Modern Wisdom
#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential
Sat, 04 Jan 2025
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, professor at the Wharton School and an author. Success is multi-layered. It involves challenges like overcoming nervousness, developing an appetite for risk-taking, and dealing with failures both privately and publicly—the list goes on. So how can we better navigate these hurdles to unlock our full potential? Expect to learn why so many people fail to reach their true potential, what most people don’t realise about where meaning and motivation come from, how to deal with uncertainty better, how to get better at taking more risks, the key to dealing with failure, why being vulnerable around showing your strengths and weakness is crucial, the best advice on how to deal with and overcome nervousness and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the differences between natural ability and opportunity?
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation. What does that mean?
Well, I did write that, and I think I believe it. So if you look at the history of great talent, we tend to see people at their peak, and we assume that they were just naturals. Steph Curry could always drain three-pointers.
um mozart was you know a natural musician and in some cases if you trace back these people were child prodigies and mozart i think was a great example but for every mozart it turns out that there are multiple bachs and beethovens who actually bloomed late and took a long time to improve
And I guess the study that really opened my eyes to this was Benjamin Bloom looked at world-class athletes, musicians, scientists, artists, and he went back to their childhoods and wanted to know, were they innately just brilliant at these skills from day one? And the consistent answer was no.
That very often their early teachers and coaches, even their own parents, had no idea how great they were going to become. And when they did stand out, it wasn't for natural ability. It was because they were unusually passionate. They love to learn. And they had early opportunities to get lots of practice in.
And I think what that suggests to me is that sometimes we overestimate the importance of raw talent and we underestimate the importance of creating opportunities that open doors for people and then giving them a chance to actually showcase their enthusiasm.
What about motivation? Where does that come from in this context?
I think in a lot of the cases, if you look at the Bloom study at least, the world-class performers tended to have an early teacher or coach who made learning fun. And I think that's not common for a lot of us, right? Like learning to do scales if you're a musician, doing drills if you're an athlete, it can be a slog.
And the idea that this boring task that might just lose your interest or might exhaust you could actually be exciting, it draws you in and it makes you wanna keep learning. And over time that becomes self-reinforcing because after all, it's hard to like something that you just suck at. As you gain skill and build up mastery, that's when your motivation begins to really soar.
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Chapter 2: How can motivation influence our performance?
when you have that conversation upfront or when you do that reflection upfront, you get better at seeing around corners and anticipating what might go wrong. And then you can actually prevent it from happening in the first place.
And I think there's a version of that that's a little bit like the opposite of what psychologists call post-traumatic growth, where something awful happens to you and you're not grateful that it happened, but you damn well commit that you're gonna grow from it. Well, I don't think we always have to go through trauma to get the growth, right?
You could have pre-traumatic growth where you anticipate the things that could go horribly and then try to prepare yourself for the lessons that those events might teach you.
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I'll just give you your money back and get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. I suppose the danger, the fear that people get stuck in who have that fear of failure is the pre-mortem but without the lessons.
It's just ruminating on all of the things that could go wrong without using them as a, well, they haven't gone wrong yet. And the fact that I've become aware of the fact that they might go wrong and potentially identified them and broken them down, hopefully makes them less likely that they're going to, this is a cause for celebration, not one for concern. That's the plan.
So in psychology, my favorite definition of worrying is attempted problem solving. And I think the attempted is the part that sometimes we forget, right? You don't always solve your problem by worrying, but you are able to see it more clearly as you worry about it. And then the goal is to make a distinction between reflection and rumination. I think for a lot of people, this is a slippery slope.
You do the premortem, you start to imagine all the things that could go wrong, and then pretty soon you're staying up all night just in a panic, in a cold sweat that all of your fears are going to come true. And I think the difference between that and reflection is in reflection, you're actually having new thoughts as opposed to recycling the same old ones.
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Chapter 3: What role does failure play in personal growth?
Because again, the desirability for people to not hurt your feelings sort of holds strong typically, is if you had to cut 20% from this talk, just tell me what would you get rid of? What would be top of the list? Because for the most part, your good stuff's probably going to be good, but it's the really weak stuff that needs to go first. That's what should be triaged to be thrown out.
Oh, I love that you pointed this out, Chris. It reminds me of Lady Klotz and Gabrielle Adams' research where they show that when you ask people how to change, like, how can I improve? How can our team improve? What most people do is they add. They give you more things to do. And they forget that our plates are already pretty full.
And one of the best ways to improve something is to cut away what's not working, to subtract. And this sort of addition bias or addiction to always adding things, it doesn't help us as often as it seems like it would. And so I love your prompt to say, okay, if you were going to cut 20%, like, what is the fat that could be trimmed in this presentation?
And that creates room then for the gems to actually be polished.
I'm thinking about the role of emotions in all of this. So much of what we've been talking about have been strategies to compensate or ways that we see ourselves. And it's this sort of degree of rationality. I'm stepping out a little bit. I'm sort of above looking down on the situation. But the felt sense day-to-day is you're just swimming in your own hormones and neurochemistry.
Well, actually, you talk about pessimism not being an effective strategy for protecting emotions. That's obviously one compensatory mechanism. People become cynical. They try to believe that they insulate themselves from having to feel the pain of failure by never just trying in the first place.
What do you think about the role of emotions and how people can treat them with the respect but objectivity that they probably need to?
Well, let's try to bring this to life. What's an emotion that you often struggle to manage? Or what's a situation where you struggle to manage your emotions?
Let's say worry. Let's say fear. In advance of a project happening, the concern that it's not going to go well. Okay, give me an upcoming project that you're worried about right now. 3,500 people on stage in London in a week and a half's time.
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