a change um I my favorite way to think about this is to say I I hear
this question from my students all the time there's the like how do I know when it's time to take on a new skill or to change jobs or to change careers or to move to New cities or or to quit I I wish got a question coming in from the internet on the importance of quitting so it's related yes it is so I worry a lot about a problem that Barry sta has called escalation of commitment to a losing course of action this is where you make an initial decision it does not work out as
plan but instead of rethinking it you double down and you would call it a sunk cost problem no I the escalation equipment but one of my favorite cauy Tales is about the cottingley fairies and it's these these two girls who ended up fooling arone and oil faking these fairies at the the bottom of the garden and they originally did it to play a trick on their parents that trick back back fired and they finally confessed in their 70s um because it just like there was never there was never a way off um that the kind
of the escalation there was never a moment where they could say actually we just we lied about that I love that episode of cautionary tales and you played a trick on us as listeners uh in the way that you unfolded that story and I'm not going to spoil it here but it was a great moment for me where I was initially mad at you and then I was just delighted at how well you fooled me so uh that was a great emotional Arc um okay so the escalation problem what what what we know from the
research on it is you can't deescalate yourself because like you have to prove to yourself and everyone else that this was a good decision all along I actually had a student in office hours once who said um I'm wondering this was about a week before her wedding she came in and she said I wonder if I'm making a mistake in marrying the wrong person and I was like whoa I'm not that kind of psychologist but I said well how did you get this close that you're you're now wondering a week before your wedding day and
she said well I've been with him for four years and I couldn't I couldn't stomach the idea of having wasted the two previous years with him I was like listen it's better to waste to admit that you wasted the last two than to waste the next 20 but I think because you're compromised because you're you're so motivated to to turn the the failure around and to justify the time you've spent and to feel like you have good judgment and you're a smart decision maker you can't trust your own judgment and so you need to rely
on other people um and what I love here is I love having a challenge Network which is a group of thoughtful um thoughtful coaches and sometimes critics who hold up a mirror and help you see your own blind spots and so my advice to my students is um have a checkup with your challenge Network twice a year uh repeating reminder in your calendar to ask the people you really trust what what's something I should rethink is there something I should quit is there a change that you think I need to make and you can't just
ask one or two people because you're going to get their idiosyncratic opinion what you want to do is go to enough people where you can start to Triangle it and see wow four people who know me well independently had the same suggestion and that is that that's a real opportunity for me to grow as opposed to just kind of their pet idea for me did she go through the W with the wedding uh yes and uh they are no longer together I mean maybe that's for the best because the alternative would have been to cancel
the wedding and to to tell everyone Adam Grant told me not to marri about but just to be clear like she wanted an answer and one of the things that I I screwed up a lot in my early office hours was trying to give students answers because they were really desperate for someone who other than their parents uh who they thought had more experience and wisdom to tell them what to do and I learned you can't you actually can't know what's right for someone else and that my job was not to help them find an
answer it was to help them clarify the question and what their values were to so that they could answer it themselves and so I think if I was helpful there it was in asking um what do you want in a partner what's most important to you what are your deal breakers and if you knew what you know now about this particular bloke would you have still wanted to date him yeah interesting sorry to have asked but I was curious you just dangled it there and I was like I need to know now I need to
know um let's take some more questions from from the room stick your stick your hands up uh we got oh we got so many questions down here let's take some questions from the people over here all these all these wow loads of people hey thank you Francisco so I used to work at Facebook for roughly N9 years and I can 100% agree with what you said about perfectionism and my question is first of all did you ever challenge Cheryl on her perfectionism because I think that'd be an interesting one and my other one if you
what what do you think is a healthy balance in a Workforce where the leadership is so perfect and they they really live what they say but that it creates a type of anxiety in the workforce as well um and what what do you think is a good balance between having Perfection as a goal and also giving Comfort to your Workforce that what they're doing is actually just good enough because the people that I work would always compared themselves and never felt they're good enough and at the same time they're all wonderful and amazing and really
great people and um you were an adviser of that company so I'm quite curious to hear your your opinion on that one can I can I comment quickly on both of those of course okay so on on the the second one I think what what I want to do as often as possible is to say look we can't we can't get a 10 on everything um you can rarely get a 10 on anything but if you try to get a 10 on everything you're going to end up with a bunch of twos and threes um
on things that are getting neglected because you you end up with tunnel vision and focus just on repairing the things you can easily control and so what we need to have is a conversation about how important is this task and I break down importance two ways one is how high are the stakes um how much of an impact is it going to have on on the organization and the people affected by it and number two how consequential is it is it a reversible decision is the door going to lock behind you or is it more
of a revolving door if it's a highly consequential irreversible decision you better be aiming for a nine because it really matters and you can't easily change your mind tomorrow um if it's if it's more reversible or lower Stakes we need to talk about what is acceptable good enough um what does a 6 and a half or seven look like and then stop working on it once we hit that standard um I had this discussion with Cheryl in part because uh this is one of the only arguments I've ever won with her uh we had this
big debate about how to get to her high standards and what she would do is she would write a sentence and then rewrite the sentence and rewrite the sentence and rewrite the sentence and I I pushed back on that for two reasons one it was um like we it felt like we were never going to finish the book and two we were going to end up with a really great intro and a really sloy conclusion and what I told her was you also don't know whether it's a good sentence until you see how until the
whole thing is done exactly see the other sentences that that's what I felt as well so um vonette wrote about this he talked about Bashers and swoopers um do you do you kind of edit as you go or do you treate creating and revising as separate skills and um as we went through this Cheryl decided that in fact we could get to the same outcome faster and in a more balanced way by doing a rough draft where we didn't have much quality control and then coming back and bringing our more Discerning lens to analyze and
revise so I think that was uh she she said she writes more that way now so I feel like I maybe added something there yeah interesting yes questions questions questions if you have a mic you can speak yeah and let's make sure we get one to the front row to a thank you Hi D uh I love both your books and your podcast uh but I also find your Instagram accounts so insightful so I was wondering how you managed to like write all these intricate and complex books as well as communicate very succinctly these messages
on your Instagram account how do you do that and even in terms of like tactically how do you manage the whole process of being online basically I had questions like this as well um and and there's a gentleman here very enthusiastic with I like to like to see hey Adam um just want to say your podcast has helped me through my own Journey going through mental health and suicide self harm and your books has helped me as well um I'm a Spoke word artist I'm a poet I'm a rapper and obviously i' got autism as
well and my question is to you that can I share my rap to you and to your people for mental health awareness please on stage [Applause] wow how long how long is the rap 1 minute 1 minute definitely get up here just the other the other that's got it be yo yo yo yo depression anxiety loneliness intimidation intimidation purpose nation impact the world nation I'll be for that pain where people are calling me S suicide still increasing depression still increasing loness still increasing pain to the purpose P my brain to my heart to my soul
social media addiction that the go through depression attacks that the go through liness times that the go through Rose of love and you can't love yourself Rose of love and you go for depression raise of love when you're going for anxiety birth death old age disease nature hope praying the God's blessing me through together walk it talk it heal it through together I'm a mental health Survivor I'm a self harm Survivor I'm a suicide attempt Survivor depression anxiety purpose Rose of love when you can't love yourself Rose of love when you're going for depression Rose
of love when you're going for anxiety the panics and the worries and darkness around me these are words describe anxiety but the doctors will call that self harm if you're going through met whole battles in this world Remember You are not alone too that amazing amazing amazing I love it thank you thank you I love that thank you wow send me an email please um can I can I just say uh first of all that took tremendous courage all of it um and secondly you sir your potential is not hidden thank you so wow I
I I hate it when these evenings are so [Laughter] predictable thank you so yeah what one one more question yes yes hi Adam uh on the um feedback and advice uh thing that you were talking about before in this modern world where people are absolutely divided and also people read very little um both sides I mean when you are taking advice how do you filter out what's logical what's not that's one and then when you're giving advice a lot of people say that you they want advice but the moment they say something you know you're
the worst enemy or something so how do you how do you navigate that that's that's what I wanted to ask you thanks good thank you very much actually let's have we got one more question up there thank you so much um Adam I'm a massive fan loved everything you said tonight follow you on social as well um love the sixn posts my question tonight you've we already touched on it as a potential subject Tim is how do you stop working or what advice do you have for people who love working I'm also asking for a
friend okay great so uh so we got polarization people who ask for feedback but don't want feedback how do you get so much done why don't you why don't you stop doing so much and then Instagram yeah and yes so go for it all right uh workaholism um read Melissa Clark's forthcoming book never not working uh it's all about the science of how to set boundaries and um I I think the biggest thing that I've learned from that body of research is uh actually my colleague Nancy rothbart studied this uh she studied the difference between
engaged and compulsive Workaholics so there's a huge difference between working because you feel guilty if you don't and you feel like you're never enough and working because you love your job and you're excited about the problems you're trying to solve and you care about the people you're trying to help and what Nancy shows is that the former is unhealthy and the latter is not problematic and so what I try to pay attention to is the question of why am I working not how much am I working and that's made a huge difference for me to
try to let the engaged workaholism happen and then contain it which means I don't start working until our kids leave leave for school uh my goal is to stop before they get home and I have an alarm that goes off and then if um if I fail at that I basically punish myself with a with a series of um commitments which include um I'm I'm not going to work tomorrow uh which I'm really lucky to have the luxury to make that choice um so I don't know how helpful that is but I think it's very
helpful I think it it the what's striking about this idea of the compulsion to work because you're feeling guilty versus being engaged and loving your job is a lot of the kinds of things that people really struggle with so social media slack email these are often demands on your attention they make you feel guilty they make you feel anxious but then they're not fun I certainly don't find them fun um and these are exactly the kinds of things that very easily bleed into your uh you know into a time when you shouldn't be working yeah
agreed um advice uh let's see I think well can I offer some unsolicited advice to all of you don't give unsolicited advice uh we know buyin really matters is the first thing so I think asking are you interested in my advice uh is a good first step um but I I found it actually helpful to have a broader conversation about that like so I I'll go back to students in office hours for a second um my question now is why are you here are you look are you really torn between multiple options and you want
me to help you weigh them and decide which one might be a better choice I'm happy to do that um if if I can are you here because you want me to poke holes in your reasoning and you're already leaning one way and you want to make sure that you've really thought this through carefully okay I'm glad to play that role I'll be your challenge Network um are you here because you just want a stamp of approval from on a decision you've already made guess what you don't need to come to office hours for that
if you think a choice you're making is good for your happiness or your success I support it I want what you think is best for you like you don't need to tell me what your plan is for me to say like hooray yes good good decision um and in that conversation I found out that a lot of people are not actually looking for advice they're looking to think out loud um and then kind of hear themselves and I don't have a problem with that um I think this is really hard in a time of polarization
both as an advice giver and an advice Seeker um I I put a vend diagram in the book um I think it's in chapter two the sponge chapter um I have three questions I've learned to ask from from both the research and and experience when I receive advice uh number one and the most important question is is this person trying to help me if not then why should I listen to them like if they're not here to help me get better they might be a troll and I shouldn't put a lot of faith in their
suggestion number two um is this person credible in the situation uh so do they actually have a track record of accomplishment or expertise in the area they're advising on if so I'm more likely to listen to them and then number three how familiar is this person with me um do they know me well enough to give me personalized advice if not um what they're suggesting may work well for them but not apply to my goals and my values and I found that running the advice and and frankly the the criticism I get through that set
of lenses is really helpful in filtering what I want to pay attention to and what I want to Discount um and this actually goes to Instagram so uh I look I I don't have a real job is the short answer I don't like I I teach classes sometimes and the rest of my time is free says here yeah but I teach two classes a year and one of them is a week and a half yeah so I have a lot of flexibility and that time is dedicated to research to writing to data analysis to advising
doctoral students to doing events like this and um and speaking and podcasting and um I feel like I've I've failed if I haven't either had a new idea or learned about a new idea each day and what I used to do is anytime I read an interesting study or had an interesting conversation I would send the study to somebody or I would forward the article to someone who I thought would find it interesting and basically social media is um is my replacement for that because I realized I was spamming my friends all the time and
they got sometimes they're like I don't I don't need another article from you like just because you thought this was interesting I'm like oh but if I have a random audience of people who have opted in maybe they do want to see what what the research was that I thought was intriguing um and I you know I think this is obviously an extreme case because my job is to to both create and communicate knowledge but I think I think for anybody like whenever you learn something new or whenever you have AA an AA moment in
a conversation um your first impulse is to share it like we're not just curious creatures right we're we're also creaters who um who really love to be teachers and so I would say whatever the thing is that was a light bulb moment for you that's something you probably want to share with someone else um and there's no reason why that couldn't become um a practice that you do on a blog or on a social platform yes but now you know you really came out of your shell in the last half hour Tim it takes time
right it all takes time so you've you've already told us you're uh you're quite disciplined at only working within the school day that's that's a big constraint on your time um and you've got all these different projects you've got these these books you've described this very detailed Pro process of of drafting and redrafting and seeking advice and going back and redrafting again you've got your your teaching fine it's not much teaching you got your res search youve got the Ted podcast you've got various business enterprises there's all this different stuff going on um I always
find this this sort of thing to be a challenge because on the one hand everything feeds everything else there's that fascinating cross fertilization on the other hand everything gets in the way of everything else like constantly being distracted from your work by I'm sorry what were you saying by your other work so how how is it that you manage how do you manage to not constantly have your Instagram posts get in the way of your writing or your writing get in the way of your research or your research get in the way of your podcasting
how are you managing that I don't know I hope they're not getting in the way uh where's Jim Barry where's Jim ask Jim can you answer this question J Jim was an amazing PhD student with me a long time ago he's now a star Professor here at UCL uh a world expert on creativity um Jim is there I never know how to answer this question is there anything you learned from working with me that I should say the people the the folks online must be just like what is on they're all off the chain in
the kogen hall anyway yes hi Jim um so what was the question again no how does Adam gr do it is the question right what should he say at 3:00 a.m. when I would have asked him a question at 11: and I get the response back at 3:00 a.m. and I would wake up at 8: and look at it and it was totally change how I thought about it I just realized that I think part of this work piece is your mind doesn't shut off and that you're constantly churning on these issues look I'm I'm
out of breath thatd be the running I need I need to get on the treadmill I think um but I think you you really sequence to get to the core of the problem and so many people fight around the edges of things and you spend time getting to the the meat what is the thing that I need to address here and I think that's what I draw out of all the conversations I've had with you thank you that's helpful Jim um I thank you um I uh it's funny um I think I think my wife
asked me once like can we turn your brain off uh CU like we'll we'll we'll be listening to a song on the radio and I'm like well what do they mean by that lyric like can't you just enjoy the song I'm like no I have to know why um but I do think I think there's there's something to that that like I I I feel really fortunate that I happen to opt into a field that I find endlessly fascinating and so human psychology and behavior I wake up in the morning thinking about it I go
to bed at night thinking about it it it kind of pervades my life and it doesn't feel like work it's fun but um I think one of the things that that does is um actually at a meeting um a few years ago where it was like 1:57 p.m. and uh the meeting's over at 2 and we just finished uh a big piece of a project and my co-author said all right let's be done I was like no we have three more minutes and we're going to use them and she came back afterward and she said
you're willingness to keep your brain on for those three minutes how many of those three minute intervals do you have over the course of a week and we did the math and it added up to a couple extra hours of work over the course of a week and I was like wait is this not normal do you not do this she's like no I like have random conversation for the last 3 minutes I'm like yeah but if I wanted to do that I would have called you not in our meeting like this meeting is to
work um and so I guess I guess there's a there's a discipline that I found really helpful which is I try to wake up each morning with um one project that I think is interesting and important and if I make progress on that project um I'm willing to let other things drop and that would be a lot harder if I had a boss I mean it's been it's been amazing thank you Adam thank you thank you everybody for contributing so so fully and so interestingly from the floor thank you all for making the journey thank
you to intelligence squ the amazing team there uh for hosting us uh your generosity of spirit Adam and your intellect and your creativity have been just a joy to sit with so wait a second hold on no no you can't end here I want to say something first okay um first of all can we thank Tim Harford for showing up um I Tim I I really cannot believe how much time and thought you put into this book and it made me very nervous frankly uh but I I really appreciate and admire um how carefully you
dig into everything you read and you always challenge me to think deeper um and also Broner and tonight has been no no exception and I'm I'm grateful that for that and now that we've met I think we might be friends so thank you for that thank you thank you and then thank you and then then I just I would love to say to the audience um did anybody see the guardian headline uh the Super Bowl of democracy is this year this week I had a real problem with that headline this is the World Cup of
democracy uh but that aside um I think we're a lot of us are worried that we're living in a time when people are are getting dumber and more tribal and more hateful and the intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness and compassion and courage in this room gives me hope for democracy and I just want to thank you all it's been it's been an honor to be here so ladies and gentlemen Adam gr here we go you
