Frederic Bahnson | How To Reduce the Impact of Cognitive Biases on Your Decisions

Srini Rao

 Fred, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, thank you Serenia, I'm excited to be here.

Srini Rao

I am absolutely thrilled to have you here. You have a new book called better than destiny and all of which we will get into. But as you know, from having listened to the show, I will want to start with something that has absolutely nothing to do with the book and that is what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping the choices that you've made throughout your life and your career?

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, what my parents did was farming. So I grew up on a farm and, you know, I think there are kind of a lot of classic things you can take from that, which is, you know, get up early, get your work done. And that certainly shaped.

habits and ideas about hard work for me that served me well in college and in my career afterwards. But I think a lot of what I learned from them is probably unintentional on their part, but the idea that you could both do something like farming in a deliberate and

kind of self-improving way that, you know, my dad had journals of when he planted things and what the weather was like and how that turned out. And he would refer back to those in the next year and adjust strategy, look at, you know, weather patterns and which field had produced

more corn in one year versus another and adjust. And so that idea of kind of iterating and also iterating over long periods of time, I learned a lot of that from both of my parents and just the realities of farming. And we'll get to talking about decision making at some point, I think. And another thing that I learned from them that comes up for me a lot now is

understanding the difference between the things you can control and the things you can't and being able to set yourself up to be resilient, you know, when there's like literally a flood, our farm would flood and being ready for that in a way that you couldn't prevent it, you couldn't stop it from damaging things, but you could plan around

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Frederic Bahnson

being able to absorb that damage and just carry on. And that I think has also become a powerful lesson and idea in my life.

Srini Rao

What misperceptions do you think we have about agriculture and farming? It's hilarious because my dad's an agricultural professor. I'm literally sitting in his office because he's not teaching this semester. So he told me I could use his office. But I think that most of us go to the grocery store and we don't really think about where this food comes from. We're just like, oh, it's on the shelf. But obviously it comes from people like your parents. What do we not see?

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, I think what we what we miss is how unpredictable and hard it is to get that food there. You know, even with the giant, you know, my parents are a small family farm sort of operation. But even with the giant factory farming operations, you know, the amount of work that goes into getting

anything to market is phenomenal. I think and I think we miss that with not just food, but almost any product that we buy, just the logistics behind planning it, actually making it a real thing in the world and then getting it from where it was made to where it's used.

the infrastructure behind all of that and then when you add in the fact that food is perishable you know refrigerated train cars and trucks and all the steps along the way is just mind-boggling how complex it is to get you know

carrots unless they were grown, unless you're picking them up at your local farmers market, there's a massive infrastructure to get you your milk and carrots and whatever else.

Srini Rao

Yeah. All the things we take for granted. It's funny because I, when I talk to artists, I always say like, you are going to spend two years working on this thing that somebody is going to spend two hours or two days consuming. Yeah. Like we watch a movie, right? And it takes two years to make the movie, but people watch it for all of two hours. And that's why I always say the bulk of your focus should be on a process, not on the outcome because the outcome is so out of your control.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, that probably points back a little bit to the farming example that I was talking about with my dad keeping journals. And, you know, there's so many forces outside your control, some of which are the end consumer and some of which are just the world you live in and with farming, it's weather and, and market forces and all kinds of things. But with art or

writing or any creative endeavor, it's the same thing. If you're not clear on what your own day-to-day work is, if you're just thinking about how you want other people to respond to it, it's going to be really hard for you to put anything out in the world that has any traction or value to other people.

Srini Rao

Speaking of creating value for other people, what did your parents teach you about making your way in the world? They encourage any particular career paths. I know you're a surgeon and as we were joking before we hit record That's like every Indian parents dream come true

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, yeah, well, so I kind of went the other direction, right? So from farm to and then engineer. And then my big career change was from engineering to medicine. So I kind of hit the highlights as far as, you know, professional certification. But I think your question was about my parents, actually, and that.

Another unintentional lesson, I think, that I've reflected on a lot recently was my dad actually, he grew up in Queens, New York. And from his immediate family, I don't think any of them ever lived any further west than maybe, maybe somewhere in Pennsylvania, you know, and when he was a young adult, he left the East Coast and

came all the way to Oregon to become a farmer to go to he actually went to college for animal husbandry and agriculture and became a farmer and so that story in the background. Has it there's kind of an implicit permission in that as a as a child to.

say, yeah, you can just walk off on a completely different path than any idea that your family or immediate social group as a child thinks is normal. And if it works for you, like my parents are farming is hard work.

And they have had a great life. They are happy with what they've done. And they had happy days in their day to day life. And to see that and know that came about because. My dad just completely departed from anything that his parents or brothers and sisters would expect or even think about, I think is a powerful lesson for me.

Frederic Bahnson

in just the idea that I can try stuff and go do other things.

Srini Rao

Yeah, you know, I was on Chase Jarvis's show when my second book, an audience of one came out and he had asked me to list patterns between the people I've interviewed. Obviously, thousand interviews, you start to have sort of pattern recognition capabilities that kind of go off the rails and almost make your brain feel like it's going to explode at times. But one of them I saw over and over was people's ability to overcome their social programming and defy the expectations of the world around them.

would please other people, and yet I've also seen the opposite in so many people's lives, and I'm sure you've probably heard me say this before, being at a place like Berkeley, I was kind of stunned how you're surrounded by all these really brilliant people who are top of their class in high school, yet somehow it's a breeding ground for conformity. How in the world do people cultivate that capacity to overcome their social programming?

Frederic Bahnson

I think it's reflection. I think it's hard, but it's simple. If that makes sense, it's not complicated, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do. And that's to get clear on the difference to recognize that it's possible that what you're moving towards is different than a goal you would set for yourself.

And I think some of that comes from a degree of maybe intellectual humility is a good estimate term for that. The idea that

None of us come to our ideas in a vacuum, right? What I think are my ideas are ideas that I have put together from everything that I've learned up to this point. And that's true for my wants and desires and values as well. And once I admit that, then I can reflect on, okay, how, how much influence.

are the these outside ideas having on the decisions about where I want to go. And, and one, if you're willing to engage with that question as an actual thing to, to admit to yourself that it might be different, what you would choose for yourself versus what you have chosen thus far, then you can then you can engage with it and look for the gap.

Srini Rao

I think it's funny because it's kind of a double-edged sword particularly when we're talking about the world of self-improvement You and I were talking about this before we hit record and the fact that so much of this Work rarely takes context into consideration You know we had this sort of oh you can be do or have anything narrative which frankly I think is bullshit because I think We're you know being sold a bag of goods when people tell us that And I always wonder like how do you balance that sort of need to be somewhat realistic?

idealistic simultaneously.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, I think you might have answered that question already with the idea of process versus outcome, which is recognizing that it's important to have, I think, big goals or values in your life that you're working towards or trying to live up to. I think it's important to link those things up to day to day actions. But I also think that it's important to kind of hold that lightly that

What I can control is not whether I achieve my big business goal or exact, you know, like I'm a father. I have two kids. I can't control how my kids turn out, so to speak, whatever that means. But I can focus on process. I can try to be a good dad and I can reflect on.

what I did and said last week and try to do better this week in living up to my own values. And what comes to that will, you know, time will tell, but that's the only part I can control.

Srini Rao

Well, talk to me about how you go from being an engineer to a doctor, to a life coach, to an author. Like, you know.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, I think that's a fun question for me because I think we get caught up a lot in look, you know.

Not necessarily looking at people's resumes, but we like to hear the story in those bullet points, right? Like, okay, farm boy goes to college. I got a degree in physics and then became a systems engineer. And then I decided to pivot into a new career and went into surgery. And ultimately, I'm taking time now to do this coaching and writing. Right. And so that sounds super clean and looking back, you can draw this arc. Right.

Srini Rao

Right.

Frederic Bahnson

interesting parts are the parts between the bullet points, right? When I graduate from college with a physics degree and I think, shit, what do I do with this? You know, like I studied this because it was interesting. But now I have to like pay my own rent and stuff, you know, like I have a physics degree. Am I going to still keep working opening the bakery at 4 a.m. or am I going to put my physics degree to use? And what does that mean? Like what I hadn't planned for that.

And so eventually I found this job engineering. And it was interesting stuff I was working on, but it was clear to me pretty quickly that it wasn't what I wanted to be doing for the next several decades of my life.

Kind of the, the routes for advancement were towards management and away from the, the actual tinkering around that I, that I enjoyed about the job. And there were a number of things. It was just like this, this is not what I want to do for another 30 years or more.

And so I started looking around and that's kind of the next, that's the next interesting point, right? And the part that's not on the resume is that complete feeling of discomfort of, okay, I made a big decision about a career and I don't like how it turned out. How can I do that better? Right? Like how...

If I just go about it in the same way, looking for something that's kind of interesting and available right now, and then just jump on that, it seems about as likely that I'm going to fail at having it be the thing I want to do for a long time. So that's kind of when I went up a level and tried to understand, you know, surely I'm not the first person in history who struggled with picking a career and started looking around for

Frederic Bahnson

information and advice on making big decisions like that and got some good advice about thinking about long-term future and long-term goals.

around kind of more around lifestyle rather than job title. Like, what do you want to actually be doing with your time? What do you want your life to look like? Sort of questions. And went through a bunch of options and eventually chose medicine because it fit with what I wanted to do as far as, you know, working with other people, as well as science, as well as creativity and kind of hands on stuff. You know, I went into surgery, which.

in a way, you know, has some direct connections to engineering and kind of physically solving problems. And so then I went through my surgical training and along the way, that's when I started to kind of consciously continuously try to learn about, hey, that worked. That idea of

looking for evidence for good ideas about how to make a decision. Like that's making my life better. And I was applying that along the way in planning how I was going to approach an academic year or, you know, what I was, how I was going to look for training programs after medical school or jobs. And along the way, I also learned more and more about how to read scientific studies and understand what was a good.

to apply the things from those research articles. And so I was just kind of gathering all this stuff initially fairly selfishly, right? I was just like, I was trying to make decisions in my own life and finding that this stuff was valuable. And so just piling more and more of that information.

Frederic Bahnson

in to my own life and trying to organize my life using the kind of best practices, I would say, for decision making or goal setting or whatever else. And then along the way, I started to figure out that I enjoy teaching that. When I was a surgery resident, I got to work with

you know, with medical students and with junior residents and teaching them. And then once I came out into practice, I was working with residents and students. And a lot of the most interesting conversations to me were about not medicine. They were about. How are you doing? What are you interested in? Where do you want to end up? You know, now that you're.

God knows how many 27 years into your formal education, like where are you going with this? What do you wanna do? And those conversations were very interesting. And over time that evolved into kind of organically people coming back to me and then not just people I'd worked with in the past, but colleagues and friends telling me.

You know, we had that conversation about making this decision, whether it was a business thing or an educational thing or.

And that was really useful to me. And, and I'd like to talk to you about where I go with that next. And so that evolved into this understanding that there was kind of this overlap between something that I really enjoyed and something that had traction and was valuable for other people. And that, that became, you know, something that I started to do rather than when it came up, but to set aside time and actually put some effort into, into changing.

Frederic Bahnson

my job around so that I could write and work with people doing this, having those kinds of conversations.

Srini Rao

You know, one thing I wonder about is how studying physics shaped your thinking, because I remember Naval Rabikant, he did this podcast, which I've referenced before, called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. And he talks extensively about the fact that studying physics is an incredibly useful framework for thinking in other areas of your life. And he said, you know, if you read Richard Finan's books, you'll have a really solid foundation for thinking clearly, which I can tell you from my high school physics class,

like why the hell is this so confusing? I don't understand any of this and yet when I heard him say that I was like damn I really want to understand this now and I just wonder like how does that shape your thinking like what does somebody who studies physics see in areas of life not just outside of physics but in just in terms of life in general that the average person doesn't like how does that change your lens on the world?

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, part of me wonders as you ask that question, whether it's causation or correlation, right? So somebody who's super interested in dissecting the world down beyond biology, beyond chemistry down to the component parts at the level of, you know, electromagnetism and particle physics, like that already is just, you know,

Srini Rao

Fair enough, yeah.

Frederic Bahnson

That's how some people look at the world and some people look at big picture stuff more easily. So I think there's probably something in that just kind of what's inherently interesting to you becomes the tool that will shape how you how you approach a lot of problems in the world. But as far as the education itself, I think it's analysis.

and wrestling with questions that we can't answer.

or at least can't answer yet. And to me, I think the combination of trying to explain something at that level of detail and trying to be rigorous about how that's done, you know, and the scientific method testing, generating a hypothesis, testing it, recognizing that you're wrong or that something didn't work the way you thought it would and adjusting how you see the world based on that. That's highly valuable.

business in art in, you know, if you want to write, you got to be able to do that. Right. You got to be able to put ideas out and see what lands and what doesn't and adjust how you're delivering your message. If you have a message you want to communicate, but at the same time within physics is

buried this understanding that we don't really know how the world works. We're getting better and better and better at explaining it and predicting what will happen when certain other things happen. But there are these fundamental mysteries. The reason physics is still a science is because there's a whole bunch of stuff we haven't figured out yet. And I think that's also an important idea for.

Frederic Bahnson

working in the world, right? Where if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to face the fact that no amount of planning is going to explain and predict everything that is going to happen for you and your business.

And so I think that's a very valuable realization that is just buried in the pursuit of really any science. But I think physics, you get down right to the granular, like what makes the universe be what it is, version of that question.

Srini Rao

It's funny because after I finished reading your book, like I just had this sort of moment where my key insight, I think, from all of it was there are no simple answers to Life Big's questions.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. Yeah. And I think we want there to be simple stories, right? Like that's it's how we think. And but that's you know, you and I were talking before about cognitive biases. Like that's where we make the mistakes is when whether consciously or unconsciously we choose based on.

Srini Rao

Exactly. Yeah.

Frederic Bahnson

Simple explanations the first thing that comes to mind the easiest version of the story to tell or understand and All of us recognize that that's rarely the truth of how the world works Despite the fact that it would be nice if it were simple

And I think that's where, where process again matters, right? Is that that's how you account for all the details and complexity is have something to come back to that keeps you on track with what you're trying to do.

Srini Rao

What?

Speaking of education, you mentioned that you had kids, and I think this will make a perfect segue into the concepts in the book. You're a highly educated person, obviously. You're in one of those rare professions where we don't want somebody who learned how to do what they did on YouTube. Although my sister said that she'd be surprised. She told me she was in her first year of residency, and a doctor walked in, and the patient was like, has she ever done this before? And the doctor looked at her and was like, yeah, she just watched a tutorial on YouTube this morning.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, there are a lot of good videos out there.

Srini Rao

What are you teaching your kids, particularly, you know, given what you know about how to make decisions, given your background, how is that influencing the way that you're encouraging your kids to think about, you know, their ability to make their way in the world, given that probably the jobs they're going to have don't even exist yet?

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, fair. I think part of it is, you know, and I think you, you've had Annie Duke on your podcast, maybe even a couple of times, right? So her, her concept of thinking in bets, I think is just an enormously valuable idea for everyone to get their head around. And my, you know, my kids, when they were younger,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yep, absolutely.

Frederic Bahnson

they went through the phase of, you know, telling when I said, no, you can't do that or no, that won't happen of loving to tell me, well, anything's possible. And my, my catchphrase back to them, which I'm sure they're sick of hearing now years later, uh, but is now kind of a family joke is yes, possible, but not probable. And, and, and yeah, I was like, this is.

Srini Rao

Right

Frederic Bahnson

This is a just bury that in every conversation that we don't know how things are going to turn out. And some things were really good at predicting. And even if you're 98 percent certain, you're going to be wrong 2 percent of the time. Otherwise, your certainty is poorly calibrated. Right. That's your model is wrong. If the outcome doesn't come up the you know, for the underdog.

Srini Rao

Uh huh.

Srini Rao

Absolutely.

Frederic Bahnson

the accurate percentage of time. And so I think when I'm conscious of it, which as a parent, I can't always say I'm 100% mindful 100% of the time of what's coming out of my mouth, how and when. But when I'm conscious of it, I definitely try to embed that idea of

Srini Rao

Uh-huh.

Frederic Bahnson

we're making plans based on what we think is going to turn out best. We're making our decision based on what we think is going to turn out best. But we don't know. And I think that is, like I said, a super valuable lesson for anyone.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, it's funny because...

One of the things that I realized parents ask children that is just an absolutely ludicrous question, especially from the time they're five years old, is what do you want to be when you grow up? And I'm thinking to myself, you're asking a kid who's not even lived a fraction of their lives to predict how they want to spend the rest of it. And I remembered, I just wrote this Facebook status update saying we should stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up and ask them what they're curious about. But it made me want to bring back a clip

Frederic Bahnson

Yes.

Srini Rao

conversation I had with David Epstein. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

I thought that was a perfect clip to kind of segue into this conversation about decision making because one of the things you say at the very beginning of the book is that of all the skills you have, decision making is arguably the most important to your future happiness. Choices about your career, your relationships, and how you spend your time will shape your life. The results of small decisions add up to big impacts.

And yet, we make these massive decisions about how we're going to spend the rest of our lives when we've hardly lived a fraction of them. And you've heard me talk about the college example of how college course catalogs are like a fast food menu, where you're forced to choose from the options in front of you and completely blind to the possibilities that surround you. So why the hell do we never learn anything about this? Why is it that we only learn about decision making by making shitty decisions?

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, I don't know. And I know you're interested in and both ask a lot of questions and have a lot to say about education in general. And, and in particular, I would say, one decision making is a meta skill.

Right. It's a skill that affects your ability to learn or put to use other skills. And so good decision-making is going to lead to good development of other valuable skills and good implementation of the use of the skills that you have or are developing. And going back to the education question,

I can't answer the question of why we don't teach this. There are some organizations out there that are trying to change that, but educational policy in, you know, we're both in the United States. Educational policy here is really, really fraught with politics, with local considerations. And I think the

the idea that I would want to percolate out into the educational system is that, you know, people love talking about, well, we need to teach kids how to think, not what to think. And yet, when we say, okay, let's stop teaching this particular topic that almost no one uses, right? Like, okay, learn trigonometry. If you go to architecture school, if you even need to know

maybe instead of trigonometry, we could have classes on decision-making, on here's the science of the psychology of how we make errors. What are the cognitive biases that are most likely to trip you up in your big decisions and how can you counteract those? And so I would love to see that. There are people working on it, but it's very hard to get implemented.

Srini Rao

Well, let's talk about this idea of destiny. Probably one of my favorite quotes from the book is when you say destiny is the assumption that there's one singular thing that's right for you now and forever, if you believe you have one grand purpose that you have to discover in life, you believe in destiny, whether you call it that or not. And I can't help but wonder if you've ever seen the movie Mr. Destiny with James Belushi based on that quote. So.

Frederic Bahnson

I have not actually. I'm going to put it on my list right now, but...

Srini Rao

Well, what's so fascinating about that movie is he basically is this kid who is in the high school state championship baseball game. He's the final batter and he strikes out. And for the rest of his life, up until he's 35 years old, he always thinks about how that one incident would have made the trajectory of his life completely different.

And so he ends up meeting Michael Caine, who's this like guardian angel at a bar and his 35th birthday, and he tells him that, you know, my life sucks and I'm 35. And so he gives him a glimpse and he says, okay, you hit the baseball. And so he shows him how much his life has changed when he hits the baseball. What he doesn't account for is the fact that his wife in his normal life hates him with a passion. His best friend no longer talks to him.

Srini Rao

He forgets that by the way you forgot about all the good things You don't account for the things that you know are good that happened because something like that didn't happen

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, I think, you know, we're coming back to a lot of the same ideas. But I think the. We like the simplicity of there being like one big decision or one big event that explains how things turned out. Right. Like, yeah, Bobby.

went off the rails. He got into drugs. He made one bad decision and he was addicted and his life went off the rails when in fact the story is, you know.

Bobby had a really hard childhood and he had no support and he was raising himself with the friends running around in the neighborhood because both his parents were working two jobs to try to make ends meet. And he had all these constrained choices and you know that story is super complex and we don't like thinking through it. So we like to think, you know, if Bobby just hadn't made that one decision at that one party, everything would have been different.

Frederic Bahnson

me or if I had gotten that one that guy got one lucky break and I didn't and therefore you know it's totally unfair and not that luck has nothing to do with how things turned out or that in like individual decisions sometimes have effects far beyond the size we expect them to but

But to look back on and construct the narrative around like two turning points is not how life works. And I think the. You know, a lot of your listeners would probably be familiar with kind of fixed and growth mindset ideas, right? This idea that we're either, you know, I'm either smart or dumb.

is a fixed mindset or I can learn and I seek challenges to help me learn even though I may fail at those challenges. That's a growth mindset and I think the destiny idea

whether you call it destiny or not if you're holding on to that idea of there's one true path for me then and i'm either on that path or i've failed to find my path one that's really disempowering right that it's like you're either a failure or you're on a track that's barely even up to you it's just laid out

And two, it's a super fixed mindset about the entire future of your life. That is like, this is the way it's supposed to be. And that I, I just don't think that that's how the world works. You know, our, our decisions matter and the little decisions day after day. Those are the things that add up to steering the course of, of where that path is pointed towards.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well like I've said jokingly said before when people would ask me what I was gonna do after business school I would say all I know is it'll have nothing to do with the internet

Frederic Bahnson

rate. Yeah, well, you know, I a friend told me once I was a year or two into medical school, it's like you remember that time, like six of us were coming back in, in the suburban from some hike or a party or something. And we were talking about like, what are you what are you going to be doing in a few years? And you said, I don't know, but it certainly wouldn't be anything like medical school. It's like, yeah, you just you just don't know.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Frederic Bahnson

And again, it's a series of decisions and also circumstances, opportunities that you didn't realize were going to come up and then deciding to take advantage of those or letting them pass because you're like, well, that's not

You know, I'm on a path this way. So therefore this random opportunity is a distraction, not a, not a chance to, to try something new and learn something. Then that's how I think you miss stuff with that destiny mindset.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I appreciate also the fact that you brought up the role that luck plays in so many different things, because I think that we really, particularly when it comes to survivor bias, we don't account for the role that luck plays. It's like, you know, you could have really good timing. That's lucky. Yeah. I mean, it's a really fortunate coincidence for Mark Zucker that he was at Harvard when he was, you know, if it had been a year later or a year before Facebook probably wouldn't be what it is. But one thing you say, sorry, go ahead.

Frederic Bahnson

Right.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. Yeah, I think there's. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Good.

Srini Rao

Um,

One of the things that you say in the book about fixed versus growth mindset is that one of the easiest ways to change your mindset is to change your language. The research on mindset has highlighted that this simple psychological trick can move us in or out of a growth mindset. Now, when I read that, I remember thinking the question I wanted to ask you was so many people basically, you know, look in the mirror and recite false affirmations. And I always say false affirmations are like mental masturbation without the pleasure of an orgasm. So what's the

between what you're talking about versus bullshitting yourself.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, I think there's a difference between reframing something and straight up just making stuff up, right, which is the difference between, you know, and the psychology studies, some of the most famous early studies from Carol Dweck, who wrote Mindset, are looking at kids doing puzzles. And if you tell a kid,

Oh, you did really well at that. You must be really smart. They that pushes them towards a fixed mindset where they believe they're either smart or dumb.

And the effect of that is that they're less interested. They actively avoid challenging puzzles in the next round where they're given an option because they don't want any evidence to go out in the world that they're not smart already because they're viewing it as this dichotomy. I'm smart or I'm not. And anything I do can either support or undermine the idea that I'm smart.

if you give other kids the same puzzles and you and they do well or poorly they do exactly the same as the first kid and you tell that second kid well you did really well on that you must have worked really hard so both of those either of those pieces of feedback can be true right that you could be smart or not you could have worked really hard or not but if you tell a kid

I think you did well because you worked hard. That kid then becomes more likely in the next round to choose puzzles that are more challenging puzzles. They're deliberately more likely to fail at.

Frederic Bahnson

because they are now and you know there's layers of research studies looking into okay that's what happens let's try to understand why it happens but basically what comes out of that is once you're in that growth mindset the idea that challenge allows me to grow now that kid is interested in doing things that provide learning opportunities rather than avoiding things that might expose them as not already knowing everything.

And that I think, you know, you asked me, what do I, how, how do I try to use this stuff in my family life and raising my kids? That's another big one. And I think your, your point earlier about asking kids, what do they want to be when they grow up? I cringe every time somebody asks me that question or ask my kids that question with me around, because I think it's doing the same thing. It's, it's trying, it's trying to get the kids to commit to a path.

and to.

form their ideas around the idea that that's a fixed thing. And like that changing the language around how we talk to our kids how we talk to each other and then I think to your point of affirmations how people talk to themselves can be very powerful. But again, that's a reframing that's not looking in the mirror and telling yourself I am a business success right while you're you know.

You know, still sleeping on your parents' couch and, you know, $30,000 in debt when last year you were $20,000 in debt. You're not a business success and you need to face up to that. And, but what you can do is tell yourself, I'm good at learning from my mistakes. Right.

Frederic Bahnson

I don't make the same mistake twice, or I try not to make the same mistake twice. I admit when I'm wrong and I learn from that. And that's a really powerful affirmation because now you're setting your identity to look for learning opportunities. And that is the difference between growth and fixed.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

No. Well, let's get into how these cognitive biases shape our decisions and how to counteract them. I think that was by far to me probably my favorite part of the book. The fact that you highlighted each one, but you actually gave very concrete examples of how to counteract them. So let's start with the sunk cost and status quo bias and talk about what they are and how to counteract them.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, so sunk cost will be a term that a lot of people who've done business education will be familiar with. But I think it is very applicable to day to day life. And this is basically the idea that we don't view things as a loss until we close out the project or the idea.

And so we have a tendency to keep pouring time and energy and resources into things that are losing that don't work for us because we don't want to admit that what we've put in so far is wasted. And First, knowing about that helps recognizing that

You know, you can't get back, and this applies to financial decisions, this applies to relationships, this applies to everything. You can't get back the time that you put in. Whether you continue on the same path or not, the money you've spent, anything non-refundable, time, energy, most of our money that we spend, not refundable, you're not getting it back. So...

you it's hard to do but the way to deal with that is to try to put aside what's come gotten you to the point you're at now and look forward rather than looking back and saying how do I justify having put all this effort into this relationship you think given where we're at today and where I want to be in the future would I enter into this relationship

starting today? Or would I continue on this project if I came to it today, knowing everything I know about how it's gone so far and how likely it is or is not to succeed? Would I join the project? And asking yourself starting where I am now, do the future prospects make putting in energy from here forward valuable?

Frederic Bahnson

and that I think it can be very hard to do but that is the way to get out of the trap it's the if you're in a whole stop digging idea which is like okay this is going down and the hard part is admitting it's going down so if I exit now I won't lose as much as if I just keep going down with it

and

Srini Rao

I learned that the hard way. So we plan a conference in 2014. That was a massive success. It was a complete flop in 2015. And in 2015, I didn't account for sunk cost bias. By the time we got to 2019, I remember sitting in an Airbnb in Boulder in November, thinking we've got to sell 500 tickets to get this to work. And we're at 25 and it's November. And I remember our event manager was like, you have to be energetically invested. I was like, that's the biggest bunch of horse shit I've ever heard.

I want to be finding I'm financially invested. And at this point, based on the numbers, this is not going to work. And I was like, you know what, if we pull the plug now and refund everybody's money, we'll take a 2000 dollar loss. And you know what? That was the ultimate blessing in disguise, because right after that covid started.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. And I would say that even had COVID not started, right. That you're, that's likely better to take that $2,000 loss, then keep pouring more energy and time into it and take whatever it would have been a $10,000 loss, plus even more people that you had to pull the

pull the plug on, right? And that that's a really hard decision because it doesn't feel like a loss to us psychologically until we close it out. You know, it's like, you can look at your stock portfolio and it's going down and down and you think, Oh, that sucks. But you don't take the loss, so to speak, until you sell your stock at that lower price. And that same thing happens to us.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Frederic Bahnson

psychologically where we can see something spiraling downward and downward, but emotionally we don't wrestle with it as a loss in quite the same way until we take the step to close it out and that makes taking that step very hard.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

Let's talk about status quo bias. And I love the fact that you've had this very simple example from Adam Grant about browsers. And it's funny because I am amazed at how often people don't question the defaults in their life. And the example I always come back to is, I remember moving to this apartment on Cardiff and it had a shower with really shitty water pressure. And I was like, this is some bullshit. Like, why the hell does this not work? And I, for a while, for about a month,

shower sucks I can't do anything and then I was like wait a minute it's like what causes this I was like it's the shower head so I literally went on Amazon and looked and people you know had written reviews of this people said this thing is like a firehose I'm like perfect that's what I need and it was amazing like just that one little change in an apartment because particularly an apartment we think we're stuck with whatever the default is so talk to me about the status quo bias thing

Frederic Bahnson

Haha

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, so the example from Adam Grant, I think, is a bit of a funny story and a simple one, which is that there's a correlation between

success at work and whether you use the browser that came on your phone or whether you've downloaded another one and use an alternative. And so the question he immediately gets repeatedly is, oh, what browser should I use to be, you know, to be more successful at my job? And the point of the story is not that there is one particular browser. The point of the story is that. being the type of person who's willing to question the default and look for alternatives as evidenced by changing the browser on your phone also suggests that you're going to look for alternatives and not just cruise with the status quo in other areas of your life and that that leads to in the case of those studies business success that that correlates with with business success and so i think the status quo bias

can also or the default bias it gets called both things in different way in different times the

way to help yourself avoid it is to try to take away the default option. Or if you can't literally take away the default option for yourself, try to view yourself as being at a tee in the road rather than on a straight road with a branch off the side. And, you know, that's a vague metaphor. But if you're if you're considering saying quitting your office job to start

freelance stuff, there's a strong bias to keep doing what you're currently doing. And the best way that I know of to to fight that bias is to try to externalize yourself from your current situation, to imagine yourself as not having a job, but considering taking the job.

that is your office job versus taking the freelance route. And that puts us in a much different mindset, a much different cognitive space than thinking about continuing versus changing. And you can't...

Frederic Bahnson

I think one of the errors that we make is thinking that by knowing this stuff, we avoid the bias. The bias is always going to be there, right? And, and that, but you can do things to try to mitigate its effects and

giving yourself what they call forced choice where you remove the option or at least try to mentally separate yourself from the option that otherwise would be the default path is a way to significantly reduce the effect of the default or status quo bias.

Srini Rao

So status quo bias, it sounds like also kind of piggyback, it's similar to distinction bias, but you actually talk about distinction bias and you say by focusing on one option at a time, you're less likely to get distracted by the differences that are unrelated to your actual main concerns, especially the tiny differences that are only identifiable in a direct side-by-side comparison. So obviously, when you're, let's go back to the freelance versus state of job example, I think the temptation is to basically,

look at each one and compare and you're saying that you actually will make a worse decision if you do that.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, and I think you do at some point have to compare them on certain parameters, right? But I think where we make a mistake is we put them side by side first and look for the differences and then focus in on the differences. And that distracts us from the things that matter to us. And I think that when we're making a decision, one of the things that I push for is to decide

before you get too far into comparing your options, decide what aspects of the decision matter most to you. And in the job example, it could be, you know, above a certain amount, salary doesn't matter to me, but schedule flexibility matters a lot. And, but also benefits matter to me a lot, like whether I'm gonna be able to contribute to retirement and...

what my health care coverage will be like. Those, so there's a small handful of things that I care about a lot and everything else is a secondary or lower consideration. Now, when I put those things side by side, I can look specifically at the, the features that matter to me, and those will be different for different people. And those will also likely be different than what's highlighted in descriptions of the job. Right. And so,

What you want to do is as you start to get excited by one option or the other, check back in with yourself and say, Oh, there were only three or four things that I said were my most important considerations. Am I excited about this freelance gig because of something that was, that's actually on that list, some combination of those three or four things, or am I excited about this freelance gig because of a

a couple of blog articles I wrote and how excited those people were. But actually, when I compare the stability and the benefits, I would actually be a lot less excited about it. And having that to refer back to and where where distinction bias trips us up is the the harder we have, the harder we have to look for differences.

the more important our brain thinks those differences are. Right? Our brain has evolved to assume that things we put a lot of attention to are very important to our survival. So if you see two things that are nearly identical to the point where it takes a lot of effort to even tell them apart,

Your brain is going to think those tiny, tiny differences that are probably way down the list of what's important to you. Your brain is going to start to treat those things as vitally important to the decision because you're putting a lot of attention into finding them and comparing them. And you may be missing the fact that the top 10 factors are completely identical between these decisions and you could move on. You can make a choice and move on.

Srini Rao

It's kind of funny because I'm sure you've heard me reference the women with small dogs example That's my major cognitive bias where it's like woman with small dogs swipe left So I want to hear your perspective on this because I got it from Alison Schrager and I remember when I told me from Brian I was like hey, you know what my theory is You know actually validated by an economist. So it's actually legit. He's like Srini Rao . That's still bullshit. You're not a dog person

Frederic Bahnson

Yep.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. Yeah. And I think there's a lot that could go into how we form those kind of filters, right? Our own filters. And we have a tendency to look for the simple story, right? Let's, we can loop back to that where it's, it's

Srini Rao 

Yeah, exactly. It's totally causation and correlation.

Frederic Bahnson

Yep, exactly. And if you can put together a simple story, like, well, that happened to twice in a row. Therefore, that must be generally true. That's that's easy and well packaged. And your brain's going to go with that unless you really consciously try to deconstruct that story. And that's, I think, exactly the type of filter we all we all make those filters in our life.

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Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, it's funny because you.

This is something I've seen in publishing. The number of self-help books with "****" in the title in the last year, it's like bookstores could have entire sections titled the self-help books.

Frederic Bahnson

Hahaha.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. Yeah. Well, people confused the popularity of Mark Manson's book with the strikingness of the title rather than the quality of his writing and the fact that he had a massive audience before he put his book out. The fact that that book was a huge success is not surprising. But people look for the easy story. It's like, oh, I've never seen a book with that title. So that must be the thing that did it.

Srini Rao

Exactly.

Srini Rao

Absolutely.

Srini Rao

Yeah, all these variables that nobody accounted for.

Yeah, so let's talk about the Satisfy versus Maximizing and the Pekin Roll. So one of the things that you say is set your standards then once you meet them, stop. Stop wasting more time, effort or money on getting more than you need. Move on to the next thing that actually matters. And there's a clip that I wanted to bring back from a previous episode with Ramit Sethi where he talked about what he called making $30,000 decisions and asking $30,000 questions. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

I thought that was a perfect segue into talking about this distinction between satisfying versus maximizing.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, well, it's I love what he has to say there that I actually have a quote from him maybe at the beginning of the chapter with this. Which is most of us should spend a lot less time on most decisions and a lot more time on a few key decisions. Satisfying versus maximization helps with that. And the idea here is that good enough is in fact good enough. And an important point for people is to separate that from settling.

Settling is taking in the idea of, well, this doesn't live up to what I wanted, but it's the best I can get right now, so I guess I'm fine with it. Or it's easy, so I'll take it even though it's not up to my standards. Satisficing is very specifically not that. You can set your standards as high as you want, but once they're met, recognize that they're met. You have met your standards. Therefore, more is not better at that point. There's diminishing returns on putting more time and energy into, you know, this is the.

on Amazon spending two hours comparing reviews for like which crew socks to buy. Right. And it's like, yeah, just make a decision or, you know, I'm in the grocery store and it takes me half an hour to pick because there are 10,000 toothbrushes to pick from. Like who the hell cares? Just pick one and move on. Good enough is good enough.

Srini Rao

Hahaha, yeah.

Yep, been there, done that.

Frederic Bahnson

And there's this I have a story with my parents on this, which I think illustrates it. Well, as far as how high the standards can be, which was when I was in my surgical training and my parents asked me at one point about. Somebody I was working with and I gave the answer. Oh, yeah, he's a very competent surgeon.

And my parents freaked out. They're like a competent surgeon, like competent was to them. Like, I don't want a competent surgeon. I want a really good surgeon. And we had to have this whole conversation about like, yeah, the, the bar for competence is phenomenally high here. And so all of us are competent surgeons. There, there, there are a few like exceptions on either side of that bar that really exceed the, the norm. But.

Srini Rao

Right.

Frederic Bahnson

To be board certified or whatever to be out in practice to finish like that. That bar is really high. And so when I say competent, I mean, yeah, damn good, like good enough to be out there doing surgery on live people. Like that's a really high bar. And that's also satisfying. That's saying that this person is not the best surgeon that has ever lived.

If we limit ourselves to only the best surgeon that has ever lived, there will be one practicing surgeon in the world at any given time. Therefore, we set the bar really, really high and anybody who clears it gets to go do this job. And I think that to me is, in fact, satisfying. We're not trying to say we can only have the literal number one best because what that leads to is none of us having access to a surgeon.

You can use that in all areas of your life. Picking your toothbrush. That bar is pretty low. Picking your college. That bar is higher than toothbrush, lower than surgeon. But you can set the bar at a place that it works for you. And once you've hit it, now you're just trying to go beyond that. You're putting resources in that. If you admit that you don't have infinite resources.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Frederic Bahnson

You could probably be using those resources better somewhere else rather than trying to exceed your satisfaction threshold.

Srini Rao

Let's talk briefly about hedonic adaptation. I mean, we've talked a bit about it on the show before. The interesting thing is I found, just from reading this, I came to this conclusion that there's this bizarre paradox of hedonic adaptation because it creates both sort of a combination of the drive to achieve with dissatisfaction simultaneously. And I've asked so many people, is there any way to get off this hedonic treadmill? And I kind of beginning to think there isn't because that's, that means we wouldn't evolve and grow.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. And I would agree to the degree that I don't think you can make this not happen, but I think you can mitigate it and you can use it to your advantage in some situations. And I think the way you mitigate it is stuff we've all heard about, right? Like keeping a gratitude journal. It's well researched. It's a simple thing.

And it works it, you know, reminding ourselves of the good things that we have. And, you know, to your point earlier about not paying attention to, to the good stuff. But focusing in on that one negative thing, simply reminding yourself every day or for five minutes a couple times a week that you have good stuff in your life then your brain starts to look for those things and that to some degree offsets the fact that you become habituated to that you normalize the stuff that you have even if you were excited to have it before it becomes your new normal and it doesn't excite you very much anymore.

The other way we can use hedonic adaptation is pretty counterintuitive. And I talk about this a little bit in the book as well, which is that look in psychology studies, actually looking at TV with interruptions by commercials. People actually enjoy have more overall enjoyment of a good show that they like if it's interrupted by commercials than if it's not.

Because when there's an interruption you kind of reset and then you come back when the show comes back on and you are excited again to see it. Whereas if there's no interruption that excitement that kind of degree of pleasure that you're getting out of watching it actually decreases over time and keeps decreasing until there's an interruption. And so our common practice of trying to like not interrupt the things that we enjoy does work against us in some settings.

And the flip side of that is also true when you're doing something that you don't like doing. But you could interrupt. Often we're like, oh, I got to take a break from this. I don't want to power through because what I'm working on sucks. Like I don't want to fold five loads of laundry at once. I'm going to do them each one when they come out, you know. That actually works against us as well trying to break up the stuff you don't like is worse than if you just powered through because the amount you don't like it decreases so your dissatisfaction lessens as you just keep doing this thing and so if you know if you want to be less annoyed by doing laundry batch it do it all.

Do it all at once. Fold all the loads of yours and your kids' laundry. Just keep piling them up until they're all out of the dryer and then fold them all at once. And that sounds miserable to a lot of us. We're like, I don't want to stand there for all that time. I'd rather do it in little bits. But if I do it in little bits, I don't like it. Each time I start, I don't like it just as much as when I started last time. But if I do it all at once.

My degree of dislike fades as I just keep standing there folding laundry and it becomes kind of routine and I start thinking about other things now I'm less frustrated about folding laundry and so you can you can flip it either way.

Srini Rao

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Yeah, it sounds like I should have batch all my bureaucratic bullshit that I have to deal with on a daily basis into one day.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, it's, I think it's absolutely true. And this is one of those things that didn't click for me for a long time, but once it did, it's like, oh yeah, this works, you know, put all the BS into a couple of hours and, and hammer through it and, and then get back to the stuff you really care about without those other interruptions.

Srini Rao

Let's talk about two other biases. I think these were really big ones, and we'll wrap things up by talking about how these actually influence our goal setting. Temporal discounting and exponential growth bias, which was fascinating, because I was just like, oh, perfect, now I can use, I literally was like, ah, I'm gonna use these quotes for my newsletter.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, so temporal discounting, time something less the further out into the perceive it to be for us and that, in particular, the drop in value is really steep at the beginning. So when you go from can I have something now versus can I have it tomorrow, we really discount the value of something if we have to wait for it at all versus waiting for it zero.

So and the great study about this like, okay, I'll offer you $100 today or $110 tomorrow and assume we trust each other and you know, you're going to get paid either way. The vast majority of people will take $100 today. But if I ask you, will you take $100 in 30 days versus $110 in 31 days? The difference is the same. It's one day you're going to get paid $10 for doing nothing other than waiting one more day for your free money.

Srini Rao

Alright.

Frederic Bahnson

Most people flip and they'll say, oh yeah, I'll wait 31 days for 10 extra bucks. No problem. And that idea, that bias affects us in lots of decisions, right? When health decisions, we think, oh yeah, this is really important to me now. I really want this doughnut. And I don't care as much about what's going to happen to me a month or a year down the road, but I'll tell myself today, oh, a month from now, I'll pass up the doughnut. But today I'm not going to. And so those are related in a lot of our decisions. This idea of not wanting to wait affects a lot of things. And then, sorry, what was the other?

Srini Rao

The exponential growth bias, which I think is sort of the perfect follow-up to that.

Frederic Bahnson

Oh, yes. Yeah, it's and this one is just wicked powerful. We, you know, and at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, we talked about this a lot like we do not inherently understand. We cannot easily conceptualize exponential growth. Right. When something goes viral, we kick that term around a lot.

And but our brains do not have a handle on what a difference it makes for things to compound over time and the difference here is that we think okay if I practice if I and it's hard to put a number on something but let's say I'm practicing guitar and each time I practice for half an hour I get one percent better.

And if I'm a, you know, I am a pretty crappy guitarist. But if I get a tiny bit better. Every day and I practice every day. How much better will I be at the end of a year compared to if I practice every other day? And our gut says, well, I'll be twice as good. I will have practiced twice as much.

But if I get 1% better each time I practice, that's compound interest on my practice. It's not linear. And so we think about that and we say, okay, yeah, you're right. It's more than twice. It must be like five times better. And that's still way underestimating it. It's 37 times better after a year. And that...

is a big discounting mistake. That is failing to understand the magnitude of the effect of consistency causes us to say, well, if I do it, you know, if I skip one, meh.

Frederic Bahnson

It's not that big of a deal, you know, every other day, every day, whatever. It takes me two years to get there instead of one year. Like, yeah, that's not true. It's 37 X after a year at 1% gain. And so, you know, you can argue about what does it mean to to have a 1% gain in skill on something, but I think the concept, the overall understanding of how much bigger that is than even our somewhat informed estimates of it when we say, oh yeah, it's bigger than double, I know. We still way, way underestimate the effect of inconsistency, how much we lose as far as opportunity there.

Srini Rao

I mean, I've seen that firsthand in my life, and I remember mapping out the trajectory. I started writing a thousand words a day in 2013. Six months after I started, my self-published book became a Wall Street Journal bestseller courtesy of Glenn Beck. Two years later, it led to a six-figure book contract. A year later, it was leading to five-figure speaking engagements. I was like, okay, there it is. That's the example.

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, yeah. And it's it's the consistency. And for some people, it's...

you know writing if if you're a visual artist drawing like if if you get out your sketch pad every day where you're going to be five years from now compared to somebody who does it two or three times a week is just phenomenally further along the curve of skill development and that's true if you're writing computer code if you struggle with a new problem a new coding puzzle every week.

Somebody who does that every month you are going to be a phenomenally better coder in you know a few years time compared to the person who does it less frequently and you can apply that to any skill development.

Srini Rao

So let's talk about how we actually set goals while accounting for these cognitive biases because to your point, we have no idea what the hell the future is gonna hold, but you talk about this idea of having a destination in mind and it's kind of funny because we had, I think if I remember correctly, Stephen Shapiro who talked about wandering worth purpose, we actually did an entire episode on goal-free living and he said, he was like, the point is not to be aimless. He's like, obviously you're gonna have goals, he said, but what you wanna choose.

rather than a destination, which is kind of funny because it runs contradictory to what you say. And I think that that's interesting because I'm always looking to see where my guests contradict each other. And one of my sort of ideas, which I stole from Ray Dalio was that triangulation raises the possibility that you'll make a better decision where you get three different opinions. So like one of the things I realized as I was taking notes on books, I saw one consistent pattern when it came to business. And this was mentioned in damn near every business book.

If you want to make money, solve a problem for people. That was almost universally true.

Frederic Bahnson

Right. And so I think where we can get hung up on this is just in the way we use the language. Like people use the term, the phrase set a goal to mean different things. Right. Some people are saying like set a measurable short term goal for, you know, saving a certain amount of money this month. And some people use it's important to set goals to say.

to have a grand vision for your business or your life to have some big top-level goal out there. And so I think we can get tripped up when we confound those things when we say, well, somebody gave me advice about said goals are unimportant because I need to be focused on this other thing. And somebody else said goals are super important. We may not even be talking about the same.

category of thing when we use the word goals in different contexts. And I think, you know, what you're talking about, like wandering versus being aimless and having a direction. And you contrast that to me saying, well, goals are critically important and having a destination is important. I think we're kind of gesturing at the same thing, which for me,

Like I talk about in the book, setting that goal, the goal that's most important to set is what I call the top-level goals. Or some people would even say that that overlaps with like values that you're trying to live for. And that I think is setting a direction. And then once you have that direction to say, I'm, you know, and I, and I talk about the

five factors of happiness or five factors of well-being, which come up time and time again in different studies, which is social connection, health or activity, curiosity, learning and giving. So if you align kind of big goals in your life with one or more of those categories,

Frederic Bahnson

that maybe isn't that different than saying I'm setting a direction. Like I'm interested in fostering social connection and keeping curiosity and learning alive in my life. That's different than saying my goal is to have an electrical engineering certification. And what I think it allows you to do if you have

A big goal that sets your direction is it allows you to hold those other, what I call mid-level goals, much more loosely. Where if I think the way for me to be financially stable as a big goal, like, okay, I want to financially support my family. That's a big goal. One of the mid-level goals I've set for myself along the way is to get my electrical engineering certification.

If I start realizing that electrical engineering isn't working out that well for me, I can, it's much easier for me to abandon that path and start down somewhere else. When I realized that that wasn't my real goal, that was a step towards my real goal. So to me, that's kind of the, the blend of

goal setting as picking a direction versus goal setting as being really rigidly set in what I'm doing and where I expect it to take me.

Srini Rao

Amazing. This has been really awesome. I feel like you just packed this with so many nuggets. I mean, I told you, I absolutely love this book. I would say this and Eric Barker's book are probably two of my favorites that I've read this year. For people who are listening. You should buy both of these books. You'll hear our interview with Eric Barker probably. By the time you hear this, you'll have heard that. But I want to finish with my final question, which I know you've heard me ask.

Frederic Bahnson

I think, first of all, I want to say I love that question. And I think what it comes down to for me is a combination of both curiosity and intellectual humility, which is something I mentioned earlier. And I think being interested in the world, in other people, and also being willing to admit what you don't know.

to say I'm learning in this space rather than I know what happens in this space. If you if you keep pursuing things that you're interested in and continuing to admit yourself to yourself that you don't know everything there is to know about those things you're interested in you will develop in ways that no one can predict and will be

unmistakably different and unique and meaningful to other people.

Srini Rao

Wow, well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us to share your wisdom, your story, and your insights. This has been just really, really thought-provoking and insightful. As I said, one of my favorite books that I've read this year. Speaking of which, where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything that you're up to?

Frederic Bahnson

Yeah, I would send people primarily to my website, which is Frederick Bonson.com. Uh, Frederick is not spelled the same way everywhere. It turns out. So mine is F R E D E R I C B A H N S O N.com. And there's some free resources from the book on the website. There's a mindset quiz. You know, we talked about growth and fixed mindset. You can take a quick interactive quiz on the, on the website and get

insight into your own mindset and you can get in touch with me directly and that far in a way is the best part of it for me. I love it when people reach out. I hope to talk to people. I will get back to you personally. So there's a form and my email on the website. So I encourage people to get in touch. Tell me what you're thinking. Ask me questions. Start a conversation. I'm also

people can follow me there, DM me, and get in touch through those channels as well.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. That was awesome.

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