How Your Mind Changes Over Time & The Upside of Uncertainty - SYSK Choice

Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know, what do the letters RX stand for when it comes to medicine? Then, how the human mind makes you who you are and how it constantly changes as you get older.

Speaker 2 What you find is, as people age, their personalities on average get a little bit better. They become less belligerent, more understanding, more agreeable.

Speaker 2 They're more conscientious, you could trust them more. We seem to kind of mellow out maybe once we pass 30 or 40.

Speaker 1 Also, the difference between a road, a street, and an avenue, and how to make the best of uncertainty, because many of us fear what uncertainty may bring.

Speaker 3 When you spend your whole life running away from uncertainty, you also spend your life running away from possibility. You know, sometimes you take a risk and it doesn't work out.

Speaker 3 But on average, if you're taking thoughtful risks, it leads to such a more interesting, exciting life.

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Speaker 1 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life.

Speaker 2 Today, Something You Should Know.

Speaker 1 With Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 Hey, hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 1 When you hear the letters RX together, you probably think of medicine. I mean, you see RX at the drugstore on signs and on bottles of medication.
But what does RX have to do with medicine?

Speaker 1 Well, the R part of the symbol stands for the Latin recipe, which means take this.

Speaker 1 The X part of the symbol is derived from the symbol for the Roman god Jupiter. It represents a prayer or invocation invocation to Jupiter that the treatment would result in a cure with divine help.

Speaker 1 So RX really means take this and pray. And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 Trying to understand the human mind, what it is, how it works, how it shapes and creates who you are, it all sounds really interesting, but also seems like a difficult thing to get your head around.

Speaker 1 I mean, part of the problem is there's a lot about the mind and the brain we don't really know or understand.

Speaker 1 But there's also a lot we do understand.

Speaker 1 And here to explain that in a way we can all grasp and understand is Paul Bloom. Paul's a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and professor emeritus of psychology at Yale.

Speaker 1 And he's author of a book called Psych. The story of the human mind.
Hi, Paul. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 2 Hey, thanks for having me here.

Speaker 1 So let's start with happiness, because I think we all want to be happy. Everybody has a sense of what makes them happy personally.

Speaker 1 But on a scientific level, what is it that makes brains, minds, human beings happy?

Speaker 2 I'll tell you two obvious things, then I'll tell you two less obvious things.

Speaker 2 Money makes people happy.

Speaker 2 For a long time, psychologists were saying the opposite.

Speaker 2 And of course, I don't mean everybody who has money is happy and everybody who's poor is unhappy, but there's a definite relationship in how much money you make and how happy you are, both for individuals and also within countries.

Speaker 2 So richer countries have happier citizens than poorer countries. And

Speaker 2 like I say, that's kind of obvious. Money buys things like health care and luxuries and freedom and protection from various harms.

Speaker 2 Lets you pay for luxuries, lets you travel, let you take time off work. That's obvious fact number one.
Obvious fact number two is the tremendous value of social connections.

Speaker 2 I mean, your grandmother could have told you this, but you know,

Speaker 2 it's good to have friends. It's good to have families.
It's good to have people who love and respect you. Yes, there are happy loners, but on average, being alone is not good for your soul.

Speaker 2 So that's some obvious things. I'll tell you two non-obvious ones that you may not have known.
One is

Speaker 2 happiness changes in the lifespan.

Speaker 2 And I'll ask you,

Speaker 2 let's see, maybe you'll prove me wrong. When are people the happiest in their lives?

Speaker 1 I would think in childhood.

Speaker 2 It's a good guess. And they are not unhappy in childhood.

Speaker 2 They're pretty happy as children. Childhood depression is rare.
But that's not the answer. People are happiest on average in their 70s and their 80s.
In fact,

Speaker 2 what happiness shows, if you graph it over time, is a perfect you

Speaker 2 where you start off pretty happy, you got childhood, you dip, dip, dip, until you're about your mid-50s. And then, honestly, for a lot of people, that's the worst time of their lives.

Speaker 2 And then it creeps back up again until when you get to your 70s and 80s, until the very last period when maybe bad health really takes over,

Speaker 2 you are typically happier when you were an adolescent, happier than as a child, happier than in midlife. And this finding has been replicated all around the world.

Speaker 1 A lot of the reason reason that I think people look back on their childhood as happy is because you're looking back.

Speaker 1 You kind of forget the bad things and nothing bad can happen in your past because that's all done.

Speaker 1 So you can look at it through these kind of rose-colored glasses where today, God knows what's going to happen. I could get hit by a bus and so that makes me maybe less happy.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 It brings us back to memory. Where if I think about my childhood, sometimes I just dredge up some happy pictures, happy events, and forget about all of the times where I was miserable.

Speaker 2 And, you know, if you have young kids, young kids are very sad a lot of the time. They're bored.
They're lonely.

Speaker 2 You wouldn't think old age is a time for happiness because, you know, your health is declining, your power is declining. Maybe your social status is declining.
But the mindset changes.

Speaker 2 Your personality shifts in various ways.

Speaker 2 You're less neurotic.

Speaker 2 You're more conscientious. And you could become satisfied and attain a sort of wisdom.
And I think a lot of talk of wisdom is often nonsense, but the happiness data is just clear.

Speaker 2 People who are much older will tell you that they're much happier.

Speaker 1 It would seem to me that one of the reasons you wouldn't be happier when you're older is you're so much closer to the edge of the cliff that you will one day fall off that you weren't 25 years ago.

Speaker 2 Honestly, you would think that. And certainly, no matter how old you are, death, you know, if your life is going well, is an ugly and horrible prospect.

Speaker 2 And there's a certain point, it's not that they welcome it, but there's an acquaintance to it, at least to a point where it doesn't interfere with their happiness.

Speaker 2 The second mystery of happiness is a genuine mystery, and it goes back to what we don't know, which is

Speaker 2 there's a lot of debate over whether having children makes you happy.

Speaker 2 Some initial studies found it doesn't. Some later studies find that

Speaker 2 in some countries, parents are happier than non-parents, and there's a difference between men and women, mothers and fathers. But the data is complicated.
I've written about this before, and

Speaker 2 the response I get by parents is often like, yeah, it's complicated.

Speaker 1 Well, but it's also, you often hear something like,

Speaker 1 it's the greatest thing I ever did, and it's the hardest thing I ever did.

Speaker 2 I think that's exactly right. And I actually think

Speaker 2 that asking about happiness is sometimes the wrong question.

Speaker 2 We want to maximize different things in our lives. We want to be happy, we want to get pleasure, but we also want to be good and we want to live meaningful lives.
And I think

Speaker 2 having children

Speaker 2 is an extraordinarily, for many of us, deep and meaningful and important decision. It means a lot.
It matters a lot.

Speaker 2 My children are now off in the world, but I define myself as a parent. And that's different from saying, oh, it it made me happy.
Like a hot foot Sunday would make me happy.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about good and evil. I've always been fascinated by why some people do good for the world and feel compelled to and feel rewarded by doing that, and other people take the other path.

Speaker 2 There's even the broader question before that, which is why do we do good at all? Why is an animal that evolved through natural selection

Speaker 2 capable of kindness and love and caring, not just to its kin, because there's evolutionary explanation why you take care of your kin, but to friends, to strangers.

Speaker 2 We care a lot about things like natural disasters across the world. We give money to save people we haven't, you know, we had never met.

Speaker 2 I think that's extraordinary and beautiful. And there's being, studying moral psychology is my day job as a researcher.
And I find it extremely interesting and really important.

Speaker 2 But your question about differences also weighs heavily. And I guess I have to say two things about that.
One is there's natural variation in every aspect of a person, every physical aspect.

Speaker 2 We're taller or shorter.

Speaker 2 We're, you know,

Speaker 2 we burn in the sun or we don't.

Speaker 2 Our knees ache when we walk or they don't. There's all these variations.
And the same holds true once you go above the neck. Some of us are extroverted.
Others aren't. Some of us are timid.

Speaker 2 Some are fearful. Some

Speaker 2 like to joke around. Others are more serious.
And the variation extends through morality. Some people are more aggressive than other people.
Some people care more, are more sympathetic, are more

Speaker 2 empathetic. And there's natural variance you see.
Some of it's that genetic that you'll see even in a kid. You know, some two-year-olds are not all the same when it comes to how they treat others.

Speaker 2 So that's part of it.

Speaker 2 The other part is, I think we're too quick to see the behavior of others that we see as evil.

Speaker 2 I don't know, take an example from a while ago, the bombing of the Twin Towers on 9-11. We see this as evil.
I think correctly so.

Speaker 2 But what we forget is that the perpetrators don't see themselves as evil. The perpetrators often see themselves as good.

Speaker 2 And some of the very terrible acts in our lights are done not through a sort of psychopathy or some perverse desire for evil, but instead through a genuine genuine desire to do good, just in a different way.

Speaker 1 Something I've always wondered about is just as

Speaker 1 your body ages throughout your life, you change. You don't look anything like you did when you were 10.

Speaker 1 I wonder if your brain and mind and who you are changes in such a way that

Speaker 1 you wouldn't really recognize yourself if you went back and talked to that 10-year-old who was you all those years ago?

Speaker 2 It's an interesting question.

Speaker 2 A lot of my research involves, I said I study moral psychology. I often study it in children.

Speaker 2 So there's a profound difference between a five-year-old and a 10-year-old and a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old.

Speaker 2 And this is in part could be explained because the brain's a physical organ and grows and ages and atrophies

Speaker 2 just like our knees and our bellies and our spines do.

Speaker 2 And it could be in part explained in terms of experience. As you get more and more experience, you change.
But we know even in adulthood, there are profound changes. Some of them are bad.

Speaker 2 Your mental speed gets slower after a certain point. You might know a lot.
You might have what they call crystallized intelligence, but you're just not as quick. The quickness fades.

Speaker 2 That's one part of it. On the positive side, There's been these studies, not just in America, but of dozens of different countries, finding regular personality changes in

Speaker 2 aging.

Speaker 2 And what you find is as people age, their personalities on average get a little bit better. They become less belligerent, more understanding, more agreeable.
They're more conscientious.

Speaker 2 You could trust them more.

Speaker 2 They're less neurotic about things.

Speaker 2 We seem to kind of, to some extent, mellow out maybe once we pass 30 or 40.

Speaker 1 Oh, thank God.

Speaker 1 I'm speaking with Paul Bloom. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of the book Psych, The Story of the Human Mind.

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Speaker 1 so Paul, since you study children, and here's something, as somebody who has been through the foster parent and adoption business, you often hear people talk who, and they will offer their opinion about, well,

Speaker 1 I hope you intervened early because once a kid hits and fill in the blank, eight, ten, it's too late. It's too late.

Speaker 1 Is there any evidence that that's true, or is that just some wives' tale theory that people come up with?

Speaker 2 It's sort sort of in between. There's some truth to the fact that

Speaker 2 both events and interventions that happen early

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 2 more powerful, have more an effect than those that happen later in life. Something as simple as brain damage, the brain recovers from it quicker if you're two years old than if you're 22 years old.

Speaker 2 Some capacities, like learning a language and some social skills, are best learned early in life. The brain seems to shut down a bit, maybe after adolescence or after 18.

Speaker 2 But the story has been so oversold.

Speaker 2 So in a strong way, you're putting it, no, it's not true. It's not true that, oh, once somebody's four, you can't do anything with them.
Once somebody's eight, they're a goner.

Speaker 2 If they're introverted, they're going to stay introverted and so on.

Speaker 2 It may be more difficult, but I think change is possible at any point in the lifespan.

Speaker 1 One question I've always wondered about, and I think everybody's pondered this.

Speaker 1 In a family you have kids, siblings, and they turn out very differently, even though they were raised in the same house by the same parents with the same rules. So why is that?

Speaker 1 Why does one kid go one way and another kid go the other way?

Speaker 2 Studies of why people turn out differently, which is one of the big and most exciting areas of psychology where it connects with behavioral genetics and other fields, find that there's really the two big factors that shape our personalities.

Speaker 2 One is genetics, and in which case you and your genetic sibling, a child and his genetic sibling would have the same 50% of the same genes.

Speaker 2 A child and his adopted sibling would have none of the same genes in particular. So that's one of it, genes.
Say that counts for 50%.

Speaker 2 So you might think the other 50%, that must come from parenting, but it appears not. It appears that a lot of the other 50% comes from experiences, life experiences.

Speaker 2 You get bullied in school, you fall in love, you win a prize, you try something and you're really good at it.

Speaker 2 You know, these life experiences that different kids in the same family experience pull their personalities apart. As you can have identical twins, right, raised in the same family.

Speaker 2 Same, there's no firstborn, there's no secondborn. They share 100% of the genes.
They have the same parents, same family environment, yet...

Speaker 2 their lives will pull them in different ways and they can end up quite different in all sorts of interesting ways.

Speaker 1 But they can also end up not quite different in similar ways.

Speaker 2 The more genes you share, the more likely you are to be similar.

Speaker 2 And so identical twins are on average going to be a lot more similar than any two siblings who aren't twins, and certainly than any two strangers.

Speaker 2 But the very fact that they don't come out exactly the same,

Speaker 2 I know twins were one's very liberal and one's very conservative, for instance.

Speaker 2 And I think that's interesting. That shows that factors of life can shape you in different ways.

Speaker 1 But what about things like, you know,

Speaker 1 I think, isn't Albert Einstein's brain in a bottle somewhere that you, you know, that they wanted to examine it? Because how could somebody so brilliant, you know, be one of us?

Speaker 1 He's just so amazingly smart. But

Speaker 1 what caught is there any idea of why somebody is just so

Speaker 1 head and shoulders above everybody else when it comes to anything, whether it's for good or evil, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer or Albert Einstein.

Speaker 1 I mean, these are just extraordinarily extraordinary people. Why?

Speaker 2 I think for all of this, let's focus on the good side, on the Einstein's, put the Dahmer's aside for a bit.

Speaker 2 Part of his genetic gifts. So everyone's noticed for a long time these things run in families.
There are these families of geniuses.

Speaker 2 Even if they're raised very differently, certain genius abilities, mathematical abilities, say, our musical abilities, crop up. They get a very lucky throw of the genes.

Speaker 2 But that can't be enough because you need an opportunity, right, to have the genes flourish. I bet there's a thousand Einsteins raised in parts of Africa and parts of Asia where they never get a

Speaker 2 mathematical education. They never learn physics.
Nobody supports them. They don't go to school.
They're not nurtured. For a long time...

Speaker 2 for a long time, roughly half the world, women, whatever abilities they have, would not be given environments to flourish.

Speaker 2 And so, you need both, right? You need the genetic gifts. Without the genetic gifts, you're not going to be in Einstein.
But without the environment, you're not going to be either.

Speaker 2 You know, take your favorite athlete.

Speaker 2 You could have somebody born with exactly the same skills as that athlete. But if they never meet a coach and never see the inside of a gym, they're just going to die.
And we will have never known.

Speaker 1 You mentioned earlier that experiences that we have help shape who we are.

Speaker 1 and we all have big experiences sometimes very oftentimes we have very bad experiences traumatic experiences and then then then there's that saying of you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger so what what does the science say about how trauma impacts who you are

Speaker 2 you know there's a story going around everyone knows about post-traumatic stress disorder when when trauma damages you.

Speaker 2 But there's a story going around about what sometimes people call post-traumatic growth, where they argue that certain sorts of trauma, you come out of it on the other side better than you were.

Speaker 2 And I've always been very skeptical about that. And it turns out that when the big studies are done, it turns out not to be true.
Trauma is very rarely good for you.

Speaker 2 And so again, more common sense advice from a psychologist. Try to avoid bad things from happening to you.
So you're not going to get tremendous benefits from trauma. But now here's the good news.

Speaker 2 The good news is we are are far more resilient than we thought we were.

Speaker 2 The typical effects of even the very worst experiences are they mess you up for a while and then you get over them and you're back to normal.

Speaker 2 Post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological harm and so on are the exceptions and not the rule.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. So the notion that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is not true at all.

Speaker 2 Total nonsense. Wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking, which by the way can lead, I think is often cruel. Someone whose child dies and you say, well, you're going to come at it as a better person.

Speaker 2 You know, stronger, wiser.

Speaker 1 What a horrible thing to do. Why could you say that?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I know people who believe it. And I even, there was an article in the New York Times recently about somebody who said, I went through some terrible trauma, yet I don't seem to be a better person.

Speaker 2 What's wrong with me? And I wanted to scream, no, you're not supposed to be a better person. Something bad happened to you.
Work to recover. And again, the good news is we're good at recovering.

Speaker 2 But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I guess

Speaker 2 one of Nietzsche's aphorisms has to be the dumbest thing a philosopher has ever said.

Speaker 1 The person that I think I am,

Speaker 1 and meaning what I mean is like how good a person I think I am. Is that the person other people see?

Speaker 1 Does it tend to match up? Or are we somewhat deluding ourselves into how good we are that other people don't necessarily think we're so great?

Speaker 2 Oh, we are often deluding ourselves.

Speaker 2 People's perception of how others see them is often deeply distorted, and sometimes it's distorted in that people, psychologically healthy people, often see themselves as better than other people see them.

Speaker 2 People overrate their own intelligence, their own attractiveness, their own sense of humor, their own kindness. And what is it? It's sort of a psych 101 finding that better than average effect.

Speaker 2 But there's another way in which we get things wrong, which I always found very reassuring to hear. And it's called the spotlight effect.
The spotlight effect is

Speaker 2 right in the title, where the spotlight effect is we each feel as if we're more the focus of attention of other people than

Speaker 2 we really are.

Speaker 2 So experiments often get people to put on a funny t-shirt and walk into a room and then later ask people, how many people noticed you? Oh, everybody noticed me. They're all talking about me.

Speaker 2 But what we miss is that people, everyone else isn't focused on you.

Speaker 2 Everyone else is focused on themselves. We're all focused on ourselves.
And it's kind of good to know that what you do and how you act matters a lot less to other people than you think it does.

Speaker 2 People's big regrets in life later on, when they're asked, tend to be what they don't do. They didn't talk to this person.
They didn't

Speaker 2 make this decision. And then when you asked them, why didn't you do it?

Speaker 2 They said, I didn't want to look foolish. And, you know, nobody wants to look foolish, but it is a bit liberating to realize that people don't notice us as much as we worry they do.

Speaker 1 Well, that should come as a relief to a lot of people. This has been interesting.
I've been talking with Paul Bloom, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Speaker 1 And he has a book out called Psych, The Story of the Human Mind. you'll find a link to that book in the show notes.
Thanks for being here, Paul. Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

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Speaker 1 Life is uncertain. You can't be sure what the future will bring.
Now that can be exciting and it can also be scary. The fact is we're wired to be afraid of uncertainty because

Speaker 1 Well, bad things can happen. So can good things, but often the fear of the bad things prevents us from going after the good things.
And that fear does seem to affect some people more than others.

Speaker 1 So what can we do about this? How can we make uncertainty our friend? Well, joining me to discuss this is Nathan Fur. Nathan is a professor who studies and teaches about innovation and technology.

Speaker 1 He's the author of four books on innovation, and the latest one is one he co-wrote with his wife Susanna called The Upside of Uncertainty. Hey Nathan, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 So, as you look into the future, the uncertainty of the future, good things can happen and bad things can happen.

Speaker 1 We as human beings seem more afraid of the bad things, that we're more concerned about bad things happening than we are about the prospect of the good that comes if good things happen.

Speaker 1 And so, why is that?

Speaker 3 Well, you know, you think about it, you know, 10,000 years ago, there wasn't a lot to be gained from going far from your normal routine, right?

Speaker 3 You know, you're probably going to get lost, get hungry, get eaten, get something, you know, you're, and so over, you know, million years, our brains wired us to fear uncertainty, but something fundamental has changed.

Speaker 3 And that is we no longer live in that environment. In fact, we live in an environment where actually there's a lot of benefits to stepping into the unknown, taking a risk.

Speaker 3 You know, we've created a safe environment for ourselves physically, and then technology has lowered all the barriers to create new things and transact and interact.

Speaker 3 So we actually live in a realm of immense possibility, but with wiring for something that's different. And, you know, for me,

Speaker 3 my interest in this came because I've been interviewing innovators for 20 years. And I noticed something about them.
And that is that we

Speaker 3 see the thing they create. We see the possibility.
We see the innovation. We see all that great stuff.
But there's a part of that story we never talk about.

Speaker 3 And that is that they all had to first face some unknowns. They had to step into the dark.
They had to take a risk. And I was so curious because I wouldn't say I'm naturally good at that.
And so

Speaker 3 I wanted the possibility piece. I could see that that was only one side of the coin.
The other side of the coin was the uncertainty.

Speaker 3 So I wanted to know how could I get better at facing this uncertainty, overcoming this evolutionary wiring that we all have.

Speaker 1 Well, that wiring does seem to be an obstacle because, I mean, you think about it, as you look at the possibilities of something that might happen in the future, it does seem that we go to the negative.

Speaker 1 Like, well, what bad thing could happen more than we rush to the possibility of great things happening. We just, we just have that negative bias.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's actually, this is a well-known effect in the psychology literature called worst case scenario. We naturally do it.
And that is we tend as humans to just devolve.

Speaker 3 I hate to use that word, but devolve in our thinking into a very binary view of the world. So, you know, take your example, you got this big job interview.
You're excited about it.

Speaker 3 What happens is you build it up in your mind as like the pivotal event in your life that everything else depends on, which is of course not true.

Speaker 3 And to prove it to you, look back in your life and, you know, how many of those decisions like, you know, really mattered that you made every single day?

Speaker 3 You know, not very many, yet we have lots of tries, lots of chances. That's the truth.
But then we, then we look at the situation, we say, oh my gosh, if I don't get it, it'll be so terrible.

Speaker 3 And so we tend to adopt this binary thinking with a very fuzzy worst case scenario.

Speaker 3 And I think what innovators do, one of the things I learned they do really well is they actually think much broader than that. They actually see there's a lot lot of possibilities here.

Speaker 3 I don't get the job, but I get an interview the next day for a job I like even more, you know, and then they assign probabilities to that. And then they also unpack the worst case scenario.

Speaker 3 Anyway, the point is often our work, we obsess about the worst case scenario. It's often not as bad as we think.
And it rarely, rarely actually happens. Sometimes it does.

Speaker 3 And I want to acknowledge that for people, but it rarely turns out the way. I mean,

Speaker 3 Michel de Montagno was a very famous philosopher and he said, you know, most of the terrible misfortunes in my life never happened to me.

Speaker 1 Are there people who are naturally good at this and are naturally good at facing uncertainty, seeing the uncertainty and just moving forward anyway without being thrown off course?

Speaker 3 Well, let me say this.

Speaker 3 My collaborator, who is an applied neuroscientist, summarizes the field by saying, everything in life is a function of genes, how you were born, experience, what happened to you, and learning, those three factors.

Speaker 3 So some people do come a little bit more predisposed to that, or they grow up in a, let's say, a family environment where, you know, the world was basically a safe place, or maybe it wasn't a safe place.

Speaker 3 So they learned to like face uncertainty, whatever it may be. But it's very clear we can learn this.
And I guess what I would add to that is just

Speaker 3 When I look at innovators, people sometimes think, oh, they're so different. And I guess I feel like having done this research now

Speaker 3 i kind of feel like they just learned a secret that the rest of us haven't learned and that is

Speaker 3 you know sometimes you take a risk and it doesn't work out but on average if you're taking thoughtful risks it leads to such a more interesting exciting life and what i see in them is almost an energy or an enthusiasm or an addiction to that new thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 I've gotten there myself as somebody who, again, who struggles a bit with it now to being like, where's the next uncertainty? Because I realize that's what makes life

Speaker 3 rich and vivid and interesting and worth living, where you do your best work. And so I think they've just learned that secret

Speaker 3 and that uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin. And when you spend your whole life running away from uncertainty, you also spend your life running away from possibility.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, I've always thought that, you know, if life were so certain, well, it wouldn't be very interesting.
It would be pretty dull if you knew that everything you did worked out.

Speaker 1 Well, where's the fun in that?

Speaker 3 Oh, it's terrible. That's a terrible world.
And I actually take great

Speaker 3 comfort in a very idiosyncratic

Speaker 3 principle from quantum physics, which is called the uncertainty principle, which is this idea that the more precisely you measure the velocity of a particle, the less precisely you can measure its position and vice versa.

Speaker 3 And what says to me is that the universe itself, some fundamental building block level has some fundamental uncertainty in it.

Speaker 3 And I love that because otherwise we could build a world with enough computing power and enough machines that everything gets predicted and deterministic.

Speaker 3 And that would be a horrible place to live in. It would be so

Speaker 3 boring. It would be so constricting.
And we need uncertainty. We forget that.
In fact, one of my favorite interviews was with the head of a major gambling organization.

Speaker 3 And he said, oh, you know what we call what we do in gambling? We call it reverse insurance.

Speaker 3 And our prime customer is that person who we just made the mistake we just talked about, which is everything in their life is so boring.

Speaker 3 They've made it so certain that they will come to us and they will pay us for the chance that something different could happen. And I just think that illustrates that need, that tension we have.

Speaker 3 And so we have this evolutionary wiring for, you know, where we're afraid of uncertainty and we seek certainty, but if we follow that too far, we would create a really boring life.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So there are times when you do want uncertainty. Uncertainty, lack of uncertainty makes a boring life.
Uncertainty would make things kind of exciting.

Speaker 3 So one of my colleagues, it was when he did his dissertation at Harvard, went and studied some of the world's top chefs and the most innovative chefs in the world.

Speaker 3 And what he found is they would actually sometimes purposely make things more uncertain as an effort to increase their innovation.

Speaker 3 So they'd shake it up and they'd, you know, open three restaurants in three different geographies at the same time.

Speaker 3 Or right when they're supposed to be redesigning the menu, they rip out the kitchen because it allows them to kind of unfreeze the rules and habits and roles they've been operating on.

Speaker 3 So it's kind of, you know, you got to judge what situation am I in. Am I freaking out? Well, that's a great time to reduce uncertainty.

Speaker 3 Or are we having a hard time escaping the trap of the old ways we're doing things? Well, that might be a place where you need to inject some uncertainty.

Speaker 1 So how do you approach this systematically?

Speaker 1 If you're facing something that you're feeling very uncertain about and you want to do the kinds of things you're talking about, step one, two, and three are what?

Speaker 3 The first thing to do is

Speaker 3 we call reframe. My thesis and my argument to you is that in life, uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin, whether it's planned or unplanned.

Speaker 3 If it's planned, you want to do something new, there's uncertainty attached to that.

Speaker 3 If something happened to you that feels really uncertainty, it feels terrible, but there's probably some possibility still to be pulled out of it.

Speaker 1 So that's really your attitude towards it, right? I mean,

Speaker 1 if you look at a situation, you can see the possibilities or you can drown in the misery. It really depends on how, on your outlook.

Speaker 3 With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I got to see how many leaders responded to this uncertainty. And there were some leaders who framed it in terms of the uncertainty.

Speaker 3 They said things like, this is the worst thing that's ever happened. This is worse than the Great Depression.
And what do you think happened to everybody inside that organization?

Speaker 3 They started freaking out. They started feeling anxiety.

Speaker 3 And all the energy, and you may have been in this situation and an organization where this happened, all the energy that could have done gone to doing something about it, a lot of that went down.

Speaker 3 The drain is anxiety and checking your bank account and should I get another job and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 By contrast, I love the example of how Brian Chesky, who's the CEO of Airbnb, framed it. Now, they lost 80% of their business in eight weeks.

Speaker 3 If anybody had the right to say this is the worst thing that ever happened, it was them. But how did he frame it? He said, yeah, this is a crisis, but this is is our moment.

Speaker 3 Great companies are forged in moments of crisis. This is our chance to show what we're really made of.
Now, when I say that, how do you feel? You feel differently. You feel ready to take action.

Speaker 3 And so in your own life, whatever happens to you for yourself, and Brian Chesky talks about the hardest thing to manage at that moment was his own emotions, his own reaction.

Speaker 3 So something happens to you or something happens to the people you're leading, a team you're leading, or your family, whatever it may be.

Speaker 3 How do you see the possibility, not just the uncertainty, and frame it in terms of the possibility?

Speaker 1 Here's the thing, though. It's one thing,

Speaker 1 as I listened to that example, it's one thing to say that, to say, oh, you know, look at the opportunity here and still feel very fearful that

Speaker 1 just logically, this could be a disaster.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And there are disasters and we want to acknowledge that. And so it's kind of like making the best best of the situation.
So

Speaker 3 when we think about it, I mean,

Speaker 3 I do want to say there are three other categories of things to do beside reframing. I mean, reframing is very cognitive.

Speaker 3 There is second, you want to, you can prepare in advance. So this is about priming

Speaker 3 for the events so that you're, when it happens, whatever it is,

Speaker 3 you're calmer in the face of that. The third is do.

Speaker 3 Taking action is one of the best ways to resolve uncertainty. And there are better ways to take action than others.

Speaker 3 Like, for example, breaking something uncertain down into a series of small experiments.

Speaker 3 And then, lastly, four, which is sustain, which is to acknowledge that there are setbacks and frustrations in uncertainty.

Speaker 3 And how do we sustain ourselves, acknowledge the emotions, acknowledge the reality,

Speaker 3 and face that with courage?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, that take action thing is one that I really pay attention to because I find that sitting around kind of wringing your hands

Speaker 1 feeds the beast of uncertainty and doing something,

Speaker 1 almost anything, is better than not.

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 And, you know, there's great research that supports the value of taking action on uncertainty, that the best way to do it is to take something big, thorny, and complex and break it down into a small experiment.

Speaker 3 And you say, well, how does that play out? You can do that in life and business. You know, you've got a new job offer.
Well, you know, what would it look like to try it out for three years or a year?

Speaker 3 It makes the decision a lot less kind of, you know, permanent.

Speaker 3 Another thing is there's great research that shows you may feel, by the way, you may feel like, well, it sounds great to take action, but I don't have everything I need.

Speaker 3 I don't have all the resources I need, all the time, the money, whatever it may be.

Speaker 3 But there's a whole domain in my field that we call bricolage, which is this idea that the way entrepreneurs and innovators really operate is they just get started with what they have at hand, like make do.

Speaker 3 Bricolage is literally make do with what you have and get started and start learning. And actually, sometimes that's the path to success.

Speaker 3 And so I would really emphasize the importance of action in most circumstances. There are some cases where it's good to wait a little bit.

Speaker 3 One trap you can fall into is you feel so anxious in the face of uncertainty that you'll grab for what we call premature certainty.

Speaker 3 You'll grab for the suboptimal thing that feels certain when you really just need to like say, I have to wait for this uncertainty to resolve. So how do I take good actions? How do I be learning?

Speaker 3 How do I be testing? How do I be trying? But realize that I don't have to make a decision today, maybe, because that might be forcing it. And so there's a, there's a wisdom.

Speaker 3 There's a little bit of art in the science as well about recognizing the right time to act.

Speaker 1 It is so interesting that uncertainty has this weird balance. Like without it, life would be dull, but with it, life can be stressful.

Speaker 1 And how you balance that out, I guess, really helps determine where you go and how well you do.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And, you know, I am hoping as we practice these skills, and I've seen it myself, we get, we build up our tolerance for uncertainty.
You know, like if you think of a thermometer, right?

Speaker 3 There's a certain amount of heat that you feel in any situation, but as you build up your uncertainty ability, you actually get

Speaker 3 the capacity to tolerate a little higher heat. And what that means is that, you know, we have this old saying, no risk, no reward.
But that's really the essence of the idea, right?

Speaker 3 And so how do we tolerate the risk so we can get the reward? You'll get more rewards. But the other way I think about it, you know, if I if I wish

Speaker 3 people could take away one thing,

Speaker 3 we call it transilience, which is an idea from an old word from my field of technology strategy, which is about this moment of phase shift.

Speaker 3 So think about the moment that water becomes steam or an iron ingot melts and becomes molten. It's this phase shift moment.

Speaker 3 And to acknowledge that as overwhelming as uncertainty can feel, that it is possible to be transilient, which is to take that thing and to transform it and say, well, what's the possibility that could happen here?

Speaker 3 And I think everybody's had that experience where you're like going down a dark, you know, a dark pathway and things aren't going well.

Speaker 3 And you flip it in your mind or you do something and it like changes in an instant. And so I guess I would say, I hope people walk away from this saying, instead of uncertainty, how do I avoid it?

Speaker 3 It's so terrible. This is awful.
To say, okay, this is what is.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 how can this make me stronger? How can this make me better? And that's the transilient moment. That question leads to the, and I think that transilience is what's beyond resilience.

Speaker 3 Resilience is like, you can take a punch and stay standing. I want you to take that punch and like be stronger.

Speaker 1 Well, there are also, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I have to fight back on this feeling that if I make a wrong decision, it's forever. And so often it's not.

Speaker 1 If you do make the wrong decision, if you do,

Speaker 1 something goes wrong, you can probably fix that. Maybe more difficult, but nothing's forever.

Speaker 3 That's a common, by the way, a common psychological bias we have where we think the next decision will determine everything. But one way to unpick that for yourself is to look back at your life.

Speaker 3 And I'd say in the last week or the last year, how many decisions did you make? How many of those were really completely irreversible?

Speaker 3 Like, you know, and even sometimes when when something goes different than you expected. You know, I told you about I applied to jobs, I got turned down from all of them.

Speaker 3 That was one of the greatest learning moments of my life and led to the next success. And I guess I would say my view is

Speaker 3 that life is a highway with many, many on-ramps, and that it is a myth to think there's only one on-ramp. And I can't tell you how many people I talk to,

Speaker 3 well, if you dig down deep and you find the failure, that is often their moment of transformation as well. And even at a, this is even at a like a wide scope, you know.

Speaker 3 So, Randy Komassar, one of the legends of Silicon Valley, when he says, What makes Silicon Valley different from the rest of the world? It's not smarter people, it's not more money, it's not all that.

Speaker 3 It's the, he says, the attitude towards failure. He said, look back at some of our greatest successes, they're almost always rooted in failure if you dig deep enough.
And so, you know, what's failure?

Speaker 3 What's success? What's the optimum? Life is a freeway with many, many on-ramps.

Speaker 1 Well, I think for anybody, and probably that's everybody, who has feared the future or felt a little uneasy about what's around the corner, this has been really helpful.

Speaker 1 I've been speaking with Professor Nathan Furr, and the name of his book is The Upside of Uncertainty. And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes.
Thank you, Nathan.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, it's a fun topic. So cool.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Do you know the difference between a road, a street, an avenue, and a boulevard?

Speaker 1 Well, the rules aren't hard and fast, but generally, a road describes any throughway that connects two points. Streets, on the other hand, are public roads that have buildings on both sides.

Speaker 1 So while a street is a road, not all roads are streets. Now, often streets run perpendicular to avenues.

Speaker 1 Avenues have trees or buildings on both sides as well. And although they run perpendicular, which way they run depends on the city.
For example, in Denver, streets run north-south.

Speaker 1 Avenues run east-west. In New York and Manhattan, it's just the opposite.
Avenues run north-south. streets run east-west.

Speaker 1 A boulevard is a wide street with trees on both sides and a median in the center. Smaller roads, such as ways, lanes, and drives, tend to split off from a major road.

Speaker 1 And both places and courts are roads with dead ends. Courts usually end in a cul-de-sac.

Speaker 1 And that is something you should know. If you'd like to support this podcast,

Speaker 1 we don't ask you for money. All we ask you to do is help us get new listeners by telling someone you know to give it a listen.
I'm Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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Speaker 5 During each episode, you will hear from leaders, decision makers, and culture shapers across industries. What drives them? What tips the scales when making tough calls? How do they continue to evolve?

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