The Most Dangerous Advice Smart People Believe

Some of the worst advice in the world doesn't come from idiots. It comes from people who are smart, people who care, people who read books, people who are trying to help. And that's why it's so dangerous. I'm here with David Epstein, the great science writer and multiple New York Times best selling author. David has consulted NASA and pro sports teams and Fortune 500 companies. I worked in the White House. We heard a lot of this nonsense and we know that it's wrong. And so now what we're going to do is we're going to break it down and explain why it's wrong and tell you how to do better. A lot of this advice, it doesn't come from nowhere. It actually comes from research. But that research has been changed or applied the wrong way in public translation. I've spent years digging through research and sometimes when it becomes popular and gets translated to the public, it loses a lot of that nuance and can really become rigid rules that don't help people get where they're trying to go. So let's get into it. The first piece of dangerous advice that smart people believe is that cynicism is a sign of intelligence. We have evidence out there that when people are cynical, other people say, wow, they're really smart. Look how critical they are, look how much they can deconstruct. When in fact we have evidence that cynical people score worse on cognitive tests. I agree with that. I think skepticism, Yeah, I think there is an element of skepticism with intelligent people, but I think that's different from cynicism. And that's important to recognize. Absolutely. And I think in many ways the better predictor of intelligence is openness. Openness to new ideas, openness to the possibility that you're wrong. Skepticism of yourself as well. One of the things that really irritated me about law school, that legal practice is actually advantages people who are cynical and pessimistic and good at deconstructing. And I was somebody who was actually not that cynical, who was actually reasonably optimistic and reasonably good at constructing. So I felt like I was always bicycling into the wind. So in any way, if you are a cynic, you're not that smart. And you ended up as not a lawyer. Right. So never quit. Grit is everything. Grit important, perseverance important. But even Angela Duckworth, the guru of grit, has now been altering what she says and is championing what she calls the paramecium principle, like the single celled organism, which just moves toward where it senses food or warmth and then moves a little More if it senses more. I mean, I was in her class when she was talking to her students and saying, this is what you want to do. If you get some signal there, go a little more that way. Maybe pivot the other way if you see something there. So instead of holding tight to a long term plan, you want people pivoting in response to their lived experience. It's interesting because I want to believe the idea that you should never quit. That feels viscerally right to me. And yet there are times when not quitting is really just escalation of commitment to a failing course of action. Absolutely. And so you want to get, you want to get rid of that. All right, the famous Churchill quote, he says, never, never, never, never give up. We always cut off the part that says, like accept when it's good sense. Exactly, exactly. So, boys and girls, sometimes you should quit. My next one is avoid awkwardness. I feel like we spend too much of our time avoiding things that are awkward. And to me that's a mistake for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's a forecasting error. So a lot of things that we anticipate are going to be awkward. Having an uncomfortable conversation, reaching out to an old friend, asking somebody out on a date. Our perception, our prediction of what the awkwardness is far higher than the actual awkwardness of it as well. And the second reason that I think that avoiding awkwardness is a bad idea is that sometimes awkwardness, discomfort is a good signal. It's a sign that you're learning. It's a sign that, oh my gosh, you know, I remember I took an acting class and I'm not a very good actor and it was really awkward. But the thing is, the awkwardness was a signal. It's like, hey, I'm doing something new and I'm learning. Yeah, totally. And I think you're a subtext. There is the spotlight effect, right. Where when you feel awkward, it's like other people aren't paying that much attention to it as you think because they're paying attention to themselves. Absolutely right. That was not awkward for me. Okay, so I agree with that. Always make the choice that preserves optionality. So keep your options open as long as possible. In many cases in life, especially early on, you do want to have options and be able to pivot. But at some point, I think people often make choices just to preserve their options and keep their options open. I love this work, this research by Scott Stanley on sliding versus deciding in relationships where people don't commit in their mind because they want to keep their options open. But they end up going through the steps of commitment anyway. And they end up in less satisfactory relationships because they slid into it thinking they're keeping their options open instead of making a proactive decision. Yeah, I don't want to keep talking my own tortured experience, but this reminds me a little bit of law school, too, because a lot of people go to law school. They spend their whole life keeping their options open. There's one of my favorite stories is a popularly apocryphal story about, I think from Lyndon Johnson, about Texans wearing a cowboy hat. You probably know this one, right? And there's a huge wall in front of them. He says, how am I going to get over the wall? It's like, there's no way I can scale this wall. And what he does is he throws his cowboy hat over the wall, and he's like, okay, now I'm stuck. Now I have to commit. So basically, commitment, rather than keeping your options is sometimes the right move. Keep your options open sometime, I guess, is what you're saying. Yeah, keep them open sometimes, but like you said, don't keep your options open for your entire life. Sometimes you want to make choices, Choices are going to be made. Right. So you want to make them proactively instead of trying to keep your options open. And keeping your options open rather than making a choice is itself a choice. Asking for help or advice makes you look weak. Big mistake. One of the biggest pieces of counsel that I give to younger people is to ask other people for advice. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Number one is that one of the things we know about the research on feedback in general is that the best feedback is actionable. And so when you ask for feedback, that is, instead of asking for feedback, you ask for advice. You're framing the conversation in a way that's going to give you something actionable. So that's one thing. So you get actually actionable guidance on how to move forward. The other thing is that it's another forecasting area. Because we think that if we ask people for. For advice, they're gonna think less of us. And they actually think more of us. Because you're coming to me for advice. Wow, what a stupid judgment you have. I'm all for asking people for advice, asking for help. It's another forecasting area. We think that people are gonna be less generous, less helpful than they actually will be. I mostly agree. Okay, let me throw one caveat in there, which is for the first time in my three books, with the third One, I decided to ask advice of other authors on titles and covers and things like that, and I'd never done that before. And the advice was all over the place. No two people agreed on the same thing. And so it put me in the position of soliciting advice from like, 10 authors that I really like and end ignoring basically nine of them. Yeah, and I was one of them that you ignored. You were one of them. Thank you for that. So here's the thing. Ask for advice. Just don't ask me for advice if you're not going to take it. That's right. So, yeah, be careful with you if you ask. Set expectations. People are most creative when they are most free. And I picked this one from a recent survey that psychologists ran in a number of different countries looking at the most prominent creativity myths. The most prominent was that people are most creative when they are most free. Interesting, because, in fact, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. And so if you have a ton of freedom, you'll just. Just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, meaning you'll do the same things that you've seen before. So you actually need boundaries and constraints to struggle against in order to be creative. But I think people think that what you want is total freedom, but in fact, that will just cause you to go where you've already been. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I'm going to agree to a point. I'm going to be like 84% agree. 84. Okay. Very specific. 84% agree. We're going to add some decimal points there. 84.7. Now, I believe you and freedom, it's a balance because I think a lot of times the experience that some people have at work, it's overly constrained. And I think there's a difference between constraints and control. So, for instance, constraints, I think are generally a positive thing. But there are a lot of people on the job, even doing creative work, who feel controlled. They're told exactly how to do it. And when people are controlled, they either comply or defy, but they don't create. Fair point. So, yeah, some constraints are great, and I try to do that as much as I can myself. Next one. You can make good choices for your future self. And I think that's a myth sometimes because we don't know our future self. I guess all the things that I have are like basically forecasting errors. There's some great research from HAl Hirschfeld at UCLA who found that a reason that people didn't save for retirement is that they imagined their future self. So the David of age 80 as a totally different person from the David of today. So we don't know our future selves. We don't know who we're going to be. We also make choices like the end of history illusion, which is that we think. I look back on my life, it's like, oh, in the last 10 years, wow, I've changed a lot. I have different interests, I have different things. And then when I forecast out the next 10 years, I say, oh, no, but 10 years from now, I'm going to be exactly the same. Exactly. So we're not very good at understanding our future selves, making good choices about our future selves. And I think that gets us in trouble. Yeah, I think there's pretty good research also showing that people think they're going to be willing to do things in the future that they're not now. Like, I'll exercise in the future, I'll save money in the future. But you're not doing it now. It means there's probably something wrong with your decision making model. Absolutely. So forget about your future self. Okay, I think you're gonna agree with this one. Good learning feels fluent. Good learning feels fluent. Good feels easy. Like you feel like you're learning the best when you're actually doing the best learning. And I think this is contradicted by the whole area of desirable difficulties in cognitive psychology, which show that actually techniques like forcing yourself to do a test before you actually know the material primes you to learn, even though it feels terrible. Right. Slows you down, it's more frustrating. And so they're actually really interesting studies looking at people rating professors and teachers sometimes. And they tend to rate them on the feeling of fluency, like how fluid their own learning feels. And that is often exactly opposite to their actual learning because it's like going to the gym, but for your brain. Like this stuff doesn't feel good. You're damaging muscle, you're tweaking tissue, but that's what builds you up. And so people tend to rate based on getting things right and they're not getting enough wrong when they're actually studying. They're not lifting enough weights. That's right. Yeah. So you can feel fluid if you're doing, you know, five pound curls. Oh, I'm so. That's on. This is so fluent. The is so fluent. This is great. But you're actually not learning. And that's obvious in a gym but it's less obvious when you're doing cognitive work. Yeah, yeah. I think that's super interesting. And there's some work that Ayala Fischbach has done on this, on reframing a discomfort. When we're trying to master something new and we feel uncomfortable about it, we can say, oh, discomfort, like, this is not a bad thing. This is basically a learning signal. That's right. That's right. I mean, discomfort isn't a sign that you're not learning, but ease is a sign that you're learning. Could be. I think the one caveat here I throw on this is that a lot of times people, people who are in a flow experience feel a sense of fluency, and those are important moments in our life. There may be moments where we're creating effectively, maybe not where we're learning effectively. Yeah, I agree with that. Because I think flow is less about learning, more about experiencing. And I think flow is quite rare in the work that most of us do. Like, I think there's a reason why a lot of that research has been, like, surfers and painters and things like that. It doesn't show up in quite the same way in most other cognitive worlds. So if you're feeling like this is completely cockamamie and disfluent, it means that you're learning something here, folks. All right, here we go. All time is equal. Come on. I think one of the big myths that we have about our performance is that all times of day are created equal. And we have massive evidence that there are big differences in performance based on different times of day. And I think when we try to schedule things, we're just looking for open slots rather than being deliberate and intentional about when we do things. I know you've written really interesting about Chronotype, like how people are at their best at different times of day. And by the way, I feel like I've converted myself from a night owl to a morning lark. So I don't know the extent to which that's possible, but I think I've done it. My guess is that you're probably less of a night owl than you were originally if you're able to do that. It's really important that we're intentional about when we do things, and there are other choices in our lives that we make that should be intentional about time. So, for instance, as I've written about, there's nobody in my family who's allowed to go to a discretionary medical procedure or an important doctor appointment in the afternoon period. If you can Avoid it. Do not go to the hospital, do an important medical procedure in the afternoon. I think that's a different time, different ballgame. So this one, I'm really curious what you'll say about this one. You should always have a 10 year plan. No way. Oh, all right. Okay. Easy agreement. I mean, I feel like it's fine to have long term goals and plans, but if it, if it makes you rigid and it means you're not pivoting to the opportunities that open. You've been talking about forecasting errors. Right. You can't see the opportunities that are coming. You don't know what's coming. Right. If you're not open to pivoting to those, you're going to miss your best opportunities. I look at, like when I was a teenager, I was going to go to the Air Force Academy, be a test pilot, be an astronaut. I had it all mapped out exactly what I was going to do. Didn't do any of those things. Look how far you've fallen. That's right. You're sitting on a couch with me, with Dan Pink. That's right. If I, if I had only known, I would have stuck to the plan. But all of the most important projects in my professional life have come from opportunistic pivots where something presents itself, turns out to be bigger or more interesting than I would have thought, and instead of saying like, that's not in the plan, turn toward it. Right. I think the other thing that you see sometimes is that, is that planning is a sign of some amount of risk aversion. That is, we try to, we think we can map things out, make decisions for purely instrumental reasons, and try to do things simply because they're going to lead to something else when they don't. And also if you make decisions for that reason, you're not going to be very good at it. Agreed. We're agreeing too much. Okay. I want to throw some, like a wrench in your gears. All right, here we go. So achieving a huge goal will leave you satisfied briefly. It will leave you satisfied, but far less enduringly than you, than you think. We are adaptive animals. And so I'll just talk my own experience here. So I thought that I would be completely pumped when I wrote a book. Like, if I could write a book, I'll be happy. Okay. Because I'm a reader and I like to write a book. So I assume if I'm writing a book, I'm going to be miserable. No, no, just. If I, if I can, if I like. Oh, my Gosh, I have never written a book before. So once I write a book, I'm going to be happy. So I wrote a book and I was psyched to see it for about 10 minutes. And then it's like, oh, how's this book gonna do? Who's gonna like it? And then it's like, okay, so I'll be happy when. If a book becomes a bestseller, then it becomes a best seller, and you're like, okay, great, it's a bestseller this week. I better stay on for next week. It's amazing how quickly that happens, that hedonic treadmill. It's incredible. And so I think that what's important is to actually enjoy the pursuit as much as the goal attainment. And I'm all for attaining your goals. All I'm saying is that if you set goals, particularly audacious goals, and you hit them, you're going to be less happy than you think. Yeah, it's really interesting. Less happy. Less enduringly. Like Scotty Scheffler, the pro golfer, was talking about this recently, how he celebrates a win for a few minutes. Right. And he was getting at what psychologists call the arrival fallacy, the idea that, like, if I only arrive, then everything will be okay, or midlife crisis, someone wants to climb Everest, but it's like they're still the same person. When they come back down, it's still them that said all the things. You know, we both felt this with books and things like that. I am still glad to have done those things in retro. Sometimes I think I enjoy them more in retrospect, which. Which is a kind of enjoyment than I actually do in the moment. So I don't want to take away from the delight of, like, achieving goals or having achievements, and maybe people need to lower their expectations for the achievement about how much it's going to pay off emotionally in the short term. I think that there is a kind of. If you go further on in life and you go look back retrospectively, having achieved some goals will leave you somewhat satisfied. Interesting. It's like another forecasting error, right? How you're going to feel about. We're really getting it. Forecasting errors. Yeah. All right. My forecasting errors. And I'm going to not like your next one. What is it? The time management is the main problem. The main problem of what? The main problem for productivity. And it can be a problem, but, oh, time managed. Okay. Not managing time effectively is the main problem in productivity. Right, right. And I think, in fact, a major problem is people get so caught up in Productivity hacks, that there's an illusion that they can actually get all this stuff done right. Like, if I look at my inbox right now, in the rest of my life, I won't be able to reply to the unread messages that are sitting there right now. And I can try to implement all kinds of systems. I did in the past. I had a response list, A, B, C, D, and pretty soon realized that if it wasn't done, A, I just couldn't get to it. So I think instead of more productivity tactics, not that those are bad, but you actually just need to cut a bunch of stuff out. And sometimes that involves not seeing things that would be interesting enough that you would otherwise respond, but you just gotta be ruthless. Yeah. I mean, I know that you're a fan of Oliver Berkman, and he's helped me. His books have helped me think a little bit about this. One thing that I sort of metaphor that's helped me on this thing is like, there's so much stuff to read out there and there's so many magazines and newspapers, things like that. And I love all of those things. And yet I'm never going to get to it. Yeah. And never going to get to it all. And so he has this. You got to change your metaphor of like, it's these. These magazines and newspapers and things are not in a bucket. They're actually in a river. And the river. So just like a river will go by you. And it's like, hey, like, that part of the river just went by me. Okay, great. There's going to be another part of the river coming here too. So seeing, like, this volume of material that you can possibly enjoy as a river that's going by you rather than a bucket to empty was very helpful to me. It'd be hard to let it go, though. Like, I find that I have to create folders and bookmark websites that I want to read. And now I know I'm not going to read them, but I need them bookmarked. And I'm like, oh, I cataloged it. Okay, I can let it go if you took it. If you took a list of my piles of articles and books to be read, I would basically need 100 people spending the rest of their lifetimes on this task. And yet part of me still thinks I can do it. This next one should be uncontroversial to you because you wrote a whole book about this. But we tend to believe that, especially as parents, that our kids should specialize as early as possible. So I'm preaching to the saved here, but I think that there is some very good evidence that you've written about very elegantly showing that what you want, especially as young people, but I think even more broadly in our lives is some amount of sampling, experimentation, trying stuff going across different genres. You know, the model, as you say in your book, is Roger Federer, who played multiple sports before specializing in tennis, versus Tiger woods, who had a club in his hand at age 2. So that got him on the whatever the Mike Douglas show or the Merv Griffin show when he was like a child, like a toddler, but also led to, I think, a somewhat unhappy life and 15 back surgeries. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, there's the injury aspect, but I would say that Tiger Wood's been very successful. I don't. Lots of things happen in lots of people's personal lives, but I view him as a success. What I think the difference is is that if you look at the science of development, Federer is the norm. Right. Okay, got it. That's a better way to put it. And so, because I think they both made it to, you know, became successful. But. And there's just this brand new paper out in the journal Science that looked at 30,000 some musicians, scientists and athletes and saw that the behaviors that produce top youth success, early specialization, narrow focus, are negatively correlated with the behaviors that produce the best adult success, which is this broader early beginning and sampling and building a broad tool set and seeing where you match. It's just that the youthful prodigies get an early lead, but they don't sustain the lead and the late bloomers make a comeback. And the more often you pick something, the more often you match somebody in a space and a sport and a skill, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot. Yeah. So don't specialize early, folks. Sample. Okay. I'm not sure what you're going to think about this one. Play to your strengths, ignore weaknesses. I think that's bad advice. Oh, okay. I might disagree with this one. I do think you want to like lean into your superpowers, but I think you can often be limited. If you don't try to raise the floor, you can have like a personal bottleneck. So if I think about again, some of the sports research, there's some interesting research in soccer. Players looking at the ones who kind of progress to the highest levels had this habit of assessing own weaknesses and working on those things. And I think there can be a desire to outsource everything you're not awesome at. And I Think you should outsource some things you're not awesome at. But I also think that can mean that you lose perspective on all the things that need to be done and aren't as sort of as good at integrating them. Yeah, I might. I actually don't necessarily agree with your point there, because I feel like there is. There's a whole universe of things that one can be good at, and most of us are not very good at most things. And finding things that you are genuinely good at, those very. And focusing on that is important. And you can spend a lot of your time fixing your weaknesses because your weaknesses are so much greater in number than your strengths. And so I think that there's a defensive thing that you can do to make sure certain weaknesses don't hold you back. But I actually think you should calibrate your life much more toward your strengths. Now, it could just be that this is something that I learned. Like, I think I spent a lot of my earlier life trying to fix my weaknesses and discovering that there's actually a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small number of things that I'm actually moderately good at, and I should just do those things. It wasn't enough berries? Yeah, no. It's like this tiny little thing of, like, a couple of things that I'm pretty good at, and it's like, wow, I better find, you know, that little island and stand on that little island, or else I'm gonna drown in all of these weaknesses. And I can maybe fix a weakness here, but I got all these other ones over here, so I'm constantly, like, trying to stay afloat. Okay. Maybe picking and choosing a weakness here and there. If you've identified that it may be a limiting factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it could be that. And I feel like so much of what. When you. When you look at, like, people working in organizations, there is a lot of efforts to fix people. And I think that more effort should be put on putting people in the right positions rather than trying to fix them. I agree with that. Yeah. Sort of matching people's propensities and proclivities and strengths to particular roles rather than putting people in a role and then doing the remedial work. Okay, you've tweaked me a little on that one. I've moved my needle a little bit. Okay. Finally, last, but certainly not least, is my claim that the Declaration of Independence is wrong and that it's a mistake to pursue happiness. Do tell. I think happiness is the wrong. The wrong goal, the wrong thing. We should. We should be pursuing. Because I think a lot of the evidence says that happiness is a byproduct of other things rather than something that you want to actively seek. So I think if you pursue excellence in your craft, if you pursue meaning in your life, if you pursue strong relationships that will allow you to be happy. But constantly scrutinizing yourself, saying, am I happy? And saying, oh, what I have to do is try to be happy, I think that's a fool's game. I think that's fair. I mean, it sounds bad. Yeah. But when I think of some of the most important things I've done, whether it's, you know, parenting or writing books or. Well, let's say. Let's say writing books and running the 800 means whether it was a competitive runner. If someone asked me in the middle of those things, like, are you happy? I'd say, are you insane? It's torture, right? But it's so engaging. It keeps bringing me back. And so I get this feeling of a sense of engagement now. I don't think we should ignore happiness altogether. If you're really engaged and really unhappy all the time, you should probably change something. But in general, I think there's so much emphasis on doing what makes you happy that there should be a little more on doing what gives you meaning or what brings some satisfaction, what is meaningful, what contributes, what connects you to other people. And I think that happiness then will emerge from that. But if your goal is happiness, what you end up doing is you end up constantly measuring your happiness. Am I happy enough? Am I happy now? And I think that that's a bad idea, too, in the same way that my watch analogy. So my watch, this watch here, actually measures my sleep. And measuring my sleep has made me sleep worse. I was going to say I was about to give another piece of advice, which is like, measuring a lot of your personal data is actually a bad idea for the large majority of people. I didn't realize this watch measured my sleep. And so it's like, oh, I realize, oh, it measures my sleep. And then I look at it, and it's like, oh, wow, you didn't sleep very well last night. I'm like, oh, my God, I didn't sleep well. God, no wonder. I guess I feel terrible. And then it's like the next night, I have a hard time falling asleep. And it's like I'm losing sleep over. And I felt perfectly fine in my sleep. Once I started measuring, I felt worse. And so that's another reason why it's just like, do meaningful things with people you care about in a way that is excellent and you're gonna be okay. This is a bonus piece of advice we got here. Like, when I was. The better I became as a competitive runner, the less I used a watch. Oh, interesting. Then you focusing on the metric and instead of going by developing a feel for, you know, are you pushing too much or not? Interesting. All right, my last one. The creativity is synonymous with originality. I think we make that mistake that to be creative, an idea has to be fully original. You didn't come up with this, did you? What do you mean? This idea? I think it's not original, is it? It's not, no. It's this. This. This originally came out of the Romantic period. Before that, like in Shakespeare's time, you can find antecedents to everything he wrote. Sure. Stuff that now we would actually call plagiarism. But that's. But it was viewed as. You build off things that people understand you and the creativity is really altering it. Yeah. So they understand the basis. And even if you're looking at, like, tech innovation, most of the breakthroughs come from recombinations of different knowledge or moving something from one area to somewhere else where it's seen as creation. And so I think people. This kind of goes again with, like, being the most free is you just want to mind wander and have free creations of the mind, which you do want mind wandering time for sure. But often I think the way to go is to find something interesting and engaging and start building off of it instead of just having a total blank page. Yeah, I think that's generally right, because in some ways there is, you know, I mean, all creativity. In some ways, I think creativity might be inherently recombinant. That is, someone's come up with some element of this before, and maybe you're just putting it together in new ways. The other thing about that is that if you're thinking about creativity not only as an expression of who you are, but as a way to match to a need in a market, it's particularly true with artistic work is that you want to actually have something be both novel and familiar at the same time. That's right. You don't want it if it's completely freaky and new. It might not land. If it's completely like what's come before, people will say it's boring. And so I think that in artistic work especially, you're trying to find that match between novelty and familiarity. And the crazier some of it is, the more familiar. Some of it has to be exactly like fantasy movies that have a really bizarre setting, always have the same kind of hero's journey plot, essentially. Exactly, exactly. And you see, you see it sometimes in. You see it sometimes in visual art, you see it sometimes in theatrical art. And I think it's. It's something that I think about as someone trying to create stuff is like, like, okay, that's been done before. That's a little too wild. What is a way to meet somewhere out here. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we agreed too much. I disagree. Okay, there we go. I totally disagree with that. So thanks for listening to our bad advice. If you enjoyed this video, David and I made two other videos together. One is how boredom can be an innovation engine and the other is why your best ideas often come at the worst time. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one.