Adam Grant What frogs in hot water can teach us about thinking again TED
Transcriber:
You might have heard that if you drop
a frog in a pot of boiling water,
it will jump out right away,
but if you put it in lukewarm water,
and then slowly heat it up,
the frog won’t survive.
The frog’s big problem is that it lacks
the ability to rethink the situation.
It doesn’t realize that the warm bath
is becoming a death trap –
until it’s too late.
Humans might be smarter than frogs,
but our world is full
of slow-boiling pots.
Think about how slow people were
to react to warnings about a pandemic,
climate change or a democracy in peril.
We fail to recognize the danger
because we’re reluctant
to rethink the situation.
We struggle with rethinking
in all kinds of situations.
We expect our squeaky brakes
to keep working,
until they finally fail on the freeway.
We believe the stock market
will keep going up,
even after we hear
about a real-estate bubble.
And we keep watching “Game of Thrones”
even after the show jumps the shark.
Rethinking isn’t a hurdle
in every part of our lives.
We’re happy to refresh our wardrobes
and renovate our kitchens.
But when it comes to our goals,
identities and habits,
we tend to stick to our guns.
And in a rapidly changing world,
that’s a huge problem.
I’m an organizational psychologist.
It’s my job to rethink
how we work, lead and live.
But that hasn’t stopped me
from getting stuck in slow-boiling pots,
so I started studying why.
I learned that intelligence
doesn’t help us escape;
sometimes, it traps us longer.
Being good at thinking
can make you worse at rethinking.
There’s evidence that the smarter you are,
the more likely you are to fall victim
to the “I’m not biased” bias.
You can always find reasons
to convince yourself
you’re on the right path,
which is exactly what my friends and I
did on a trip to Panama.
I worked my way through college,
and by my junior year,
I’d finally saved enough money to travel.
It was my first time
leaving North America.
I was excited for my first time
climbing a mountain,
actually an active volcano,
literally a slow-boiling pot.
I set a goal to reach the summit
and look into the crater.
So, we’re in Panama,
we get off to a late start,
but it’s only supposed to take
about two hours to get to the top.
After four hours,
we still haven’t reached the top.
It’s a little strange
that it’s taking so long,
but we don’t stop to rethink
whether we should turn around.
We’ve already come so far.
We have to make it to the top.
Do not stand between me and my goal.
We don’t realize we’ve read the wrong map.
We’re on Panama’s highest mountain,
it actually takes six to eight hours
to hike to the top.
By the time we finally reach the summit,
the sun is setting.
We’re stranded, with no food,
no water, no cell phones,
and no energy for the hike down.
There’s a name for this kind of mistake,
it’s called “escalation of commitment
to a losing course of action.”
It happens when you make
an initial investment of time or money,
and then you find out
it might have been a bad choice,
but instead of rethinking it,
you double down and invest more.
You want to prove to yourself
and everyone else
that you made a good decision.
Escalation of commitment
explains so many familiar examples
of businesses plummeting.
Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Kodak.
Leaders just kept simmering
in their slow-boiling pots,
failing to rethink their strategies.
Escalation of commitment
explains why you might have stuck around
too long in a miserable job,
why you’ve probably waited for a table
way too long at a restaurant
and why you might have hung on
to a bad relationship
long after your friends
encouraged you to leave.
It’s hard to admit that we were wrong
and that we might have even
wasted years of our lives.
So we tell ourselves,
“If I just try harder,
I can turn this around.”
We live in a culture that worships
at the altar of hustle
and prays to the high priest of grit.
But sometimes, that leads us to keep going
when we should stop to think again.
Experiments show that gritty people
are more likely to overplay
their hands in casino games
and more likely to keep trying
to solve impossible puzzles.
My colleagues and I have found
that NBA basketball coaches
who are determined to develop
the potential in rookies
keep them around much longer
than their performance justifies.
And researchers have even suggested
that the most tenacious mountaineers
are more likely to die on expeditions,
because they’re determined to do
whatever it takes to reach the summit.
In Panama, my friends and I got lucky.
About an hour into our descent,
a lone pickup truck came down the volcano
and rescued us from our slow-boiling pot.
There’s a fine line between heroic
persistence and stubborn stupidity.
Sometimes the best kind of grit
is gritting your teeth
and packing your bags.
“Never give up” doesn’t mean “keep doing
the thing that’s failing.”
It means “don’t get locked
into one narrow path,
and stay open to broadening your goals.
The ultimate goal
is to make it down the mountain,
not just to reach the top.
Your goals can give you tunnel vision,
blinding you to rethinking the situation.
And it’s not just goals that can cause
this kind of shortsightedness,
it’s your identity too.
As a kid, my identity
was wrapped up in sports.
I spent countless hours
shooting hoops on my driveway,
and then I got cut from the middle school
basketball team, all three years.
I spent a decade playing soccer,
but I didn’t make the high school team.
At that point, I shifted my focus
to a new sport, diving.
I was bad,
I walked like Frankenstein,
I couldn’t jump,
I could hardly touch my toes
without bending my knees,
and I was afraid of heights.
But I was determined.
I stayed at the pool until it was dark,
and my coach kicked me
out of practice. (Laughs)
I knew that the seeds of greatness
are planted in the daily grind,
and eventually, my hard work paid off.
By my senior year,
I made the All-American list,
and I qualified
for the Junior Olympic Nationals.
I was obsessed with diving.
It was more than something I did,
it became who I was.
I had a diving sticker on my car,
and my email address
was “diverag at aol.com.”
Diving gave me a way to fit in
and to stand out.
I had a team where I belonged
and a rare skill to share.
I had people rooting for me
and control over my own progress.
But when I got to college,
the sport that I loved
became something I started to dread.
At that level,
I could not beat more talented divers
by outworking them.
I was supposed to be doing higher dives,
but I was still afraid of heights,
and 6am practice was brutal.
My mind was awake,
but my muscles were still asleep.
I did back smacks and belly flops
and my slow-boiling pot this time
was a freezing pool.
There was one question, though,
that stopped me from rethinking.
“If I’m not a diver, who am I?”
In psychology, there’s a term
for this kind of failure to rethink –
it’s called “identity foreclosure.”
It’s when you settle prematurely
on a sense of who you are
and close your mind to alternative selves.
You’ve probably experienced
identity foreclosure.
Maybe you were too attached
to an early idea
of what school you’d go to,
what kind of person you’d marry,
or what career you’d choose.
Foreclosing on one identity
is like following a GPS
that gives you the right directions
to the wrong destination.
After my freshman year of college,
I rethought my identity.
I realized that diving was a passion,
not a purpose.
My values were to grow and excel,
and to contribute to helping
my teammates grow and excel.
Grow, excel, contribute.
I didn’t have to be a diver
to grow, excel and contribute.
Research suggests that instead
of foreclosing on one identity,
we’re better off trying on a range
of possible selves.
Retiring from diving
freed me up to spend the summer
doing psychology research
and working as a diving coach.
It also gave me time to concentrate
on my dorkiest hobby,
performing as a magician.
I’m still working on my sleight of hand.
Opening my mind to new identities
opened new doors.
Research showed me that I enjoyed
creating knowledge,
not just consuming it.
Coaching and performing
helped me see myself as a teacher
and an entertainer.
If that hadn’t happened,
I might not have become
a psychologist and a professor,
and I probably wouldn’t be
giving this TED talk.
See, I’m an introvert,
and when I first started teaching,
I was afraid of public speaking.
I had a mentor, Jane Dutton,
who gave me some invaluable advice.
She said, “You have to unleash
your inner magician.”
So I turned my class into a live show.
Before the first day, I memorized
my students' names and backgrounds,
and then, I mastered my routine.
Those habits served me well.
I started to relax more
and I started to get good ratings.
But just like with goals and identities,
the routines that help us today
can become the ruts
we get trapped in tomorrow.
One day, I taught a class
on the importance of rethinking,
and afterward, a student came up and said,
“You know, you’re not following
your own principles.”
They say feedback is a gift,
but right then, I wondered,
“How do I return this?”
(Takes a breath)
I was teaching the same material,
the same way, year after year.
I didn’t want to give up
on a performance that was working.
I had my act down.
Even good habits can stand
in the way of rethinking.
There’s a name for that too.
It’s called “cognitive entrenchment,”
where you get stuck in the way
you’ve always done things.
Just thinking about rethinking
made me defensive.
And then, I went
through the stages of grief.
I happened to be doing some research
on emotion regulation at the time,
and it came in handy.
Although you don’t always get to choose
the emotions you feel,
you do get to pick
which ones you internalize
and which ones you express.
I started to see emotions
as works in progress,
kind of like art.
If you were a painter,
you probably wouldn’t frame
your first sketch.
Your initial feelings
are just a rough draft.
As you gain perspective,
you can rethink and revise what you feel.
So that’s what I did.
Instead of defensiveness,
I tried curiosity.
I wondered, “What would happen
if I became the student?”
I threw out my plan for one day of class,
and I invited the students
to design their own session.
The first year, they wrote letters
to their freshman selves,
about what they wish
they’d rethought or known sooner.
The next year, they gave passion talks.
They each had one minute to share
something they loved
or cared about deeply.
And now, all my students
give passion talks
to introduce themselves to the class.
I believe that good teachers
introduce new thoughts
but great teachers introduce
new ways of thinking.
But it wasn’t until I ceded control
that I truly understood
how much my students had
to teach one another,
and me.
Ever since then,
I put an annual reminder in my calendar
to rethink what and how I teach.
It’s a checkup.
Just when you go to the doctor
for an annual checkup
when nothing seems to be wrong,
you can do the same thing
in the important parts of your life.
A career checkup to consider
how your goals are shifting.
A relationship checkup
to re-examine your habits.
An identity checkup to consider
how your values are evolving.
Rethinking does not
have to change your mind –
it just means taking time to reflect
and staying open to reconsidering.
A hallmark of wisdom
is knowing when to grit and when to quit,
when to throw in the towel
on an old identity
and dive into a new one,
when to walk away from some old habits
and start scaling a new mountain.
Your past can weigh you down,
and rethinking can liberate you.
Rethinking is not just a skill
to master personally,
it’s a value we need
to embrace culturally.
We live in a world that mistakes
confidence for competence,
that pressures us to favor
the comfort of conviction
over the discomfort of doubt,
that accuses people who change
their minds of flip-flopping,
when in fact, they might be learning.
So let’s talk about how to make
rethinking the norm.
We need to invite it and to model it.
A few years ago,
some of our students at Wharton
challenged the faculty to do that.
They asked us to record
our own version
of Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets.
We took the worst feedback
we’d ever received
on student course evaluations,
and we read it out loud.
Angela Duckworth: “It was easily one of
the worst three classes I’ve ever taken…
one of which the professor
was let go after the semester.”
Mohamed El-Erian: “The number of
stories you tell
give ‘Aesop’s Fables’ a run for its money.
Less can be more.”
Ouch.
Adam Grant: “You’re so nervous
you’re causing us
to physically shake in our seats.”
(Laughs)
Mae McDonnell: “So great to finally have
a professor from Australia.
You started strong but then got softer.
You need tenure, so toughen up
with these brats.”
I’m from Alabama.
Michael Sinkinson: “Prof Sinkinson acts
all down with pop culture
but secretly thinks Ariana Grande
is a font in Microsoft Word.”
(Laughs)
AG: After I show these clips in class,
students give more thoughtful feedback.
They rethink what’s relevant.
They also become more comfortable
telling me what to think,
because I’m not just claiming
I’m receptive to criticism.
I’m demonstrating that I can take it.
We need that kind of openness in schools,
in families, in businesses,
in governments, in nonprofits.
A couple of years ago, I was working
on a project for the Gates Foundation,
and I suggested that leaders could record
their own version of Mean Tweets.
Melinda Gates volunteered to go first,
and one of the points
of feedback that she read
said “Melinda is like Mary effing Poppins.
Practically perfect in every way.”
And then, she started
listing her imperfections.
People at the Gates Foundation
who saw that video
ended up becoming more willing
to recognize and overcome
their own limitations.
They were also more likely to speak up
about problems and solutions.
What Melinda was modeling
was confident humility.
Confident humility is being
secure enough in your strengths
to acknowledge your weaknesses.
Believing that the best way
to prove yourself is to improve yourself,
knowing that weak leaders
silence their critics
and make themselves weaker,
while strong leaders engage their critics
and make themselves stronger.
Confident humility gives you
the courage to say “I don’t know,”
instead of pretending
to have all the answers.
To say “I was wrong,”
instead of insisting you were right.
It encourages you to listen to ideas
that make you think hard,
not just the ones that make you feel good,
and to surround yourself with people
who challenge your thought process,
not just the ones who agree
with your conclusions.
And sometimes, it even leads you
to challenge your own conclusions,
like with the story about the frog
that can’t survive the slow-boiling pot.
I found out recently that’s a myth.
If you heat up the water,
the frog will jump out
as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.
Of course it jumps out, it’s not an idiot.
The problem is not the frog, it’s us.
Once we accept the story as true,
we don’t bother to think again.
What if we were more like the frog,
ready to jump out
if the water gets too warm?
We need to be quick to rethink.
Thank you.