Adam Grant How to stop languishing and start finding flow TED
I know you all have long to-do lists,
but I hate wasting time so much
that I have a to-don’t list.
Don’t scroll on social media,
don’t check my phone in bed
and don’t turn on the TV
unless I already know
what I want to watch.
But last year I found myself
breaking all of those rules.
I was staying up way past midnight,
doomscrolling,
playing endless games of online Scrabble
and bingeing entire seasons of TV shows
that weren’t even good.
The next morning I’d wake up in a daze
and swear, “Tonight in bed by 10:00.”
But it kept happening
night after night for weeks.
What was I thinking?
As an organizational psychologist,
I have spent my whole career
studying motivation,
so it really bothers me
when I can’t explain my own behavior.
I wasn’t depressed. I still had hope.
Wasn’t burned out, had energy.
Wasn’t lonely, I was with my family.
I just felt a little bit aimless
and a little bit joyless.
Eventually, I remembered
there’s a name for that feeling:
languishing.
Languishing as a sense of emptiness,
stagnation and ennui.
It was coined by a sociologist Corey Keyes
and immortalized
by a philosopher, Mariah Carey.
(Laughter)
When you’re languishing, it just feels
like you’re muddling through your days,
looking at your life
through a foggy windshield.
So I’m curious how many of you have felt
like that over the past few months.
OK, those of you who didn’t have
the energy to raise your hands –
(Laughter)
you might be languishing right now.
And you over here who didn’t laugh,
you’re definitely languishing.
Strangely enough –
[How are you feeling today?
Meh. Meh. Meh.]
(Laughter)
Some of you passed the quiz.
Strangely enough, what rescued me
from that feeling was playing Mario Kart.
But let’s back up for a second.
In the early days of covid,
a lot of us were struggling
with fear, grief and isolation.
But as the pandemic dragged on
with no end in sight,
our acute anguish
gave way to chronic languish.
We were all living in “Groundhog Day.”
It felt like the whole world
was stagnating.
So I wrote an article
to put languishing on the map.
I called it “the neglected
middle child of mental health”
and I suggested it might be
the dominant emotion of our time.
And soon it was everywhere.
I was seeing it all over the media,
being discussed
by celebrities, by royalty.
I’ve never seen people so excited
to talk about their
utter lack of excitement.
(Laughter)
And –
I think –
I think that naming languishing
helped people make sense
of some puzzling experiences.
Why even after getting vaccinated
people were having trouble
looking forward to the rest of the year.
Why when “National Treasure” came on TV,
my wife already knew
all the words by heart.
And why I was staying up way too late,
falling victim to what’s known
as revenge bedtime procrastination.
(Laughter)
We were looking for bliss in a blah day
and purpose in a perpetual pandemic.
But languishing
is not unique to a pandemic.
It’s part of the human condition.
Two decades of research show
that languishing can disrupt your focus
and dampen your motivation.
It’s also a risk factor for depression
because languishing
often lurks below the surface.
You might not notice
when your drive is dwindling
or your delight is dulling
You’re indifferent
to your own indifference,
which means you don’t seek help
and you might not even do anything
to help yourself.
Meh.
Languishing isn’t
just hard to spot, though.
In many cultures,
it’s hard to talk about, too.
When people ask, “How are you?,”
you’re expected to say, “Great!”
or “Living my best life.”
That’s called toxic positivity.
(Laughter)
It’s the pressure that we face to be
optimistic and upbeat at all times.
If you say, “You know, I’m just OK,”
then people might encourage you
to look on the bright side
or count your blessings,
which isn’t just annoying.
It can actually be bad advice.
Can I get two volunteers?
I will cold-call if I have to,
don’t all jump at once.
OK, right over here.
You can come up to a mic
and can I get another volunteer
right over there, up to this mic, please.
A round of applause
for our two volunteers.
(Applause)
Hi, what’s your name?
Martin: Martin.
Adam Grant: Thank you.
Can you tell us three good things
about your life, please?
Martin: I’m married
and I’m healthy and I’m happy.
AG: All right, I’m glad
the marriage came in first.
Well done. OK, over here.
What’s your name?
Lee: Lee.
AG: Lee, can you tell us
42 good things about your life?
Lee: My cat Titchypoo, my dog Enzo.
And so my wife, Jazz.
AG: Third behind the dog and the cat.
(Laughter)
Well played.
Lee: My children, Indio and Walter,
Manchester United Football Club,
my friends, TED.
AG: TED coming in at
ringing eighth.
Lee: TED is very high, TED is very high.
The poetry of C.S. Lewis,
E.E. Cummings, Dylan Thomas.
AG: You want to name
all the poets you’ve ever heard of?
Alright, Lee, thank you.
We’re going to pause you there.
Round of applause. Thank you both.
(Applause)
So for a long time,
I assumed that people in Lee’s position
were going to be happier than Martin.
But when I ran the experiment,
I found the exact opposite.
That people who are randomly assigned
to count more blessings,
are actually, on average, less happy
because you start to run
out of things to be optimistic about.
And if you don’t know that many poets …
(Laughter)
The harder it is to find
good things about your life,
the more you feel like,
well, maybe my life isn’t that good.
In the early days of the pandemic,
researchers found that the best predictor
of well-being was not optimism.
It was flow.
Flow is that feeling of being in the zone,
coined by the psychologist
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
It’s that state of total
absorption in an activity.
For you, it might be cooking
or running or gardening
where you lose track of time
and you might even lose
your sense of self.
Flow is the appeal of a Netflix binge
because you get transported
into a different world
and immersed in a story.
But bingeing is a temporary escape
from languishing, not a cure.
At best, it leaves you
with a bunch of asymmetric relationships.
You might love hanging out
with your friends:
Chandler,
Arya,
Dwight,
Buffy – Buffy, anyone? –
(Laughter)
Joe Exotic,
Peppa Pig.
(Whispers) But they don’t know you exist.
Bingeing is passive engagement
in a fictional world,
peak flow depends on active participation
in the real world,
which is why I was so surprised
to find my flow
while driving a cartoon car
in a Nintendo game.
When the pandemic first started,
all three of our kids
were at home in online school,
and that lasted for a full year.
It was not easy.
One day we found this
on our six-year-old’s report card.
[can independently mute and unmute
himself when requested to do so]
(Laughter)
You know, I know some adults who still
haven’t figured that out yet,
not just online, but in real life, too.
So I guess we had that to celebrate.
But like many of you,
we were isolated from extended family.
My sister was halfway across the country.
And one day we were reminiscing
about how much we love playing Mario Kart
as we were kids.
And she said, “Well,
we could all play together online now.”
Why don’t we start a family game?
And soon we were playing every day
with a video call
running at the same time.
And after a couple of weeks
I stopped feeling so blah.
I was living zen in the art of Mario Kart.
(Laughter)
In the morning our kids were waking up,
asking what time we would play.
They were excited.
And they loved it when I would gloat
about an impending victory,
only to be bombed by a flying blue shell
and then just sit there
watching all three of our kids
drive past me to the finish line
in tiny go-carts.
We had so much fun that we started
a new Saturday night tradition
after the kids were asleep.
Adult Mario Kart.
(Laughter)
So after reflecting on that experience,
I’m proud to present to you
for the first time
my Mario Kart theory of peak flow.
It has three conditions:
mastery, mindfulness and mattering.
Let’s start with mastery.
Mastery is something
a lot of us have been having
a hard time finding lately.
(Laughter)
Psychologists find that at work
the strongest factor
in daily motivation and joy
is a sense of progress.
We find that our happiness
depends in Western cultures
more on how our projects are going today
than how they went yesterday.
That’s why Nike says, “Just do it.”
I guess if Nike had been started
in a more past-focused country like China,
their slogan would be, “Just did it.”
If languishing is stagnation,
flow involves momentum.
But mastery does not have to be
a big accomplishment,
it can be small wins.
Small wins explain
why I was drawn to online Scrabble
for the rush of playing
a seven-letter word.
Small wins makes sense
of why so many people were thrilled
to bake their first loaf
of sourdough bread.
And small wins explain
why one engineer spent an entire afternoon
mastering the art of stacking M&M’s
on top of each other.
Take a look.
(Video) This is going to be
harder than I thought.
Oh!
Oh!
Five M&Ms! Five M&Ms!
(Laughter)
AG: Turns out that was a world record.
(Laughter)
That kind of mastery depends
on a second condition for flow,
mindfulness.
Focusing your full attention
on a single task,
not something a lot of us
are doing that much these days.
[Are you OK? You’re barely paying
attention to your book, phone, show … ]
[ … laptop and the crossword
you started ten minutes ago.]
There’s evidence that on average,
people are checking emails 74 times a day,
switching tasks every 10 minutes,
and that creates
what’s been called time confetti,
where we take what could be
meaningful moments of our lives
and we shred them
into increasingly tiny, useless pieces.
Time confetti is an enemy
of both energy and of excellence.
If we want to find flow,
we need better boundaries.
[It keeps me from looking at my phone
every two seconds.]
(Laughter)
When I think about boundaries,
I think of an experiment
by organizational scholar Leslie Perlow.
She went to a Fortune 500 company
and she tested a quiet time policy.
No interruptions
three mornings a week before noon.
On average, engineers
spiked in productivity.
47 percent of them
were more productive than usual.
But the best part is that when the company
made quiet time official policy,
they had 65 percent
above average productivity.
I don’t think there’s anything magical
about Tuesday, Thursday,
Friday before noon.
The lesson here is that we need to treat
uninterrupted blocks of time
as treasures to guard.
Now, mastery and mindfulness
will get you to flow,
but there’s a third condition
that turns it into a peak experience.
Mattering. Knowing that you
make a difference to other people.
Early in my career,
I was studying fundraising callers
who were trying to bring in
alumni donations to a university,
and I knew they were languishing
when I saw this sign posted on their wall.
[Doing a good job here is like
wetting your pants in a dark suit]
[You get a warm feeling
but no one else notices]
(Laughter)
I wanted to study how to show them
that their work mattered.
So I designed a series of experiments
and over the next month,
one group of callers on average
more than doubled
in weekly time on the phone
and nearly tripled in weekly revenue.
What moved the needle was randomly
assigning them to meet one student
whose scholarship
had been funded by their work.
Now, instead of focusing
on the monotonous process of making calls,
they were absorbed in a meaningful purpose
of helping to fund tuition.
So think about the people who would be
worse off if your job didn’t exist.
Those are the people
who make your work matter.
You need to know their names,
their faces and their stories,
and you can find flow
in projects that benefit them.
This all explains why Mario Kart
was such a great experience for me.
It gave me a feeling of mastery,
the sweet satisfaction
of a perfectly placed banana peel
for my sister to slip on.
It required mindfulness too.
My brother-in-law was the best player.
Beating him demanded total concentration,
especially when my kids
were ganging up with him against me.
And it wasn’t just a game. It mattered.
Over the past year, we’ve all felt
helpless in one way or another.
I felt helpless to fix covid.
I couldn’t even do that much
to make online school better.
And I’m a teacher.
But in Mario Kart, I felt helpful.
I was able to give my kids
something to look forward to
when we couldn’t go anywhere.
I was able to keep my family close
when we were far apart.
We normally think of flow
as an individual experience.
But playing Nintendo,
we were all immersed together.
And although we don’t play daily anymore,
I feel closer to my sister
and my brother-in-law
than I ever had before.
I learned that love is not
the frequency of communication,
it’s the depth of connections.
I also realized
that the antidote to languishing
does not have to be something productive,
it can be something joyful.
Our peak moments of flow
are having fun with the people we love,
which is now a daily task
on my to-do list.
So what’s your version of Mario Kart?
Where do you find mastery and mindfulness
with the people who matter to you?
I think we need to rethink
our understanding
of mental health and well-being.
Not depressed doesn’t mean
you’re not struggling.
Not burned out
doesn’t mean you’re fired up.
When someone says, “How are you?,”
it’s OK to say,
“Honestly, I’m languishing.”
Or if you can only muster one syllable,
“Meh.”
(Laughter)
And when you’re ready,
you can start finding the flow
that lights a path out of the void.
Thank you.
(Applause)