Revisionist HistoryMalcolm Gladwell hosts a rollicking live discussion about Adam Grant’s new book, “Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things,” which is available now. They explore why we overemphasize innate talent, how Adam grappled with impostor syndrome as a writer and perfectionism as an athlete, and how to chart a path toward achieving greater things. They also discuss the evidence on affirmative action — and riff on topics ranging from humility to psychoanalysis to whether Lions or Bills fans suffer more.
Pushkin.
My good friend Adam Grant, author in psychology professor at U Penn, has a new book out, Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. He sent me a draft months ago. I told Adam I love it so much that when it comes out, I want to sit down and interview you about it, and we'll run the interview in the Revision's history feed. Sure enough, Hidden Potential has now come out, and on Adam's publication day, he came to New York and joined me on stage at the ninety second Street y for what turned out to be a really really fun conversation as we always have whenever we get together. So here it is, thank you, Thank you all for coming, Adam, thank you for coming to New York.
You know we have done this many times we have, and this is it's usually on my turf, not yours.
This is what I was about to say. I was going to ask you what is different this time around? And you that's exactly right. You have finally come to my house. And I was reflecting on this, and I was wondering, what kind of an idiot am I that I have agreed to go to your turf like seven times in a row before demanding that we returned to favor. This is like a you know in basketball. This is like someone seating you know, home territory and saying, oh, well, just let's just do it at your arena.
I will say, though, you once invited me to your actual house where we had dinner and you cooked.
That's true.
Do you remember this?
Yeah, I wouldn't say that was necessarily to your advantage if I was cooking.
Well, it definitely wasn't, because I've never told you this, But do you remember what you cooked?
Yeah?
I think it was tilapia really, or it was something that swims and I.
Don't eat seafood. But I didn't want to hurt your feelings, so I ate it.
I feel like we're even oudam that that that's very touching you you you took telapia for me, that's I am.
I wanted to start.
We're going to be discussing your book Hidden Potential, but I'm looking at the blurbs on the back, and i just want to not read the blurbs, but just.
Talk about who has blurbed your book.
Okay, So the first burb is from Serena Williams, right, World's Greatest Tansper. The second blurb is from Mark Cuban, the famous owner of the Dallas Mavericks, the guy who was on Shark Tank. The third quote is from Malcolm Glava me. The fourth quote is from yo Yo Ma, world's famous cellist, and the fourth quote is from US Navy Admiral William mcgraven. Okay, Now, what's the theory behind the order? Why does Serena did she?
Did?
She say I'll give you a blurb if you put me first?
Like? What?
How does who decided she goes first? Do Cubans say, I'm willing to go second to Serena? But not if I'm If I'm behind Glavel, I'm you're.
Not getting him? What happened? How did that work?
I didn't choose the order?
It's not alphabetical because wait.
Are you? Are you trying to argue for a higher placement than third?
No?
Is that what's happening?
No? No, I don't. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure I belong third. I think I don't know why I'm ahead? Why would I be ahead of Yoyoma? Yoyoma in every way is.
More culturally significant than I.
I will be for I will be dead and forgotten that people will be listening to Yoyoma. Okay, William mcgraven defends this country and you have a blast like where are your priorities?
By the way, this is how you treat a guest in your home.
But well, I mean, we have a history of me feeding U tilapia. So all right, let's talk about your book, which I like a lot. By the way, otherwise it would not have blurbed it. You're interested in character, which is is That's sort of an interesting twist, isn't it. You would think an organizational psychologists would be someone who would be interested in structures and procedures and those kinds of things.
I'm a psychologist first, and I happen to do a lot of my work on people at work. But what I care about is people and the quality of their lives and how much they get to grow.
And so if you happen to do.
That in an organization, great, But I could care less about the org chart, but I care deeply about helping people reach their potential.
Yeah.
I want to make an additional observation about your books as a group, and that is that it's they're fundamentally about character, as you say, which you're also very interested in sort of interrogating our intuitive ideas about character.
Right.
I'm always reminded and you will know this. Didn't Lee Ross write a famous paper which was all about how our intuitions about psychology are wrong in the in the main, and that it seems to me a lot of what you're doing in your books, is this a fair summary of them? Is you are continuing on that path of kind of interrogating our intuitive notions about psychology.
Some would call that Gladwellian.
No, I don't think I think you're don't. Don't you're deflecting now, Adam.
You're you literally just deflected.
Ah, I don't.
No, No, is anyone else watching this happen. His deflection is accusing me of deflection. It's not a deflection, it's.
Not no listen, am, I I'm just a flat up contrarian. There's a difference between someone who gently interrogates what we get wrong as intuitive psychologists, and someone like me who just says provocatively and usually erroneously, that everything we think is wrong. I'm a bomb throw You're not a bomb thrower.
Yeah, I guess that's I think that's a parody or a caricature of your work. But no, I think I think I start with really wanting to understand what makes people tick and how we can improve the quality of our lives. And then within that I want to focus on what's surprising and unexpected. So yes, I think you're right, which causes me pain to admit.
Like we think again.
For example, the idea of valorizing humility as a kind as the kind of cornerstone the key as the cornerstone of intellectual growth is really interesting.
And not one.
I imagine if you gathered a group of people of students and ask them what did they think, what characters trait did they think was the key to intellectual growth, humility would not be in the top three.
No, and that's what I wanted to write about it.
Yeah, I mean I go to work when we used to go to a physical workplace, and still when I go to teach, I walk into the classroom and I think Donald Trump and Elon Musk both attended this financetitution. Yeah, what would I want the next Trump or Musk to learn? And strangely, humility is very very high on that list.
Yeah, I wonder how you could so tell me about the thought process that led you to think, Okay, the next stage in this journey through character, I wanted, I wanted. I wanted to be about hidden potential. How did you get there?
I went down this path because I was once told that I couldn't write.
Who told you that?
The Harvard Writing Office my first week of college when they recommended me for remedial writing, which I was then told was for jocks and people who spoke English as a sixth or seventh language.
So wait, keep going, this is interesting.
Yeah.
So I I failed the required writing test as a as a brand new freshmen.
It was the first piece of feedback I got from Harvard.
And if you think I had imposter syndrome before, like already worrying like I'm the one mistake.
I don't belong here. Now I show up.
I take the writing test, They're like, Nope, you must take an extra semester of writing and you can't, like you can't explain your thoughts coherently, and you don't know how to structure an argument.
And I was like, I think I don't belong here.
And I think that's the point, right, That's why I wanted to write this book. Is we make so many judgments of other people's potential, and so often they're driven by starting ability. Do you have the raw talent? Are you a prodigy? Do you look extremely capable? And if the answer is no, you think you should give up? Yeah, because you don't have what it takes. And I think that's a huge mistake. I think it counts out a ton of late bloomers. I think it overlooks many many slow learners. And I think it also prevents us from stretching beyond our strengths and actually.
Achieving more than we believe we're capable of.
But so wait, but this is a interesting because I would you know, I associate you your a can you can you give us a little more insight into your eighteen year old self?
You said you had imposter syndrome?
Why I think I didn't.
I didn't have any sense of what it took to be a Harvard student. I remember going to my interview and the interviewer was the first Harvard graduate I ever met, and I just I thought that was a different intellectual league. I didn't know if I was smart enough. I didn't have any patents yet. I did not get a.
Perfect SAT score, But you got in.
Yeah, but I didn't know exactly why or how, and they're just evaluating me from a bunch of pieces of paper, right, which is a pretty It's a pretty poor proxy for somebody's potential.
Yeah, those of us who didn't get into Harvard are always baffled by those who did get into Harvard and profess to have imposter syndrome.
I'm what I'm getting at.
With all these questions about your college heres is to what extent this book strikes me? Each one of your books is steadily a little more personal. Some of the best parts of this book are where you illustrate some of your points with personal stories. And I'm wondering whether, in some sense this book is a personal is a more personal project than your.
Preah it might be.
I think I've gotten more comfortable realizing I've gotten so much. I guess reader feedback and also listener feedback from podcasts like we like hearing your personal stories, Like don't always use the data as.
A crutch, Like they're not a crutch. That's literally what I do. It's how I think.
Like, if you ask me a question about anything, I'll be like, well, what is the best randomized.
Control trial on that? So This is not me avoiding sharing.
It's that I consider systematic evidence to be a better source of knowledge than my idiosyncratic lived experience. But I realized that a lot of people's brains don't work that way, and I think I've come around to the idea that, yes, if I'm sharing my story in service of explaining an idea or revealing a lesson, then that's not about me. That's actually me trying to offer a gift from.
My life to theirs. I think this book is a personal.
Project because I've realized over the course of writing it that all my achievements that I'm actually proud of were things that I started out bad at. Yeah, and I thought most of my life the opposite was true. I thought what I was supposed to be proud of were the things that came naturally to me.
So this is really interesting, and I want to dig into many parts of this, but I want to start with we were talking earlier about a lot the kind of hidden project in many of your books is interrogating our kind of lay notions about psychology that are incorrect.
And I'm curious about this.
So the lay notion this book is, to your just point you just made the lay notion this book is focused on, is we have this kind of veneration of inate ability.
But in fact, what the.
Evidence suggests is that many of the most important accomplishes, accomplishments we have are not about what we start with, but what we acquire along the way. And what I want to know is what I'm curious about is why do we have, in this specific respect, a lay notion that's so clearly at odds with the facts.
Where did it? Why do we Why.
Would we venerate anateability if a natability is not nearly as important as.
Like, what's the reason for that?
It's such an interesting question. Off the top of my head, I think there are a couple of things going on. Number one, how many parents do you know that are living vicariously through their kids?
I mean, your kids are two in less than a.
Year, so sorry started, sorry started.
A lot of people, you know, whether it's you know, wanting their kids to be highly intelligent or accomplished in their careers, or you know, great athletes or incredible musicians. Whatever dreams people have unrealized they often impose on their kids.
And I think saying I.
Didn't have the natural ability is a convenient way to say, you know what, like maybe I didn't waste my potential. I didn't squander an opportunity, which is a lot of cognitive dissonance to live with, to say, maybe I could have been great, and I just I didn't have the right approach to learning, or the right level of discipline or the right coach.
That's that's unsettling to think about.
And so I think just you know, kind of blaming right, a lack of a progress on raw talent. It lets us off the hook a little bit, would be one thought. I think the second thought is that when we see natural talent, we're just blown away by it. You know, if you've ever watched a four year old playing Mozart, you know, it's mind boggling. And that is that that is a human that's cut from a different cloth than me, and so it's it's hard to ever see yourself in that person. I remember, Actually I'll give you a personal example on this, since you invited me to talk more about my share. So this is about to become the Adam Grant Show.
Are you ready? Yes?
All right?
I remember when I so you know, I'm an introvert, I'm shy, I was extremely afraid of public speaking and when I wanted when I decided I wanted to do it, I said, okay, I have to go and learn from great speakers. So the first thing I did was I watched videos of mlks I have a dream speech.
It was completely demoralizing.
I mean, I watched this something I will never no matter how hard I work at this, I will never get that good.
I might as well quit now. And I think that.
I mean, it's just it feels unfathomable. Right when you see that the innate ability differences between you and someone else could be that great, It just seems impo possible for you. And so you assume then that that is what is required.
What you're doing with him, okay, is you're assuming that what you're observing is in innate.
In fact, he's practiced.
He grows up in an oral culture in the He's grows up watching his father and others preach sermons. I mean, he's surrounded in a world that is you know, is speaking in that vein. It's like he's actually not the right person to look at and see evidence.
Of that's exactly right, but we don't know it. You watch someone as good as as Martin Luther King junior. And you think that's got to be a god given gift. There's no way he was ever bad at speaking, right, He's too good, It's impossible. What we don't see is the history you're describing. We admire people at their peak. We don't get to see the distance they've traveled. We don't see the fact that he started entering public speaking competitions when he was fifteen years old, that he had twenty years of deliberate practice under his belt, that the year he gave the Dream speech alone, he gave over three hundred and fifty speech, which is probably as many speeches as you've given in your career, I would imagine. So I think we have unfortunate access to greatness. We see people at their peak, and we assume that they started far ahead of us.
But is this a universal affliction or an American affliction? Because I say, I bring it up because one of my favorite chapters in this book is you have a chapter on talking about the educational system in Finland and how much it differs from the American system and in its sort of assumptions about learning and doesn't sound like the Finns at least, as is expressed in their educational system, hold to a notion of innate ability. And you know, so, what are we dealing with here? Is there something uniquely American about this idea?
There may be to some extent, I think when yeah, when I think about what we do culturally in the US the different from other parts of the world. There is a tendency to make the fundamental attribution era more in the US.
But you should define that.
Yeah, the tendency to attribute people's actions and station to their their innate characteristics as opposed to their situation and affordances and opportunity and circumstances. An idea that you thoroughly decimated in outliers, I will point out, But we still do it a lot in the US, right. We we like we're an individualistic society. What we like to do is we like to say, okay, you you are where you are because of the things that are inside of you.
And I think you're right.
I think in Finland, I think in Estonia, I think we could probably make a whole list of other countries.
There's a stronger sense that every.
Child has hidden potential and it's the job of parents and teachers and coaches to realize it in two senses of the word, one to recognize it and then to develop it.
It seems to be fundamentally parodoxical, and no one's properly explained to me why it would be the case that a culture like the United States, which is the highest achieving you could argue its flies achieving culture in the world on a number of metrics, should have a notion about achievement that is fundamentally wrong.
It just doesn't make any sense.
In fact, if you said to me that America was the one place where people recognize that hard work, that everyone has a lot of potential, and that it's revealed in hard work practiced over your life, and that trying to judge someone on the basis of their performance at twelve is a fool's Errand if someone said that is a distinctly American view, I would have said, that makes sense.
It doesn't make any sense at all that we should have it backwards of all cultures.
I think part of the problem is our country feels too big to invest in everybody, and so what we often do is we say, Okay, well, we're going to create gifting and talented programs, and we're going to build a winner take all system so that the kids with the true promise are going to get to rise to the top. And that allows us to believe in the notion of meritocracy. It allows us to feel like we've earned all the success that we've achieved, as opposed to partially lucking into it.
And so I think there is a function there, right.
It allows us to think that America, like when we talk about the American dream and we say that anybody can live the American.
Dream, this is the land of opportunity.
We are justifying our system, and I think that serves a soothing function for a lot of people.
Another one of my favorite chapters in this book is about perfectionism, and it's sort of your critique of where perfectionism leads us, what it costs us. And you start with a really interesting discussion of your time as a diver in high school.
And how you a perfectionist.
Can you talk a little bit about how your perfectionism manifested itself and how you came to believe it was self defeating?
Yeah, I actually, first I didn't know I was a perfectionist when I started diving, and then at some point it crystallized, and I thought it was a big advantage because in diving, I mean, you've all heard Olympic announcers say perfect tens, and I thought, okay, in a sport that's judged on perfection, aiming for perfection has got to be the way. And it was such a liability for me more than an asset. There are a whole bunch of things that I did that were counterproductive. One was I just wasted a lot of time trying to perfect easy dives as opposed to learning harder ones, which limited my degree of difficulty. I actually got an award one year for my teammates. It was the if only a word, and there was a little drawing of me on a paper plate with a cartoon that said, if only I had pointed my left pinky toe dive, I would have gotten an eight and a half instead of an eight.
And like that's not what mattered.
Like I should have been stretching so I could actually touch my toes without bending my knees. That would have made me a better diver. I think not only did I focus on the wrong things. I ruminated a lot, I beat myself up a lot, and I was constantly shaming my past mistakes as opposed to trying to sort of educate my future self from those lessons, and that was that was not helpful. Probably the worst thing that I did, though, was the bocking where you know, and diving, when you're gonna take off forward, you walk down the board and then jump to the end.
Well, if my hurdle.
If my take off, if my approach wasn't perfect, I would just stop and start over, and stop and start over, and then there's a two bock rule and then I have to get off the board and then I'm not doing dives all practice, because like, what's the point of Yeah.
If you balk, you know?
It was if you stop and start again more than twice, you have to dismount from the well.
That was the rule that my coach, Eric Best had to instant because otherwise I would just bock all practice.
So but what's going on inside your head?
Are you enjoying? Are you enjoying being a diver?
Yeah? I loved it.
I loved it, but I was really frustrated, feeling like I couldn't get it right.
I couldn't get it right. I was really bad.
And then when did you start reflecting on the experience and kind of.
I think this is the reason I asked this question.
Is forgive me, Adam, if I could play doctor Freud for a moment, and if you'd like to recline.
I feel there's a lot more. There's a lot more of your books are a lot more.
Of a personal project than you let on, And this one in particular, I was reading Soon and you have these little moments where you start talking about diving, and I think you know, if I was a psychoanalyst, I would say, Adam, this book is really about you trying to make sense of the mistakes that little Adam made and the experiences that little Adam had.
Is that is that not fair?
I mean, I wouldn't frame that in Freudian terms because I think he set psychology back a century. Of course you would say that, but it's like, I mean, his approach was so unscientific, and if you disagree with him, well you're in denial.
Like I was that helpful to anyone?
Exhibit A who's in denial?
Here? I will say there are some good meta analyses of randomized controlled trials of psychodynamic therapy that show that it can have efficacy for some people in some situations, but I'm still extremely skeptical. Anyway, Uh I will.
You're in a place called Manhattan and you're dissing psychoanalysis. What I don't know, Malcolm an active self. You want people to buy your book afterwards, and this is what you're telling them.
First of all, I think most people here have already bought the book. And I also think there's a point at which you stop blaming your behavior on of your parents, Adam, and start taking responsibility for your adult crisis.
I brought.
I brought this up because I was wondering whether you were doing a version of the same thing, which was at the age of how old do you know now forty two, at the age of forty two, still working out the problems you had as a swimmer as a divery. Oh, don't ever call a diver a swimmer. Yeah no, that's like me calling you a jogger as a runner. I think there's a difference between trying to work out the problems of little Adam, which is how Malcolm Freud would approach this discussion, and trying to figure out if there are lessons from my biggest struggles and also my greatest moments of growth that could become teachable moments for me and others. I'm trying to reflect on the fact that I really was my own worst enemy for a good part of my diving career, but then I ended up ascending to a much greater height than I ever thought possible. I should not have gotten where I got as a diver. I shouldn't have been a like what was I doing in the Junior Olympic Nationals as somebody who literally was called Frankenstein because I didn't bend my knees when I walked? Like something about this does not add up. And so I think that juxtaposing those kinds of moments with what does the social science tell us is really powerful.
But if you had, I guess what I'm trying to say is the work that you've done, the extraordinary work that you've done as an adult, is in some way we're all beneficiaries of some of these struggles you had as a If you had been this kind of non nerdy golden boy who was a kind of diving prodigy and to whom things came easily, we don't get this book definitely not. Yeah, to go back to our earlier point, This is another kind of crucial flaw in the kind of obsession with innate ability and the way in which we celebrate We happen to celebrate those who achieve things early and without a parent effort, and that is that we're not thinking about the downstream consequences. Right, We're not thinking that a lot of what looks like struggle at an early age is simply kind of raw material in preparation for some kind of future better thing.
Right.
Being a struggling as a diver as a freshman is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty small thing, but it's a little kernel that becomes something really interesting. When you're forty and you're interested in writing about hidden potential, right starts to matter.
Then I think you're onto something important here.
And I think I read a book once they called it Desirable Difficulty by you.
Yes, I think that, yeah, this is actually something.
That more used to actually stressed to me that I hadn't appreciated. So you know, Mariast from the book is a chess grandmaster, and I think an extraordinary coach who recognizes and brings out the hidden potential in kids that nobody else thought had a chance. And one of the things Maurice said is he is watched in chess over and over again. The biggest prodigies young are the ones who have the biggest struggles when they're older, because it came too easily to them at first, and they're just they're used to kind of having this this natural success, and all of a sudden they lose the game.
And they can't take it, and they haven't.
I think the fundamental problem there if you look at the researches, they have not built the character skills that are necessary to face obstacles. They don't know how to embrace discomfort. They don't know how to accept the right imperfections and say these mistakes are actually part.
Of my growth.
And so I think that sometimes early success does a major disservice to our future selves.
I reminded a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Orlando, Florida, long story, and I emailed me about that, Adam, there's two surgeons sitting next to me. Of course he's dropping and one of them had a daughter who was at Cornell Medical School, and he was boasting about how she was she loved Cornell.
Cornell's amazing she got into Cornell. Isn't that fantastic? Blah blah blah. And I emailed at him.
I was like, how does this guy get it completely backwards? Why doesn't he boast about his daughter that my daughter's having an amazing time in medical school.
Isn't it amazing that she's.
The kind of person who can go into an institution and find what's meaningful to her and flourish.
And you know, he was.
Focused on Cornell, and he wasn't interested in the character traits his own daughter had that allowed her to flourish and be happy and find meaningful And I was just like, there's something about parents. What you're describing is why are parents so bad at kind of decoding the psychology of their own children?
It just strikes me as like, well, why are we making these mistakes? Then?
Why on earth are we so in love with prodigies? Like I don't again, I mean, I'm just baffled by this.
I Mean, when psychologists study this, they talk about parental over involvement and over identification and the notion that as a parent, like we were touching on this earlier, you start to define your own success by your children's accomplishments. And I just want to sit parents now. I see this all the time with our students at PEN. I want to sit these parents down and say, like, what your children achieve is not a reflection of your greatness as a parent. You should be much more concerned with who your kids become and how they treat other people.
Being a great parent is.
Not about how much precedure kids attain in their school choices or in their jobs.
It's not about career success. It's about character.
I think you might have found someone who had not yet internalized that.
Message you say on this subject of perfectionism, I want you to talk a little bit more about what in gener what precisely is damaging about and having a perfectionistic attitude, and what do you feel we should have instead.
Okay, so if you look at the current work, which I think is the most comprehensive and rigorous to date, what we see goes wrong with perfectionists is one, they lose the forest in the trees, so they tend to focus on small details and overlook the big picture. Two, they do a lot of the rumination and sort of self shaming as opposed to self compassion that's necessary for learning from your mistakes. And three, they actually tend not to stretch themselves much. They want to focus on the things they know they can master, as opposed to venturing into uncharted territory. And by avoiding failure, they actually avoid risk taking, and they avoid learning and challenging themselves, and that means they end up with a static or even ever narrowing comfort zone as opposed to an expanding domain of expertise.
You make the comment of the book that you think perfectionism of the sort you've just defined is on the rise.
Why would it be on the rise?
So empirically perfectionism has risen in the US, in the UK, and the great nation of Canada. I think if you look at why it's increasing, what everybody does is they say social media.
It's got to be social media.
Everybody has a perfect image of themselves on Instagram, and that's leading our kids to have unrealistic expectations.
That may be part of the story. But guess what.
Perfectionism started rising a generation before social media existed. It started rising when Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers. So there's got to be something else going on. And my read of the evidence is there are two things that seem to be contributing to it, and both of them are parental behaviors. One of them is rising parental expectations for kids, holding children to increasingly impossible standards, and two is increasingly harsh criticism kids who don't meet those standards?
Did you so, why would Okay, let's let's take one step further.
Why would parents?
I mean, it seems like an obvious question, but I don't know that I know the kind of good answer.
Why would parents?
Expectations have risen, So we're talking about the nineties, eighties, nineties, what's driving parent rental expectations in that era?
So we don't we don't know.
I think the probably the consensus hunch right now is that the world has gotten more competitive. So, you know, however hard it was to get into college in the eighties, it got a little bit harder in the nineties, and it got increasingly difficult over time. And so in a world that feels more and more zero sum, I think we've we've probably seen a lot of talk about how the current generation of kids is the first in America that might not sort of outdo their parents or have a better standard of living than their parents, And so when you see that world, and you see a world of scarcity, you think, I've got to do whatever it takes to help my kids succeed, forgetting that the very things you're doing to try to help your kids succeed are just turning them into achievement robots who one day realize like, this is no way to live a life and burn out.
How were you? How did your parents? Would you think your parents were guilty of that?
My mom used to tell me, Adam, no matter what grade you get, as long as you do your best, I'll be proud of you. And then she would add, but if you didn't get an A, I'll know you didn't do your best. She said it with a smile. I think she was half kidding, but I took it seriously. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, I guess there's a little I didn't. I didn't get the harsh criticism though, but I definitely felt like expectations were high.
Yeah.
The last chapter of your book, could you talk a little bit about interviews and admissions and college admissions and things? And I had some big and some small questions about that. You have a very interesting part where you talk talk about what the evidence social science evidence tells us about the success and or failure of affirmative action programs. Can you summarize what social science tells us about that?
Yeah, I went in to read the evidence to ask what is the impact of these programs. A lot of people have strong ideological positions on them. I feel like my job as a social scientist is to look at the most careful research that's.
Been done and try to hint the picture of what do we know?
And I think what the evidence suggests is that affirmative action programs are a double edged sword, even for the very people they're trying to help. So on the one hand, they do manage to open doors for people who have historically been denied opportunity by virtue of group membership. On the other hand, if you enter a university or a workplace that is known to have affirmative action, you perform worse if you are a beneficiary of that program than if the program didn't exist. So we see this with women, we see it with racial minority. What happens is and I don't think this will shock anyone. People start to doubt whether they really deserve that spot.
Am I qualified? Do I belong here?
It's a massive version of imposter syndrome, and not the healthy kind. And then other people will question it too, and they're like, well, I don't think you really got in on your own merit, and that self doubt and constantly being doubted by others, that takes a toll. It's exhausting to deal with. It's distracting to constantly question your capabilities day in, day out.
And so you know, I came away.
From this evidence thinking I don't I don't know, I don't know where I stand. I think that we're sort of damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't. But I do think there's an alternative approach that might be helpful to think about.
What two questions about that one is, why isn't that same logical for the white beneficiaries of affirmative action. If I'm a legacy kid gets into Harvard because daddy went to Harvard, why aren't I walking around with a big.
Burden of imposter syndrome?
I do want to hear, because daddy gave seventeen million dollars to does it not work?
Do it? White people exempt?
Can we just pause to acknowledge the fact you just called legacy admission affirmative action for white people.
That's what it is.
I think that's an accurate characterization. I think that not only should legacy admission be banned, I think that if there used to be used by a lot of Ivy League schools as a tiebreaker, and I think it should be a reverse tiebreaker. If you're on equal footing with somebody whose parents didn't go to an elite institution, then you already had an advantage, so the other person should get in.
Yeah.
I think, first of all, a lot of people don't know who the legacies are. I think also there's not the same stigma. Historically, there hasn't been the same stigma associated with legacy admissions, so affirmative action is seen as lowering standards. Yeah, and in most cases it's not right. It's just saying we're gonna look at people who all meet the qualifications and requirements, and then we're going to make sure that those whose groups have been historically disadvantaged.
Get a shot.
But I think in the case of you know, of legacy, there hasn't been that stigma. It's been assumed, oh, you come from a genius family, you belong here.
Yeah, so the problem is really it's not necessarily The problem is inherent in the notion of, in this case, treating a group of disadvantage students differently. It's the narrative we tell around the policy that we don't have the same kind of We have a disparaging narrative around racial affirmative action, but not a disparaging narrative around rich people affirmative action.
Look, we had a Supreme Court ruling that happened as the book went to press, and I think actually one of the ideas that I've flowed in this book is maybe an option now that we ought to take seriously, which is, maybe we should stop defining people by their great membership. Maybe instead of assuming that just because people came from a particular background that they had the same degree of difficulty and the same adversity, we should actually get to know the individual students and find out the obstacles they faced, and then adjust our expectations of them according to how much poverty did they individually face, according to did they did they run into major challenges? And I think that that that seems like a much more fair way to give people who have been disadvantaged or real shot.
Yeah, wait, I want to it's a very I mean, there's much to be said for that idea, and that's a longer conversation, but I want asked. We're running out of time, but I won't have one last thing I want to say. So this is I'm now I'm asking you to give me some advice because I'm working on book right now, and this is very I deal with this very question we're talking about in this book.
Are we talking about the revision of the tipping points?
Yeah, a different book, the revision of the tipping Are we allowed to say that publicly that you're reading the tip.
I'm revising the tipping point?
And so I was thinking of posing the following question, Given what you're saying, what advice would you give to a bright, ambitious African American student who's interested in stan wants to be a doctor or engineer or scientist some kind, who has two admissions offers, one from an iv ATIG school and one from an HBCU. So one where he goes or she goes with the stigma of affirmative action on one where she goes without the stigma, what would you tell that student?
If that's a fascinating question, I'm not sure I'm qualified to advise on it, is my first reaction.
My second is what.
A book called Hidden Potential.
Yeah, but I'm trying to look at what works for most of the people most of the time, not necessarily assume that I know the path that's going to be most effective for a complete stranger.
I'd want to see.
I'd want to see much better data about what are the life trajectories of you know of students with similar profiles who both have the same set of opportunities and then end up for a variety of reasons, and you know in one or the other. I guess the first thing I would want to do, though, is I'd want to know what are your goals?
Like?
Are you trying to maximize your status or objective career success? Are you trying to you know, to to lead a life you can be proud of. Are you pursuing happiness or meaning?
Like?
I think there are lots of different outcomes, and I think the big mistake that I see I've I've had a lot of students come by office hours with these kinds of dilemmas over the years, often their grad school dilemmas or their job dilemmas, But sometimes it's high schooler is trying to choose a college, and the main advice that I find myself giving them is is to say, you don't want to just define your your success by achieving your goals. You should think about success is living your values. If you have a career target that you hit, but it requires you to compromise your principles, that's not success, that's failure, and it's the worst kind of failure because you've abandoned what matters most to you. So why don't we talk about what your values are? Is one of your core principles to break a bunch of grap excuse me, to break glass ceilings? Do you want to prove to people that other people can follow in your footsteps? Karen Nelton is here. Karen did some brilliant work on being a trailblazer? Is one of your core priorities in life? To open a door and clear path for other people? If so, you can ask, do I want to do this by starting out in an IVY League school or do I want to go to an environment where I might be more supported and maybe it's easier to blaze a trail later?
I don't know.
I can't predict the future.
That's the kind of conversation I'd want to have, and it wouldn't end with advice. It would it would end with me asking what have you learned through this conversation about your values and which path do you think is going to help you avoid straying from them?
Adams, it's a beautiful answer to the question. You started by saying you didn't think you could answer the question. Then you gave me a beautiful answer to the question.
That's because I didn't answer the question. No, no, no.
But it goes to and this is actually, I think a lovely moment to kind of sum up we are if when I read this book. When I read this book, the first and overwhelming thought I had was we really are at we really are asking the wrong questions about something like potential. We're just like our premises are all wrong, right, That's what you're getting at here? In one one chapter after another, you're just saying, wait a minute, we're starting with this perspective, and it's just like, we're why what do we you know?
It's that that kind of need to.
Go back to to fundamentals and react ask some really basic questions, is what this, what is so?
What is really wonderful about this book? And please go and buy Adam's book.
Thank you all.
This bonus episode of Revisionist History was produced by Nina Lawrence and Jacob Smith.
It was mastered by Ben Cheno. Special thanks to Daniella Bellarazo, Paul Durban, and Constanza Gallardo.
