Todd Kashdan | The Upside of Your Dark Side

Srini Rao

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

Todd Kashdan

Thanks for having me.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure to have you here. So you have one of those books that I came across, I think just based on my Amazon reading history called The Upside of Your Dark Side, all of which we will get into. And I know part of the answer to this question from having done my research on you, but I still wanna hear the rest of it. So I wanted to start by asking you what birth order were you and what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with your life and your career?

Todd Kashdan

Well, interesting for me because I'm a twin and I am nine minutes older than my twin brother. And those nine minutes have made the whirlwind of difference of our entire personalities and lives.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, say more about that.

Todd Kashdan

Well, there's something about when you have the twins and I'm the first one to be held by my mom and my grandparents where all of the aspirations that they've had for generations, I mean, and I have, like most Jewish Americans, I have traced things back to the Holocaust out in Germany, is everything was put on me in terms of what everyone hoped to be for the second generation in America. And my brother.

had so much less pressure on him growing up. And that pressure made me more sociable, more approach-oriented, risk-taking, and because people started to define me by those personality traits, as opposed to I was doing it to get attention and admiration from them, that it made him less and less social and less and less ambitious.

Srini Rao

Uh.

Srini Rao

That is that crazy that nine minutes would make that much of a difference because I've always known that there's a difference between you know, birth orders like how people are, you know, me and my sister are five years apart, but I would never have gathered that nine minutes could make that much of a difference. Why is something as what seemingly insignificant as nine minutes such a big difference maker? Like, what is the science or psychology behind that?

Todd Kashdan

This is a great opening to this entire nature of like mastering the psychology of human behavior, because it's not really the nine minutes. It's how everyone shoved in their expectations within who came out first, right? It's just like walking into an interview in terms of, there's a recency effect and a primacy effect. So the first person that gets an interview, when you have a larger group of people in the waiting room, gets extra attention. And so is

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Todd Kashdan

the final piece of the equation. And so this recency effect, or this primacy effect of me coming out first, I mean, there's a good chunk of research showing us that child tends to be the more intelligent and creative child of the two. And part of it is because you are basically,

adult caregivers are more defined by the first character that comes to the door.

Srini Rao

Wow. So are you and your brother like just wildly different people even though you're twins?

Todd Kashdan

you're making me realize I'd love to do a podcast with my twin brother here. He's one of the reasons I went into psychology is because we are, we are so different. Um, but now one of the, what, you know, one of the interesting things about the two of us, and this, this is like a nice setting point for what our conversation is going to be is we both applied early to Cornell university as growing up in New York and eight people applied early. We both were in those eight.

Srini Rao

Hey

Todd Kashdan

And back then you get an envelope. And so we all agreed to open it up together before the school day started. And we all opened up our envelopes on a count of three. Every person got into Cornell except for me. And they're jumping up and down and all excited. And I had to like walk with my head down, you know, as the bell rang, as they're still out there talking about like, you know, what they're gonna do in Ithaca and climb gorges and go hiking. And that moment, I was so enraged and embarrassed

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Todd Kashdan

to transfer into an Ivy League school.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Well, OK, so there's a lot here to unpack. And you mentioned being Jewish American. So as I always have to ask my Jewish guests from what I hear, being raised in a Jewish family is pretty similar to being raised in an Indian family. The expectation is Dr. Lawyer, engineer or failure.

Yeah. Well, you're an educator. So I want to do a bit of a deep dive into education because anytime I talk to an educator, like I, you know, mounds of questions, I always jokingly say that I'm a failed byproduct of the system. Yeah, like my sister went to Berkeley, you know, ended up becoming a doctor chief anesthesiology resident at Yale, I went to Berkeley got shit grades got fired from every job. And you and I were talking about this yesterday, about how we don't learn to study. But I'm curious about two things. One was what was the narrative about

Todd Kashdan

Absolutely.

Todd Kashdan

Interesting.

Srini Rao

education in your family and making your way in the world. Like what were you taught about the role and the value of education by your parents?

Todd Kashdan

man, you ask interesting questions. I mean, my grandmother slipped a dictionary underneath the pillow of my twin brother and I for years, we both had neck problems. And I used to see orthopedists and chiropractors. And then one day I just looked up because he just lifts up their mattress to see what's under there. And so one day I just lifted up and I was like, I was like, who put a dictionary underneath my bed?

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Todd Kashdan

And she was like, I read a biography about Albert Einstein and he slept with a prediction under his bed and I thought that, you know, unconsciously, this would help you become more intelligent over the eight hours that you sleep each day. And it's just a great indicator of my grandmother who raised me in terms of her attitude of, not only am I gonna focus on this as you get tests and quizzes, like where's the other 3% when you get a 97 as a grade, but I'm even gonna make you think about this when you're conked out and unconscious to think about education.

So it was the reason we were the golden childs of she's had six grandkids was that him and I, my twin brother and I, Andrew, we were the most interested in of like, listen, we'll get great grades. And then maybe we can squeeze in on the side socializing and playing some sports here and there.

So it was always a focus. And, but I love the fact that my grandma always said is that you can always decide later as you live to 90, when you decide you don't wanna learn anything more and you don't wanna read anything more, but you wanna open as many doors as humanly possible. And that lens is why I chose to go into clinical psychology versus biological developmental or cognitive psychology was that I knew more doors would be open, that maybe I was gonna write a book, and maybe I'd be on,

a podcast like with you here and those options are not as available when you went to these more specialized variants of psychology.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, let's talk specifically about education. I mean, you're a professor, you teach at a university, you alluded to this moment of the envelope. And of course, I think all of us back in those days remember getting the envelope. It was pretty clear if you got the big envelope, it was like, OK, I got in. Cool. I know. And, you know, in the wake of the college admissions scandal, especially when I saw the Rick Singer documentary, and I've talked to a few professors about this before, you watch these kids and their reactions nowadays to whether they get in or not.

It's like they have been fed this narrative that this is like the moment that will make or break your life. And it's funny because we have Jennifer Wallis here who wrote what I think is arguably one of the most important books this year called Never Enough when the achievement mindset becomes toxic. And she talked about how much pressure these kids face today and how they've been taught to believe this even though there's no correlation. She said, believe it or not, the University of Wisconsin apparently has the highest number of CEOs of big companies.

But you're an educator. And so this is something I've asked dozens of educators, mainly because I eventually gonna write a blog post about this. But let's say that you were tasked with redesigning the entire system from the ground up. And for better or worse, that we're making you the director of education policy. You know, goodbye, Betsy DeVos, even though she's no longer there, thank God. But basically, you're taking over the role that she had. What would you change it? How would you do it?

Todd Kashdan

I mean, honestly, I think we need a more ideographic, personalized educational approach. And what that means is...

on a regular basis. So right now we have a system where at the age of around seven or nine, you basically assess people for whether they have a gifted and talented potential. Which is absolutely a bizarre concept in terms of your seven year old self with almost no metacognitive awareness. Like thinking about thinking, like what are your feelings about your feelings. At that stage, you just don't have like a philosophy of life to determine whether or not you're gonna be exceptional at something.

And so my alternative would be, you're gonna do constantly collecting data on a matrix of people's personality dimensions, their interests and their values, those three bins right there. And then you are going to help guide people towards make sure that where they learn the basics. Like yesterday we were talking about note taking and you could talk about how do you actually read an article? How do you read a book effectively to actually...

acquire information so it goes from short-term memory into long-term memory. And how do you develop like creative original thoughts and criticisms and branch-offs when you read something, when you think that this is the, you're reading and hearing from one of the experts on this topic, who am I at age 11, to make any criticisms about what someone wrote about World War II. And so if you start from the place of we're going to make figure out what are you initially attracted to and then try to teach you.

all of the basic and secondary topics through that lens. So sports is your thing. And you're obsessed about, you know, the new Beckham documentary on Netflix, and you follow the World Cup, you know, men's and women's, then how many, you want a teacher to be giving us many metaphors and analogies as possible in that domain. And if your thing is technology, well then you can learn math, reading, and history through the lens of technology. And it's kind of amazing that we don't do this.

Srini Rao

Yeah, so I guess the bigger question is why? Like, what is preventing us from doing this? Let's start there because I also have some questions about, you know, sort of what you've seen in the evolution of the way people learn at in your tenure. But what is what is the thing that is preventing this? Is it policy? Is it bureaucracy? Like, I remember when we had Seth Godin, he said parents are the people who have the power to change things.

Todd Kashdan

Right. And.

parents often are overburdened and we give too much of the attribution pie of successes and failures onto parents. I believe this is an important element of society. Not that they're not important, but I think we put too much weight on their behavior. And the science backs up is that after you hit your mid adolescent years, your primary focus is what are your peers doing as opposed to what adults are doing. And so to not consider...

What are the social norms and peers in terms of, is it cool to have your backpack in school? Is it cool to get good grades? Do you get social status if you get into a good college and are working towards a good college? And we know that there are racial differences and subculture differences in urban environments and rural environments all over the US, where aspiring to be exceptional and excellent in learning, growing as a person, and...

Basically making an impact on the world and not just money is devalued in a lot of places. And so it's not so much the parents as what is the social system that they're involved in. And when I think of like what prevents us from really innovative solutions to education, it's more of the question of why is there a status quo bias and why do people conform so much? And you can think of in a simple way.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Todd Kashdan

Conformity is influenced by two questions that often we don't even think about consciously. One of them is, if this is such a better way of doing education, Todd Kashdan, like why aren't other people who are smarter than you thinking about it and doing it? So that prevents me from talking about it other than with you on this podcast right now. Like I've never written anything about a manifesto for improving the educational system thinking that there are experts that are out there.

And the second question is, what's going to be the social penalty in terms of punishment for me deviating from what other people are saying and doing? Like, am I ready to get a thousand negative comments sent to my email after I give a workshop or a talk on this topic, especially from teachers and administrators who have so much skin in the game that they don't want to do any extra work and they're not going to be convinced that

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Todd Kashdan

in the next 15 years, it's worth it for them to add extra work because there's a better way of doing things. There's an inefficiency in the system to challenge the status quo. And I think we have to acknowledge that before we can figure out how to support dissenting better ideas.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I think that the other thing that you brought up was interesting is sort of creating a, you know, multifaceted sort of portrait of somebody. Because if you think about sort of the college admissions process itself, it's like, how much can you really communicate what you value and who you are in one sort of five paragraph essay? And, you know, I think that the other thing that I think about is how we make all these decisions about who we are, what we want to do with our lives before we have any

data points. David, David Epstein writes about this in range, where I think he calls it something that I don't remember the exact terminology is like, you know, the history bias, but he talks about the fact that every point in your life, like you will actually change from and he says that yet at 18 is a particularly bad time to be making long term decisions. Yet, you know, we have people like I remember hearing people like I'm going to go to medical school.

have you ever set foot in a hospital? Do you even know what it's like to work when one? Because there are a lot of people I think that if they actually saw the reality of the thing that they think they want to do, they would change their minds.

Todd Kashdan

Right.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's actually a great question. Like what percentage of people who are in a multi-decade career had direct exposure of spending more than an hour with someone who was in that career before they before they Set off on that path. I mean, i'm not one of those people. I mean, I didn't spend time with a psychologist

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, speaking of being a psychologist, and then I think this will make a perfect segue into the book. One thing I always wonder about it, particularly people like you who are both psychologists, but also parents, do you have to navigate the same like tremendous amount of bullshit that every parent does like teenagers who are assholes?

Todd Kashdan

Hahaha

Srini Rao

And how do you draw the line between being a father and being a psychologist? Because like, I always wonder if your dad, you ever get your kids saying, can you stop being a psychologist and just be my dad for a minute?

Todd Kashdan

you definitely have like a sense of where you're collecting, collecting our conversations in the kitchen. You know, I think, I think one of the benefits of writing a book or doing research on a topic is it forces, it forces you to avoid hypocrisy. So, you know, when I wrote a book on curiosity, I made sure I'm like, God, I gotta be asking lots of questions when I meet new people. And I have to definitely be choosing novelty over familiarity more often. And when I wrote this book on the upside of your dark side,

I was like, I gotta get more comfortable with being embarrassed and anxious and angry and sad or else I'm going to be a hypocrite. I'm reading all this research. And so I have a parenting book plan. I just want to make sure that my kids don't end up as homeless drug addicts as I'm in the middle of writing the book when they turn 23. But what it does, it forces me to think about, well, what are the best strategies to get the desired outcomes I want? So

As a parent of three daughters, one of the most important things to me is getting intel. But I'm basically like a CIA, FBI agent. And so what that requires is that I have to, I have to be very nonjudgmental to things that I have incredibly emotionally intense judgments about. So when they're dating, when they're getting, you know, when they're, you know, when they're drinking excessively.

Srini Rao

I knew that was that was coming. I was like three girls. I was like the dating thing has to come up here

Todd Kashdan

Yeah. And then like, you know, you know, this, this is a different error. I mean, it's amazing how society changes. Like edibles are totally socially acceptable and legal in the state of Virginia. So, you know, if my kid takes an edible, which had happened once, and then I find them, like, how do I respond to it? Um, when one of their friends like ends up like, uh, engaging in self-injurious behavior and tries to take a whole bottle of pills, do I respond in a way that both solves the, tries to solve the problem?

but also make sure I don't close the door to more Intel in the future. And that, like when those frameworks or lenses of what will get me the greatest Intel is one of, to me, one of the most valuable things about parenting. It's not the actual behavior. It's like, what's your system? And so for me, like I could talk to like their mom and complain about them, how horrible they are, how annoying, like we just created like horrible kids, like in that moment, but they will not hear it.

And so I get access to things that most dads don't from their daughters because like, I don't, I really try hard to not sex segregate their behavior. Like, like I don't say, Hey, come to the door when they have a boyfriend that comes and so listen, I have my gun there. I'm wearing a tight she's t-shirt so they could see my biceps. Like I don't do any of that. I just, I asked them a bunch of questions about the big five personality traits to figure out like, Hey, are they, are they a thinking person? Are they like,

Srini Rao

Hahaha

Todd Kashdan

you know, are they willing to engage with me? Because I want them to be with really interesting, fun people. And I also want to know their personality. It's a much better approach than playing prototypical 50s dead, where you just try to intimidate them.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, let's get into the book. What was the impetus for this book? Because I like I think the title right away grabbed me. I was like the upside of your dark side. I was like, Wow, this is one of those things that you kind of think you're like, really, there's an upside to a dark side. But as I read the book, I realized, yeah, okay, this is really, you know, calling into question a lot of conventional wisdom. You know, you and I talked about just sort of survivorship bias being ripe and success literature. So what was the impetus for writing this book?

in particular.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, there's a number of things. Let me start with one that's like, I wonder if you remember this. Do you remember when on social media, I think it was Facebook, where everybody could get, got a score for what percentage were their posts?

positive versus negative. And it gave you a ranking with all of your friends on Facebook. And I remember I had this friend of mine, I'm not gonna reveal his name, and he had like a 96% of his words were positive. And he was number one out of like 3,300 friends. And he was so proud of it. And I was thinking to myself, that's messed up. Like...

There's no way you can communicate effectively and deal with conflict and deal with annoying people who like cut you in line, cut, you know, and like overcharge you at a restaurant or root to you as a waiter and waitress. You know, just try to pull rank on you like in terms of like a boss or supervisor and you're like 96% positive that goes in there.

So it was all of these kind of happiness trends that became very big with Martin Seligman coming up with positive psychology and really bringing that to the forefront of the self-help industry. And then companies were, still to this day, I mean, Deloitte does it where they have happiness workshops right now, which I thought it passed, where we realized like we don't want happy.

slaves in the workplace who like are gonna be you know feel pleased regardless of what their work is we want people to be Agile and like basically be very sensitive to is a situation or being mistreated is a situation where I should be upset and All of all these trends to focus on happiness as the elixir of life and the fundamental aim of life

Todd Kashdan

made me want to write a book because I knew there was so much science of saying of, listen, there's a reason evolutionary wise over 200,000 years that we have a full range, this toolbox of emotions and personality traits. And there's a reason that there's narcissism, and there's a reason that there's righteous indignation. And I want to just call together all my colleagues' great work and just put a flag in and say, happiness is really enjoyable.

but it should not be your life aim. And that's a provocative statement to say.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's funny, I was just, I just finished reading the toxic positivity book by, I think Whitney Woodward, I think is her name, that I might have that wrong. But the interesting thing was she ended it by saying that happiness as a goal is actually paradoxically less likely to make you happy. And you actually open your book by saying, not surprisingly, the leading predictor of success, and elite military training programs is the same quality that distinguishes those best equipped

to achieve favorable deal terms in business negotiations at Tobisto, the gifts of parenting on their children, the ability to tolerate psychological discomfort. This is what psychologists refer to as distress tolerance, equality found in people who can handle the emotional equivalent of camping, no shampoo, flush toilets or walls to keep out creepy crawlers who don't shy away from anger, guilt or boredom just because they feel bad. And I think that in and of itself is a provocative way to begin a book because there's

So much emphasis I think on feeling good and You know I think it gets people caught up in what one of our former guests Wiley McGraw referred to as the self-help hell loop where They're actually doing all this stuff that makes them feel good, but doesn't actually lead to anything good So one talk to me about why we actually have such a low Distress tolerance for these kinds of things and we know what it is that causes that distress tolerance to increase And how we start to build it?

the more of it into our lives.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, there's a lot in there. I like what Brian Little from Harvard talks about, doing good versus being good. Like to really think carefully about, what are you striving towards? And like, what are your ultimate concerns? And when you think about pursuing aspirational goals, there's always gonna be like great deals of stress and really big trade-offs in terms of your expenditure of any energy, money.

time, attention, we have a limited amount every single day. And so having to know that there's a cost of, if I decide that I get a keynote to work with, to work with Mercedes Benz and travel to another country, the trade-off is I'm gonna probably miss one of my kids sporting events. And I think thinking about trade-offs is one of the best ways of realizing is that these negative emotions are in bed, they are often indicators of like what we care about most.

And you could think about this, I know this isn't exactly the answer to your question. You could think about this as a series of questions, which is, do you wanna get better at detecting deception and lying? Well, if that's the case, happiness is much worse than a mild amount of anger and sadness. Like, do you wanna produce persuasive messages? I mean, you've got from Robert Cialdini onward about how to be persuasive and influential. What we know is, is that slight levels of sadness and irritation

make you more persuasive in talking to a room full of people than when you're in a happy mood. And when you want to restore your social standing after you're embarrassed or you fail at something or you want to stimulate your own effort and your performance or motivate other people in the locker room, we know that angry speeches at halftime and sporting events are much more effective on second half performances than happy, prideful speeches. But so there's all of this

you can go through almost every single negative emotion and say, what is the rationale that we have this in our repertoire? And I think one of the reasons that we have intolerance of these distressing emotions is that we live at, every single decade is the most comfortable decade for humans to live in. And there's plenty of books out there, Steven Pinker at the top of the list in terms of we have, we've never had more abundance in society.

Todd Kashdan

but it's coupled with so much pessimism. And the reason is because we know that moral outrage and problematic things get more eyeballs than attention. So people spend more time thinking about it. And you often forget to be grateful for all the things you don't have to worry about anymore. And I just remember when I lived in New York City of how many people, and this is not a political comment, but how many people that were homeless also had smartphones.

And it wasn't of like, these people are doing extremely well, but it was like amazing that I was watching people play Angry Birds as they're sleeping on cardboard on the street, thinking of, this is a really interesting paradox in terms of both abundance and deficits occurring simultaneously. And we forget like just, just like you said earlier, which is that most of us for our jobs did not spend sufficient time of stepping into a hospital or a law firm to know.

Srini Rao

Hehehe

Todd Kashdan

what that job is like. We don't know what it's like to feel, to be a woman in 1950 and to be a black man in 1908 and to have those experiences. We can read history, but you really need to hear firsthand accounts and you have to feel, not just think about, how much we've accomplished and we are so comfortable, but we're not conscious of it, that it makes us.

lacking in the skill to deal with those moments where we're not doing well, we do feel physical pain, we do feel psychological pain, we basically we're out of practice compared to the prior generations.

Srini Rao

Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, you say that it's only when we're unwilling to take on the inevitable pain in life, whether it's the death of a parent divorce or not getting some big promotion at work, that pain turns into something we experience as suffering arises when we turn our backs on an escalation and emotional, physical or social discomfort. And like I said, I think that the

overemphasis on positivity and what has effectively turned into toxic positivity has been really detrimental for us. Dan Pink even talked about this in his book on regret. He said, we're over indexed on positive emotions. And he said, positive emotions are good, but he said negative emotions are essential for healthy living. So one thing I'm curious about is what role do you think that popular culture, social media, what I now affectionately call the self-improvement industrial

books have played in creating effectively our intolerance for discomfort and negativity because I feel like you can't scroll through social media without sort of just a bunch of bullshit motivational platitudes that sound good in theory but mean absolutely nothing to somebody who's really suffering.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, yeah, we had a little bit this conversation yesterday about the difference between the theoretical and the practical and I'm glad that you're saying that. I mean, you know, let's couple social media with social comparison so it actually predates social media, which is, we have never in the history of humanity had so much exposure to what other people are thinking.

Doing and how they're living like we just have access to it's basically reality TV to other people's lives It's not a full picture But it's a sufficient enough picture for us constantly actually Calibrating how we're doing not from our internal compass and our values but from other people are showcasing themselves and what we forget and this is um

Alain de Batin talks about this, is we compare our insides to other people's outsides and we're not, like you really have to retain this. You almost have to have it on a post-it on your computer every single day. Like your insides is...

There's always, there's all this conflict and like consideration. I mean, you know, in terms of all the different careers that you can pivot towards, all the different people you can be friends with, like should I invest continually in this relationship that's not working for me? Should I spend more time with this new person who seems really interesting to me? We have a lot of conflict in our lives and difficulties. And when we play in that space, we're not avoiding our negative emotions. We're not accepting our negative emotions, but we're actually channeling and working with them.

That's where the growth takes place. And that's where we start to make better decisions in terms of what is going to help us, not just in the present moment, as you said, feeling good, but actually lead me to live a life that I'm actually proud of and it's meaningful and impactful. That gets to Dan Pink's concept of regret. Like our biggest psychological pain is not by taking risks and failing. It's always the inaction, right? The end of the date, you decide like not to try to kiss the girl or the guy.

Todd Kashdan

That's the one that haunts you for 25 years. And it's the, you're in the office and you have to make a decision. Do you say that you want a pay raise or a promotion to do something else? When you don't say speak up and it was on your mind and you prepared for it, it haunts you for decades. And so those regrets, as Dan Pink talks about, which is based on the work by Danny Kahneman, is it is a motivational impetus.

for us not to do that again, the inaction, even in other unrelated life domains. So if you decide not to ask for a raise when you get that opportunity to go into your manager's office, if you sit with that regret and you actually like, you know, marinated it and feel the pain from that, you're probably less inclined to have an avoidance stonewalling approach.

when you're talking to your family at the dinner table and you're actually probably going more likely to express the things that bother you versus suppress them.

Srini Rao

Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, you know, I think that one thing you talk about are things that like we try to basically put, you know, sort of, again, platitudes over particularly doubt, which I thought was really interesting. You said what many people fail to realize is the fact that doubt in moderation performs a healthy function. Doubt is a psychological state that prompts us to take stock of our skills and to work to improve areas where they might be deficient.

And it honestly made me think of an example, which is how this podcast started. You know, since Avara, who was the co founder, I had emailed him about starting a multi author blog. And he replied back saying, that's a terrible idea. You're not a very good writer, but you're a great interviewer. So you should spin this out into a separate site and do that instead. And of course, an hour later, I mocked up the first version of the site. But there's a term that I coined after a conversation with my friend, Sam Duggan, who runs the financial samurai podcast.

what I call the paradox of receptive resistance. And because we were both talking about this idea that he'd written this post where he kind of, you know, implicitly criticized me and I got really pissed and I hated him for years. And it's funny because we both laugh about it. Now. I just thought he was an asshole. And he told me he was getting killed at work. But I told him I was like, you know, what's amazing is that you weren't wrong about what you said. And so we had talked about the fact that you know, we are so much less open to feedback

Todd Kashdan

Yeah.

Srini Rao

I basically was like, this is the term the paradox of receptive resistance is a profound observation about the human condition, particularly during our formative years, it encapsulates the encapsulates the idea that during our youth, when we're most in need of and should be most open to constructive feedback and hard truths, we're often most resistant to it. This resistance is largely due to the fragility of our ego and our natural inclination to seek validation and approval. And I think that kind of ties really nicely to your idea about the role of doubt.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I do after a very intense, you know, class with my students or a corporate workshop is I ask the question of what are you still confused about? What are you still unsure about? Write about it for one minute and

What we know from the science is when you focus on what you still doubt, what you're unsure of and confused about, that increases your retention of the material because now you're connecting it to what your future self wants to potentially do and learn in the aftermath. Like you want to read the footnotes, you want to go pick up a book, you want to double check. You know, when I say something like, you know, this leads to, you know, be able to actually...

very clearly define your emotions before you go out drinking leads to a 50% reduction in binge drinking episodes. Well, you might not trust me. It sounds too clear if I say 50%. So you want to, you're confused. I'm like, there's no way, there's no way, there's no way it's an even number like that. So it's really interesting to going back to education is, and this also flows in the workplace. We focus so much on, okay, what have we acquired? What have we learned? What have we decided? As opposed to like, what are we still not freaking know?

And almost every meeting, if you want people to grow and continue developing ideas, in the aftermath of this conversation or this session, you wanna end on the doubt and confusion. Now it doesn't feel good, but it's basically like, what does it do? It makes us learn and grow. And everyone says that they want that, but they don't like how it feels to end on...

a slightly unhappy note. And if there's one big takeaway that I want listeners to get from this practically is think about ending on a slightly unhappy note because of its function. And that's where the doubt and confusion becomes valuable.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Let's talk about risk in particular, because this really struck me. You said as people become better able to satisfy their desire for comfort, they narrow the range of experiences and fall out of practice at navigating life's hardships. To put this in a linear way, one material comforts and convenience items leads to an urge to use external goods to be at ease, which leads to lower psychological immunity circumstances that are less comfortable and more inconvenient. And, you know, you and I were talking about.

my nephew who just turned one this week. And you know, I think that I am writing this life advice book for him. And I decided for the essay I was gonna write the other day, I was like, you know, every year, I write down lessons from my birthday for each year. But since you're only a year old, I'm going to share the 12 things I've learned from you. And what I realized is that he still has that like, because he's young, he has a sort of dose of recklessness that we tend to lose with age and

as you lose that, I realized that your range of what's possible in life becomes more and more limited as you lower your tolerance for risk and risk is uncomfortable.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, I love everything you're describing. I mean, and I love the idea that you were clarifying lessons learned by the time, you know, by the time he reads that, he won't even know who this person was that you were speaking of. There's so much that we gain from the perspective of like, you know, a child's perspective on the world. Catherine Warner, I think that's her name. She coined this term, emotional safeguarding. And what she means is that,

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Todd Kashdan

middle class parents in particular, so now I'm picking on the upper classes and upper classes, is they want their kids to be intellectually challenged. Like I want you to do what I did. I want you to read 1984 and Lord of the Flies. Like how come you're reading Harry Potter and how come you're reading graphic comic books in grade school? You're not learning the classics. And yet we...

we prevent them from being challenged emotionally and socially. And so if we see them being picked on in playgrounds, I mean, we're jumping right in, grabbing that kid, grabbing a teacher and saying, hey, listen, that kid cannot say anything negative to my kid. And so we're not allowing their conflict resolution skills to develop because we're taking away their autonomy. We're jumping in too quickly. Now I'm against bullying, against harassment, against violence, but...

You have to realize, you have to ask these provocative questions of how do you develop an ability to deal with people who have differing views than yourself, differing perspectives than yourself? How do you deal with people that disagree with you? How do you deal with people that embarrass you in public? How do you deal with people that make you anxious because of whatever reason? You think they have more status, you think they're cooler than you, you think they have more money than you. We can't just give a bullet point.

on a PowerPoint slide to our kids of how to deal with this. They have to learn it. And then we deconstruct in the aftermath. What happened? What do you wish happened? What were you expecting to happen? And then like, who are your icons? Who are like, who are the heroic people that you see in your environment that are really good at this thing that you're in trouble with today? And who's really bad at it? And you're doing this as like, you're not telling them.

Srini Rao

Mm.

Todd Kashdan

you're having them show themselves like what it's like to be emotionally and socially challenged. And again, this is one of these cultural and sociological mechanisms that makes us psychologically weak in a world where we need to have this ability to tolerate like so much pain and so much difficulty that's gonna occur in our lifetime.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it makes me think about what we teach or don't teach for that matter in school and it comes to so I wrote this article titled what we should learn in school but never did to date the most read thing I've ever written. It went viral on Medium. And one of the things I realized just based on all the conversations I've had in the past 10 years with people like you is we really don't teach anything about

one of the most sort of critical skills for navigating adult life, which is managing our psychology. There is nothing about that in school, like most of us basically, you know, have to go through hell and find ourselves in therapy to realize that, oh, this is actually really important. So from the vantage point of an educator, what do you think that we need to incorporate into the way that we're educating people, particularly when we're talking, you know, like K through 12, about this aspect of life, because

It seems like such a critical skill, yet we're so focused on sort of the basics of like math, science, reading, whatever. But we don't teach you anything about this.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, can I tell you like one of my favorite moments of one of my twin daughters? Um, so when she was in elementary school, the band teacher, her incentives financially, she would get like a bonus based on how many people joined band. And there was like a slow, systematic decline in the number of kids like band because she was kind of annoying. And she was not

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely.

Todd Kashdan

to cajole or persuade the kids directly to go into band. So after class, between classes, she grabbed a whole bunch of these kids, I think she was in fifth grade, so they're young. And she said, like, listen, like, you guys did band, you were the ones that did band last year, some of you decided not to do it this year, and I wanna encourage you, like, you should be doing it. Like, music is good for you. And she really pressured them. And my daughter raised her hand and said,

I'm pretty sure we were told you're not allowed to push us into choosing band or not. And she grabbed her arm, yelled at her, and then brought her to the principal's office of an act of disagreeing with an authority figure in front of other kids. I get the phone call. I come into the school. And this is basically what I told the vice principal, was imagine when my daughter, Chloe, goes into middle school and high school. And imagine like...

there's a boy that's like snapping her bra from behind her, like in the seat behind her. And then she gets mad and she says, don't do that. And she does it twice. And it is it a third time. Like when would you like think it's appropriate for my daughter to assert herself and develop a sense of agency and empowerment to like speak up for things? Because the starting point is right here. Like right here in fifth grade, she might not have used the proper like words and respect when she did it, but she's scaffolding. Like you can shape.

an assertive woman right now and what you've done and this teacher have done is say, it is bad that you spoke up against some injustice that you saw. You're training her to accept the guy in high school who's gonna snap her bra from the seat behind her. And I'm saying, I will always defend her and say, this is the wrong way to go. And then we just had a conversation of like, you know, that she was totally in the right, but she phrased it wrong. Of course she phrased it wrong. Like I phrase things wrong like now when I get upset at adults.

just happened two nights ago at a concert of Exposin' in the Sky. You know, it's, and what we need to be doing is looking for when kids are irritated and they're anxious and they're sad and they're missing their parents, whatever, or they feel as if like, you know, they feel as if they're stupid because they're not getting a concept everyone else is getting in the class. Teachers should look for those moments. They are like the best growth building moments that exist. And instead,

Todd Kashdan

We often penalize, punish, or just try to sue them. It's the wrong way to go. It's like basically they have a early warning system message their brain is saying is that there is a goal that's not being met that's important to them. And our job as adult figures is to help them work through that not to punish and sue them.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, I love that. It's I wish that was more prevalent in the way that we are taught in school, because I think that you were taught not to challenge authority at any cost. I mean, particularly you grew up in an Indian culture, you're taught very early on that you just don't challenge authority. And you know, that works for a long time. And then when you start to it starts to create all sorts of conflict. But I think that is such a critical skill. Let's talk about

another idea here, you say that your happiness can interfere with long term success, the pursuit of happiness sometimes backfires ending in unhappiness. Sometimes people want to feel bad. Someone else's happiness can impair your performance. And you know, the idea of not pursuing happiness as a goal, I think is such a it basically flies in the face of all this crap that we have heard from, you know, self helpbooks. And I think that what I'm really curious about is understanding this distinction between

happiness, fulfillment and pleasure. Because I think that, you know, we can make those things mutually exclusive, we can have both at the same time, or we can basically push some of those, for example, you can push pleasure to the point of diminishing returns in numerous ways. I'd be let's face it, some recreational drugs are pleasurable to use, you know,

Todd Kashdan

Right. One good way of thinking about it is there was some research by Islet Fishbach. I think that's how you pronounce her name. Fishbach, yeah. Oh, sweet. Oh, yeah. She's great. Yeah, she's in my author club. So she has this great work of thinking about it as a two by two matrix, which is convert all.

Srini Rao

Fishbach. Yep. She was a she was our first guest this year.

Todd Kashdan

complex ideas into two by two matrices. So one is, what emotion are you feeling? Like are you feeling happy or unhappy? And then, what is the goal in this moment? Is it for, to manage your mood to feel better, or to improve or enhance the self in some way, however that's defined. Look, this gets to the question of like, what's success, what's greatness? Like, what is genius? And what she finds is that people that actually feel good and then

are trying to improve their mood to stay in that good state, they put less effort into tasks, they're less creative, and it makes sense because if you're feeling satisfied.

If I was feeling satisfied that we've already covered everything I'd like to cover in a conversation, then I just sit back and just let you talk and we don't have to have a two-way conversation. If I feel satisfied that I've accomplished everything I want in the workplace, well, there's no motivation for me to think about an innovative product or where our customers there might be more gains that are possible with whatever product that we're delivering. And when you focus on

Trying to enhance the self and then it doesn't matter whether you feel good or bad is like you're going to be stimulated to continue to commit and work toward a goal as opposed to aborting prematurely. And what I think we want, you know, you had this whole thing by Roy Baumeister on willpower.

of like we have a limited amount of willpower. That's why, you know, we can't work out for three hours a day. And we're not gonna, a marathon, just because you run a marathon doesn't mean you can run a 50 mile or a 100 mile ultra marathon. Like we have to build our willpower up to do these things. Well, one of the ways of getting out of the limited amount of willpower that we have is to alter the goal that we have going into a situation. And we have to like resist the temptation to go into mood enhancement mode.

Todd Kashdan

And if you think about dating, if you think about work meetings, if you think about spending time with your kids, the goal shouldn't constantly be for everyone to feel good and for everyone to be friends, because very often it's exactly the opposite that leads to whatever the desired outcome is. We have to clarify, what is the thing that we're hoping to attain? And in group situations, it's often the best decision-making.

which often means you're going to have a couple, if not a whole bunch of unhappy people, because not everyone's going to get what they want.

Srini Rao

Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, with that in mind, this is one of those things that I have asked so many people. How do you find a balance between fulfillment and ambition, knowing that there's value to being dissatisfied? Because let's take publishing, for example, you and I were talking about, you know, Ryan Holiday, and he had this really great example, where we were talking about one of his books. And he said, you know, he's gotten to do these things that, you know, most people would kill for, you know, write the books he's wanted to write and have a career that most people would give anything for.

And he said, you'd think I would wake up every day and like think, Oh, life is awesome. He said, but nobody does that. He said, you know, it's basically the metaphor he uses, like people, basically they, you know, they think to themselves, all right, I hit a home run. He was like, no, that's not it. It's, you know, a grand slam. He's like, no, that's not it. It's a grand slam in the world series or the highest contract in baseball. And he said, the truth is if nobody, you know, uh, if everybody was happy to being a Senator, nobody would run for president. And I think what struck me most was when he said.

He said, and that belief drives a lot of achievement. And in the aggregate, it's true, but on the individual level, it's a lie. And that always stayed with me as something so profound. And yet it, the other side of me thought, yeah, but you're Ryan Holiday. Of course you can say that is easy to say when you're in your position.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, I mean, I love what Ryan's saying. I mean, just think about it in parenting. Like, when are you fulfilled? Like, when have you reached the destination? Like, it doesn't happen. Like, it's just stages and phases that you go into. I mean, you know, there was a time where my kids would listen to me wholeheartedly if I had like an interesting idea or thought. And now I get, you know, the Bobastic side eye. Like when I say something in front of their friends, that's like some kind of interesting research I read. It's a new phase where their peers are more important than their adult figure.

And so now I have to, you go from satisfaction to slight dissatisfaction of like, all right, this is a cue that I'm no longer matching the context perfectly. And so there's basically like a period of having to like, of adaptation that's required for the situation to get off of the hedonic treadmill where we're constantly chasing like this, you know, these golden outcomes is really to

acknowledge, take a moment of appreciating like past, you know, your past version of yourself, your present version of yourself, and the future version of yourself. And I think as you're saying, one of the things with highly ambitious, successful people where they have a problem is they keep changing who their social comparator is. And thus they never end up getting headway into feeling fulfilled. And one of the ways of getting off of that constant uptick in new

more profound, more impactful people that you're comparing yourself to is to take sufficient time on a daily basis or a weekly basis. Build it into your schedule where you're going to reflect on how far you've come. And when we play with this timeline of 15-year-old Ryan Holiday and 18-year-old Ryan Holiday and I don't know, however old he is now.

Then you start to realize like, holy cow, like I would have never expected that people were basically gonna invoke my name on a podcast where I'm not even on it in the first place. This is like a crazy concept. And my bet is even someone who's such a stoic such as himself is he doesn't spend sufficient time doing that. And we all need to get better at having that nostalgia for what we expect it to be and look how far we've come.

Srini Rao

it out. Well, I mean, I think that one thing I've realized is that there is no point in which you bridge this gap between who you are and who you want to be like that gap is eternal. Because that's just how we are hardwired as humans. And I remember with Sasha Heinz here, and we're talking about, you know, one of the things that is related to hedonic, hedonic addict adaptation. And she said, basically, what ends up happening as you become more successful as your reference group changes. So

when your reference group changes, so does what you consider success. And, you know, like you and I are both published authors. And I remember, like I said, basically what happens is, you know, I go from Srini, the sort of author linger and obscurity to being now at Penguin Portfolio, where my peers are Ryan Holliday, Simon Sinek and Seth Godin. So no longer am I the guy who went from obscurity to, you know, published author with portfolio. I'm the redheaded stepchild of Penguin Portfolio, uh, because the reference group changes and she said that if you look at the Olympic podium.

the person who wins the silver is the least happy every single time. Because in their mind, they see themselves as a person who didn't win the gold, whereas the person who wins the bronze apparently is just happy that they're on the podium.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah.

Todd Kashdan

Exactly. I love how you've integrated all the psychological research. Yeah, no

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, yeah, like I said, my brain is like an encyclopedia of the things that I've learned from people like you.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, I mean, I also think that we have to consider that we have very narrow definitions of what success and greatness looks like that is imposed on us by our social milieu. And so, you know, if you go to Sri Lanka or Cambodia or, you know, Vietnam, they're not having conversations about comparing themselves to Seth Godin, like the average person.

I mean, the average successful person is they're focusing on like, listen, like I'm, I'm a member of my community. I've got this awesome like restaurant here. It's relatively packed. People are telling me that they love it. I'm getting tons of excellent reviews and they're good. And this goes back to the amount of social comparisons that are available to us and social media where we have too much access to what is possible. And we have, and because of that,

We are not making an internally generated idea of what's possible. Like we really have to, I mean, this is why, this is the value of like meditation retreats or just walking in nature is like we wanna reset of like, okay, irrespective of what all other people are doing and what my parents want and what my mentors want and friends would like for me, like how would I like my life to be? And just go through each life domain, spirituality, friendship, work.

leisure, physical health, mental health. And once you start doing these reflections that are independent of what society is telling us, you'll often find, as you just said, like these wild mismatches where it is amazing how little time that I spend per week with white space, like of not having something stimulate me. You know, one of the big changes that I made in my life in the past year, post the pandemic, was not listening to audio books because I was just collecting.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Todd Kashdan

downloading too much information and I wasn't spending enough time reflecting, which is always what made me a creative thinker and a good researcher. And while I miss reading 75 or listening to 75 books per year, the benefit mental health wise to me and being more creative is an amazing trade off and it's always a trade off.

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, one thing that I think really struck me that you said was that to motivate improve performance and survive, you have to give yourself permission to engage in acts of dominance, aggression, strategic manipulation and selfishness, putting yourself family and innermost circle first. This is as true for leaders with a capital L as in heads of companies or the small L as in anyone who is trying to influence someone else by embracing the Teddy effect you cause you access to 20% edge that you and the majority of society prematurely

And I think that if I hadn't finished reading that section, the people would have heard that first sentence and think thought to myself themselves, like, wow, this sounds really obnoxious, like dominance, aggression, strategic manipulation and selfishness. And, you know, I think that we all have those qualities to varying degrees. You know, like I'll give you an example. I had a very difficult choice to make between somebody we worked with and a project that was going to be something that basically did wonders for our brand.

And I realized I was like, I'm going to basically kill a friendship permanently in order to move the business forward. And I don't feel like I have a choice here. Like this is going to be something that pays off and we have to make this choice.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah.

I'm glad you're tackling the Teddy Roosevelt effect because I think this is really important. And the most negative feedback that we've gotten from this book is this chapter because they don't realize we're talking about low grade narcissism, low grade specific dimensions of psychopathy. Because we think of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, now that serial killers have become our entertainment. I mean, we think of the Dexter as the worst characters possible. And just like you said,

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Todd Kashdan

really big on persuasion and manipulation, but some of it looks really wonderful. So strategically giving people's gifts, handing out compliments, giving people like thank you emails. There's strategic action that's taking place here. This falls under this category of like positively balanced.

Machiavellian strategies, like we are selfish characters, we feel good, it makes other people feel good. And so we kind of get like a green check where society says that's good. And what all we wanted to say was, is that you have psychological tools that you are prematurely discarding because they don't feel good. And sometimes dominance is required. I mean, when you, you know, one of the things that I've always defined myself as because of I'm a pretty big guy, I work out a lot and...

I'm pretty assertive because I grew up in New York City, is I have always had the temperament where I could bully bullies. Like when I see someone bullying someone, there's always these scenarios where I'm like, damn, is anyone else gonna stop being a bystander? And why do I always have to step in? My kids have already gotten into the practice, like, dad, why do you always have to be the one who like stops crimes thinking you're like a freaking superhero? Like we were on a New York City subway. It was coming back from like an off-Broadway theater.

Srini Rao

Hahaha

Todd Kashdan

And there was this guy, this big guy with, remember, big thick glasses and this woman fell asleep and he was rifling through her backpack. And I'm looking around thinking of like, everyone knows this is happening. And I'm like, damn it, why do I have to be the one that actually says something? And then I said something and the guy like, like typical bro chancho is like, you want something, you want to fight. I'm like, listen, I'm not like in third grade anymore. I don't fight adults. I'm saying to say, leave the woman who's asleep alone.

And then I'm like waiting for someone else to jump in and someone doesn't. So this act of dominance, recklessness, call it impulsivity, it has its benefits. Like, you know, this isn't a story for me to like look good. It's basically is like, we have this ability to speak up and amplify the voice of people who can't speak for themselves. And in this case, there's a woman asleep on a subway who's being robbed. I could turn the other cheek, but going back to...

then the psychology of regret, I know I'm gonna kick myself forever if like he goes further and does something even worse. And so I make the choice of like to step in and do something. And that's like a little bit of the Teddy effect of like, of realizing that you do have this grandiosity a little bit and it's a good thing that you feel that you're the one that could save a situation. You could improve a situation. And how horrible would it be if listeners hear

were a zero on a hundred point narcissism scale. Like you didn't think your strengths were amazing. You didn't think like you had skills that were awesome and other people could actually learn something from. I think as a clinical psychologist, I would never want any of my clients to be zero on a narcissism scale. You kind of want them to be like a 12.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you have this line in the book where you say narcissists have grand grandiose visions of themselves, which result in the vigorous pursuit of goals where they get to showcase just how unique visionary and potent they think they are. And it got to be like right as a reading that out letter and thinking to myself, every single person who has a personal brand then would qualify as a narcissist, myself included.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, I mean, who was like, who was the posters and the heroes like when you were a kid growing up?

Srini Rao

For me, I think it was Superman.

Todd Kashdan

Was there any like scientist or athlete or actor or actress?

Srini Rao

Michael Jordan, because I grew up in the Jordan area when he was on the Bulls. And if you read if you read anything about Michael Jordan in any biography, he was it's safe to say he definitely was a narcissist who had grand visions of himself. And rumor has it in Roland Lazansby's book, I don't remember the exact title, but he said that Michael Jordan showed up on day one of practice for the Chicago Bulls. And he played.

Todd Kashdan

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Like it was game seven of the NBA finals and he expected everybody else to play the same way.

Todd Kashdan

Yes, yeah, yeah. And then his predecessor, Kobe Bryant, was really high narcissism. I mean, my understanding of before games when they were at the Lakers court is that he would come in the earliest despite making the most money and having the most prestige, and he would take up, half the court would be him, and the other half the court would be the rest of the team. But he got there first.

Like he wanted them to know, just like you're describing with Jordan, is like, listen, I'm freaking awesome, but I'm going to outwork all of you. And I'm going to earn the reason why I get so much attention and so much money that happens there. So that's, so that's the element of narcissism that's healthy. That's, that's the, that's narcissistic admiration. Like you think you have these amazing strengths and you feel like the world should be exposed to them. Now you have the unhealthy side of narcissism, which is called

Narcissistic rivalry and that's basically when you are you believe you have these strengths and you are going to step on the foot And step on the head of anyone that tries to get into your space and you're not going to let anyone Practice and you're not going to let anyone Um be a talent that's going to be next to you and there's plenty of athletes to fall into that category where It's the unhealthy element. Um world meta who's also in the lakers He would be he had more of like this narcissistic rivalry. He would get into fights with other players on the court

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Todd Kashdan

thought that they were trying to show him up, as opposed to these are all, you know, the upper echelon, like the top 1% of basketball players on earth. Like everybody should be trying to show up, everyone. And so the two, you want to be, to feel as if you have sufficient strengths.

that other people could potentially admire you if you brought it to full fruition. But you don't want to be stepping on other people trying to get to that point. And that's separating the healthy and the unhealthy parts.

Srini Rao

Well, speaking of unhealthy and healthy, let's talk about pleasure and fulfillment because you talk about pleasure and meaning in two different ways we say you say that we're it turns out short term hedonists and long term saints. What's more, nobody can be accurately categorized and exclude as an exclusively pleasure person or meaning person. A life of meaning that's devoid of pleasure is frankly no fun. On the other hand, a life fully given over to the pursuit of pleasure may miss out on the benefits of having objectives that we aspire to accomplish, or to become namely a purpose in life. So say more about that like

you know, how do you find this sort of balance between pleasure and meaning?

Todd Kashdan

Yeah, I mean, everything we're talking about is like, we're moving away from a focus on a single attribute to having this huge matrix.

or profile of dimensions, right? So, I mean, you've probably had them on your show. You know, you've got Angela Duckworth is grit and Michael McCulloch is forgiveness and Bob Emmons is gratitude. And, you know, Martin Seligman talks about prescription and I wrote a book on curiosity. And all these singular dimensions are not the panacea to make life fulfilling, interesting, valuable or joyful. And we have to think of ourselves and other people in a more complex way. Like we have this profile.

And yesterday you and I were talking about surfing. You were talking about being in Nicaragua and I've done it in El Salvador. Is that surfing is an interesting blend of meaning.

and happiness and richness. It's got all three of those in there, but they're different moments. So the idea of, you know, there's those, when you're just sitting on your board after you caught a wave and you're just prideful and you feel alive and you're like, oh my God, I'm like, I feel like today's like one of those days where I'm really in my body and I feel like really coordinated that goes in there.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Todd Kashdan

Like relish that, savor that awesomeness, savor that self-aggrandizing experience that you just had. And you don't have to share it with anybody, but don't just go right to the next wave. You're sitting there and look at the sunset and enjoy that stuff. And at the same time, if you are a surfer and you wanna be better at surfing, spend all of that cognitive energy trying to...

time the wave and like, you know, have the foot placement properly and like, you know, have the, make sure that your core like you're fully activated so you can, you can get up as opposed to just ride it like a boogie board. That there's in the singular activity at the same episode, you have moments of meaning, moments of growth and moments of great joy and to live a really good life.

is to really dive in and like explore and savor each one of those elements of well-being when they arise. And I think too much we get

overly obsessed with one of these elements of well-being and we forget that the other ones are absolutely essential and my icon for thinking about this has always been Martin Luther King like you rarely find a picture of Martin Luther King Jr Where he's like really smiling and like laughing hysterically. There's a few of them, but most of the time he's sober he's serious and he's fighting like, you know, one of the greatest injustices of you know of human history in one time and

he sacrificed the joy, the pleasure, like, you know, that, you know, that just kind of that, that exuberance for a life of meaning and we're all better off for it. But I would say is like, most of us don't have to make that kind of extreme sacrifice. And most of us will not make that much of a meaningful accomplishment. And it's not that I'm saying we can't, there aren't future Martin Luther King juniors that are listening here, but I'm saying is that you can live a life with more balance and you might even be better.

Todd Kashdan

at those ultimate concerns that you're focused on.

Srini Rao

Well, I think that makes a beautiful place to finish our conversation. I mean, you and I can talk all day about this because it's so rich. And like I said, we'll have you back to talk about your other book. But I want to finish with my final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Todd Kashdan

Man. I mean, for me, I think it is, to follow along with this matrix of attributes, to really tap into your unique matrix in terms of the books you've read, the people you've met, the skills you have with your personality traits, and the positive and negative life events that you've experienced. You have a perspective that is unlike anyone else on earth. So do not try.

to mimic anyone that you find as like iconic or impressive to you because it's your unique perspective and your unique stories that are going to make you unmistakable and basically invaluable.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with us. Where can people find out more about you, your work, your books, and everything else?

Todd Kashdan

I mean, you can find everything on Todd KashdanCashin.com and all my books are on Amazon and a couple of airports in some strange, some strange, terrible country. That's about it.

Srini Rao

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