We're wrong about what makes us happy with Dan Gilbert (transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Dan Gilbert: When I think about the things I value in the world, if you take them away from me, I will be utterly devastated forever. The devastated part is right. The forever part is wrong. 

Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective.

I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Dan Gilbert. He's a Harvard psychologist and the bestselling author of Stumbling On Happiness. He's given three popular TED Talks and hosted the award-winning PBS show This Emotional Life.

His research suggests that we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy. 

Dan Gilbert: The best data suggests that, um, as my father would've said, happiness increases when the kids leave home and the dog dies. 

Adam Grant: So how do we get better at finding happiness? I wanted to ask Dan what he has discovered.

I have to ask you, because I've never asked you about this before. Are you the only Harvard professor who dropped out of high school? 

Dan Gilbert: You know, it's funny, when I first came to Harvard, 1996, the Harvard Gazette always runs a little puff piece on new professors, and my lack of a high school diploma came up and I said to the journalist, I guess I'm probably the only professor at Harvard without a high school diploma.

I promptly received emails from several other professors at Harvard who did not have high school diplomas, some of whom became good friends, one of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. So no my friend, there are more people without high school diplomas at Harvard than at the post office where you really have to have one.

Adam Grant: Wow. I had no idea. So tell me the backstory. How did you end up dropping out of high school? 

Dan Gilbert: It's not really complicated. Like if you don't go, they look for you and eventually if they can't find you, they give up. My father was a professor, molecular biologist. My mother was an artist. And this is the early seventies, which you know, is really still the 1960s.

And so I started reading Eastern philosophy and decided that my teachers in high school didn't know anything that I wanted to know. And so I just decided I would stop going. And I started hitchhiking around the country and playing music and meeting other people and just, you know, I began a life that wasn't the life that my parents were hoping for.

Adam Grant: Clearly. 

Dan Gilbert: Yeah, going to high school is hard. Dropping out really is very easy. 

Adam Grant: How long did the dropout last before you decided you wanted to reenter formal education? 

Dan Gilbert: It was a couple of years, and in that interim I got married, I had a child, I became a science fiction writer and started writing and selling my stories and publishing.

And one day I went down to a local community college 'cause they had advertised that there was a writer's workshop that you could join and I thought that would be a great thing. And when I got there, the woman at the desk said, "No, I'm sorry it's closed, it's full already." But it had been a long bus ride. I said, well, what else is open? And she looked on the list and luckily for me, Introduction to Psychology was not popular. It still had a spot. So I said, "Oh, that might be fun. Sign me up for this course." And the dominoes all fell from there. I fell in love with what I was learning and very shortly thereafter found out I could go to a real university if I just took a test called the GED, and I did and made the transition from writing fiction to writing nonfiction, which actually isn't nearly as big a jump as most people think.

Adam Grant: Not if you write like Dan Gilbert. 

Dan Gilbert: That's kind of you to say. Thanks. 

Adam Grant: So tell me, now that you're a psychologist, are you happier than you were writing sci-fi? 

Dan Gilbert: I think I loved writing science fiction when I was writing it, and then I loved writing science when I was doing that. If the question were now looking back, would I rather be doing that than this?

The answer is clearly no. For many reasons. One of which is I don't think I had a particular talent for writing fiction. 

Adam Grant: I think most people inside our field and probably outside it too, know you best for your work on affective forecasting and, and all the mistakes we make when we try to predict what's gonna make us happy or feel good in the future.

When did you get interested in the fundamental questions of happiness? 

Dan Gilbert: Like almost everything in my life, it's just a dumb accident. I just stumbled on it. 

Adam Grant: Were you drunk? 

Dan Gilbert: Uh, I have never needed drugs in order to stumble. I have a natural propensity for turning the wrong way and walking into doors and falling through windows.

In 1992, I went out for lunch with a friend of mine. I wasn't studying anything vaguely related to affective forecasting or happiness or decision making. I studied how people made judgements about each other, like my mentor had in graduate school. I hadn't seen this friend in a year, and he said, how are things going?

And I said, how are things going with you? He said, actually, things have been going terribly. My uncle died, my girlfriend and I broke up. I've had my papers rejected. And I went, wow, how are you doing? He said, actually, I'm doing pretty well. How about you, Dan? Well, it turned out I had the same story. It had been a terrible year for me. All sorts of bad things had happened. I was getting a divorce. My son had dropped out of high school. And I was actually doing okay. And my friend looked at me and he said, "Do you think we could have ever predicted that when all these things happened to us, we would still be fine?" And I realized that for me, the answer was no.

So I ran back to my office after that lunch, I typed up notes on the conversation, which is how I know I'm not inventing this story to tell you. I still have the piece of paper.

Adam Grant: Wow. 

Dan Gilbert: And I wrote the question, do people know what will make them happy, how happy it will make them, and how long that happiness will last?

I thought surely psychologists have a good answer to this. It's a fundamentally important question. I couldn't find a good answer, so I called my friend and collaborator, Tim Wilson. I said, Hey, maybe we ought to do a study on this. Fast forward 30 years, we published, I don't know, 75 papers with hundreds of studies on this topic.

All because of one stupid lunch with bad Chinese food. 

Adam Grant: It's a great case for, for going to lunch. There's so many demonstrations of these affective forecasting failures. If you were to choose your top three, what are your favorites? 

Dan Gilbert: Certainly one of the mistakes that's caught my attention the most is our inability to imagine adaptation. My friend Danny Kahneman used to say, when you ask somebody how they would feel if they were blind, they imagine going blind. But the day you lose your eyesight, probably a very, very bad day. But it's not like all the hundreds and thousands of days that will follow, because human beings are remarkably adaptive.

They adapt to almost any new situation. And yet when we look forward, if I say, how would you feel if you lost your children, if you lost your legs, if you lost your eyesight, if you lost your wife, if you, what you imagine is a calamity. And you are right to imagine it, that is what's going to happen at first.

But if you are like most people, the data say, you're going to get used to it. And most people who go through traumatic events, even the most traumatic events, adapt, come back to their baseline of happiness. Now, to me, that was mind blowing. And so Tim and I did quite a few studies trying to understand why and when this happens and with what effect.

So that would probably be my number one nomination for an affective forecasting error, believing that if you get knocked down, you will not get up again. You almost surely will. 

Adam Grant: How do you square that body of evidence with some of the research, I'm thinking about Diener and Lucas for example, suggesting that when people lose a job or they get divorced, they sometimes end up on worse trajectories of wellbeing than they were beforehand.

Dan Gilbert: Well, there's no doubt that these things are bad. Anybody who hears me saying, "Cancer's wonderful! It's really what you want!" That's not the message here at all. These things do have impacts. It's just that their impacts are not on average as long lasting as people imagine. Now, once again, I didn't say the impacts are not long lasting.

They're just not as long lasting as people imagine. So if a person is a seven in happiness, and you say, how happy would you be five years after you lost your job? And they go, I'd be a three. And we track them and we find out they're really a six. What have we learned? We learned that losing your job is bad, that it has long-term effects. You went down a point in happiness, but it's still not nearly as bad as you thought. Because six isn't three. Hope that clarifies the claim is a little more nuanced and therefore more likely to be right than something ridiculous like "bad things don't matter." Of course they matter. They just don't matter as much or for as long as we think they will.

Adam Grant: Well put. Okay, the next question is, why do we make these mistakes? You spend a lot of time unpacking this set of errors. I think about impact bias. I think about immune neglect. I think about a bunch of different psychological factors that are, are interrelated that explain why we struggle to estimate the duration of the malaise that, that follows bad experiences.

So what's your current understanding of why we're so bad at this? 

Dan Gilbert: Our ability to think about the future is a very new ability evolutionarily speaking. We know what parts of the brain enable us to do this, enable us to do this in a way that no other animal can, and we know that these parts are rather new in evolutionary time.

So in a sense, this ability to look forward, which psychologists call prospection, is still in beta testing. We shouldn't be too surprised that there's bugs in the system. One of the bugs is that when we look forward into the future, we see snapshots. We don't see movies. On your next birthday, you get a surprise party. What do you see? You see yourself in the room and everyone's yelling surprise, but you don't see a movie playing out where first everybody yells surprise, and then you say, I'm happy to be here. And then you cut a cake and about two hours later you're going, when are these people gonna go home? Right? So imagination is not able to simulate changes over time very easily. What imagination isn't able to do is simulate time as it flows from that moment forward. It is one of the limits of imagination. So I guess the answer is, it's a new ability. What do you expect? I mean, you can do more than any other animal when you look forward in time.

Why are you complaining that you can't do everything? 

Adam Grant: Why do we fail to learn? All it should take is just one or two of these mistakes before we start to realize, hey, I'm more adaptable than I thought. I know that I'm not gonna be that bothered next month or next year, so why am I wasting my energy on it now?

Why is this so rare? 

Dan Gilbert: Some people do learn the lesson you're talking about, but most of us don't. When you get divorced and you find six months later, you're actually doing fine, you could learn one of two lessons. One is wow, I am more adaptable in the face of adversity than I ever realized. I have inner resources and the ability to see things in new ways. Nothing will get me down from here on. I'm confident. Okay. That's what we would call the domain general lesson. The domain specific lesson you might learn is , Melissa was never right for me, and I'm really glad to be rid of her. It turns out people learn from their errors. They just learn very domain specific lessons.

They learn that this particular thing doesn't knock you down forever and that they were wrong about that. What they don't learn is the bigger lesson that I just articulated. So do we learn from errors? Yes. We just don't learn quite enough. 

Adam Grant: That's very much where, where my mind was going. I was thinking about the longstanding finding that we struggle at analogical reasoning, and wondering if, if people would learn the lesson of the moment as opposed to the lesson of the lifetime.

I think what that suggests then is that those of us who are abstract thinkers ought to be better at learning the more general lesson. Is that true? Do we have any data on that? 

Dan Gilbert: We don't have data on it. My intuition is with yours. My first hypothesis, being old, is that old people know. And the reason they know is they've learned the domain specific lesson over and over.

The divorce wasn't as bad. This wasn't as bad. Losing my thumb wasn't as bad. And at the, near the end of a lifetime, you start going, you know, none of these things were so bad. I think it might be that nothing's as bad as it seems to be when you're contemplating it. So I do think that we may extract the lesson after long experience. I don't have data on it. You know, except N of 1. 

Adam Grant: If that's true though, it might shed light on why there's often a happiness bump in older age. 

Dan Gilbert: I think there's no doubt about that. I mean, we know from Laura Carstensen's work that people begin to experience not more positive emotion, but less negative emotion, and so the ratio of the two is changed in the balance of happiness. But I do think older people are more likely to realize that nothing's gonna get the best of them at this point. That they've pretty much survived all the situations that they've been in. And that's probably gonna be true going forward. 

Adam Grant: Okay, so contrast this now with a paper of yours that fascinated me when I first read it and has kind of annoyed me ever since, which is your paper on the peculiar longevity of things not so bad. 

Dan Gilbert: Well, the basic insight of this paper is that when bad things happen, we rise to the occasion to overcome them. Your spouse leaves you. You can't just ignore it. You've gotta do something. And what most people do is weep and sob, and cry and curse, but then they find a new way to see the event, to see themselves, to think about their lives, and they feel better again. That kind of work that we do to get to that point, if you're making fun of it, you call it rationalization. If you're teaching people to do it, you call it coping. But it's all the same work, but it is work. Now, this will happen when your spouse leaves you, but what about if your spouse just leaves dirty dishes in the sink? Well, this isn't enough of a threat to your wellbeing and self-esteem to marshal all the resources it takes and do the work to reframe it and think about it differently. Instead, you're just annoyed. So the insight of this paper and the experiments it describes is that sometimes little things kind of slip under the radar. They don't bother us enough for us to do something about them, and therefore they can bother us longer. It doesn't seem like the world should be that way. It feels like our reaction to things should be perfectly calibrated to their magnitude. When my friend Adam does something little to bother me, I should be a little bothered for a little time. When he does something big to bother me, I should be bothered a lot for a long time. But what we show in this paper is that in fact, under certain circumstances, the little thing bothers you more for longer. And that just doesn't seem right, and in a way it is a little bit perverse.

Adam Grant: That's exactly what bothers me about it. I feel like I am a meta victim of the peculiar longevity of things not so bad because now that I have a name for it, every time I see somebody sweating the small stuff or complaining that someone moved their cheese, or pick your favorite description of this phenomenon, oh, but they, they haven't read this paper and how could they get bothered by this? And now I am, I'm getting sucked into the very trap that I'm describing. 

Dan Gilbert: I am of course, making it sound as if it's about household annoyances. I mean, there are some profound things that happen in our lives that this explains. For example, if you do something to insult me, we've been friends a long time and it's gonna really hurt. But because it hurts a lot, I'm gonna find a way to get over it.

But if you insult my collaborator, Tim Wilson? It doesn't hurt me nearly as much as if you insulted me. And in fact, it might not hurt me enough to ever do the work to get beyond it, and therefore I bear a little bit of a grudge against you for the rest of your life 'cause you said something bad about my friend Tim.

And indeed in this paper you're talking about, we show in experiments that people are quicker to get over some kind of insult to themselves than an insult to a stranger next door. And we think it's for exactly this reason. 

Adam Grant: Okay, so putting these two topics together, things not so bad sort of sticking with you and, and getting under your skin, and things much worse, getting over them. I have a question for you about something I've never voiced before. I was told by a, a friend and colleague recently that I live in the future most of the time, and that's one of the reasons I'm not normally that phased by things that happen in the present or that happened in the past. But I've noticed an exception to that, which is I really struggle with sort of moderate regrets.

I know a lot of people, and you probably know more, who struggle with the fear of missing out. I don't feel FOMO. I'm very content with what's been called JOMO, the joy of missing out. What I do have a hard time with is ROMO, the regret of having missed out. And when I think back to college, there are two relationships that I know I missed out on because I have them now, but I didn't then. One of them is my good friend Tim Urban, who I overlapped with in college for three years, but didn't meet until 15 years later. And it bothers me because we could have had 15 years of a great friendship that we missed out on, just not knowing that each other existed. The other one is you. I think you were the only psychology professor I didn't meet in undergrad.

I was on your floor all the time. And I don't even think I crossed paths with you. And this bothers me because, you know, obviously I, I had been learning a lot from you from afar, but the interactions we've had have enriched my life in lots of ways. Can you help me with all your expertise? Explain, first of all, why this regret of having missed out bothers me, because I know better. I know, well, I should just focus on the fact that I'm grateful that I now have a relationship with Dan, and I now have a relationship with Tim, but it still eats at me. So why? And then, how do I get over it? 

Dan Gilbert: So your confidence that if you could just go back and change something, time would've gone forward in a better way, I think is horribly misplaced. According to every science fiction writer in the last a hundred years, it all happened the way it happened. It's not clear that it would've been better if it had happened differently, despite your imagination telling you how much better it would've been. 

Adam Grant: So you're basically doubling down on adjusting my counterfactuals.

Dan Gilbert: "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, by the white chickens," said William Carlos Williams. And he was telling us that the entire universe depends on that wheelbarrow, and if you change it, you may change everything. So just realize that that is inarguably true and get on with your life, for God's sake.

Adam Grant: I like it. I'm telling my students when, they come to me with dilemmas about should I study abroad, I regret not having studied abroad, but I wouldn't go back and undo it because I'm thrilled with the way things have turned out, and I know that changing that variable could be a butterfly effect. 

Dan Gilbert: Exactly.

Adam Grant: So I just, I just need to apply that here to people the same way I do with choices. 

Dan Gilbert: I'm not trying to be panglossian and suggest we are living in the best of all possible worlds. What I'm suggesting is we have no idea and we can't ever know. Could be the best of all worlds, the worst of all worlds. Could be an average of all worlds.

Who knows? What you can't be sure of is that any change you make would've made this world any better. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how things might have been different, I mean, we all should spend a little time on that. That's called learning lessons from your experience. But maybe the key word here is little.

There's a lot to be said for being here now. All the time you're spending thinking about the past is all time that you are in the present, not being in the present. 

Adam Grant: It's true, and I think that that pang of regret has definitely in some cases led me to reach out knowing that there's probably the next Tim or the next Dan in my orbit.

Dan Gilbert: That's exactly right. 

Adam Grant: Not to suggest that you're replaceable, either of you.

Dan Gilbert: Utterly.

Adam Grant: Let's go to a lightning round. One sentence or one word reaction. 

Dan Gilbert: Oh my God, you're telling a professor to answer in one sentence? 

Adam Grant: I have faith in you. 

Dan Gilbert: Doesn't the Geneva Convention prohibit this? Okay, go ahead. 

Adam Grant: What's the worst career advice you've ever gotten? 

Dan Gilbert: Follow your heart. 

Adam Grant: Why is that bad advice? 

Dan Gilbert: Because a successful career is the intersection of your passion and your talent. If I had followed my heart, I'd be a very bad guitar player right now. I mean, no, be realistic. Satisfaction's gonna come from doing something really well that you love, and it might be the fifth thing on your love list is what you're actually good at.

Adam Grant: How about the best life advice? 

Dan Gilbert: My father was a professor, and when I became a professor, he was a scientist, molecular biologist. He said to me, you will think for your entire career that your research, it matters most. And then you will get old and realize it was the students. And I think there's deeper advice in there, which is you may think all the things you're up to in your life are what matter most, but in the end it was the people you touched and connected with.

My dad gave me very sage advice. I had to get very old before I really heard it. 

Adam Grant: It makes me think about Vonnegut and Player Piano and the line that if it weren't for the people, the damn people, the world would be an engineer's paradise. 

Dan Gilbert: I'd forgotten that. That's beautiful. 

Adam Grant: Those engineers clearly missed this lesson.

All right. What's something you've rethought lately? 

Dan Gilbert: I've been rethinking for the last couple of years the model of scientific publishing in the world. I used to participate in it and now I see it as an obscenity that needs to be destroyed, brought down. An empire that needs to lay in ruins. So having gone from, boy, I hope I can find a publisher to, let's kill them all? I would say that's a rethinking. 

Adam Grant: Big time. And can you give us a taste of your vision for how it might work differently? 

Dan Gilbert: Well, sure. I mean, if we were out of the lightning round and wanting to just chat again, I can say that my latest project, as you know, has been to produce a major reference work in our field, social psychology, that's free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. You know, for four centuries, publishers have been selling science to those who could afford it, and for most of that time, they deserved their profits because they were doing something we couldn't do ourselves. They were printing our ideas and words on paper and distributing them out throughout the land.

We don't need them anymore. Right? Modern science needs publishers like modern music needs AM radio. It doesn't whatsoever. The only reason that AM radio went away and publishers haven't is they're a multi-billion dollar business that does not want to go gently into that good night. But everyone listening should know, you are taxpayers, you are paying for scientific research to be done, and then you can't even read about it without paying. Why? Why can't you read about the research that you funded? Answer? It's owned by scientific publishers. I just think the world would be better if everybody had access to the information that science offers, but it's being held hostage by people who are making money.

Adam Grant: I'm in full agreement with you on this, Dan, and the solution that publishers are trying right now is offensive. I think the most recent article I had accepted, there's a little box I could check right before we finalize the publication saying, if you want this to be open access, please pay $3,500. 

Dan Gilbert: Well, you got away for 3,500, but I published a two page article in nature and it was $11,000. $11,000 to make it free. But there's a very easy way to get around it. We just publish without them. And that's what we're doing now with the Handbook of Social Psychology. It's just a demonstration project that it can be done. By the way, we're talking about scientific publishing. Everything I'm saying is not true of Barbara Kingsolver and her publisher or the publishers who publish your books, Adam. They are doing an important service for you and they deserve to be paid. They're finding audiences, they're sending pay, but scientists don't need any of that. 

Adam Grant: Nope. You've had a lot of time to reflect on Stumbling On Happiness. Is there something you've changed your mind about since you published it?

Dan Gilbert: Thankfully, I don't know of anything in it that requires revision, but many things could certainly use addition. 

Adam Grant: What would be your biggest expansion? 

Dan Gilbert: Well, I think we knew very little about how to solve the problems that Stumbling On Happiness identifies. Stumbling On Happiness basically is an indictment of your imagination. It says you're gonna try to close your eyes and think about the future, and you're gonna be prone to a bunch of errors. I'll spend my whole book telling you what they are and why they matter. And the very end, it says, is there anything we can do about it? And I think we now know the answer and it's a paradoxical answer. The answer is yes. There's actually a pretty good way to make predictions about what will make you happy. And the paradox is people don't like this method at all. It's a method that we call surrogation, and it just means using other people as surrogates. If I wanna know how happy I'm going to be if I go to law school, what I really ought to do, the best data I can get, is to find out how happy people who went to law school are. I mean, a lot of 'em would be good, but even some of them would probably be better than my own imagination. But we've shown in experiments that when you give people this opportunity, they just shake their heads and go, well, what do you mean? Those people aren't me. Knowing people are remarkably similar in what makes them happy and unhappy, right? Nobody says I'd rather be hit by a two by a four than have a weekend in Paris. Nobody would rather eat cardboard than chocolate. We're very similar in our hedonic reactions to things. So other people's reactions to, to events you're only imagining are a very good guide to your own reaction. 

Adam Grant: I'm gonna have to fight you a little bit on this, Dan. 

Dan Gilbert: Sure. 

Adam Grant: Because it, it wanders into the realm of organizational psychology, and I'm thinking about, you know, now over half a century of evidence that vocational interests differ significantly between people and that the kind of work that would make me happy might make you miserable.

Particularly if I as a, an introverted, agreeable, highly conscientious person happen to love a little bit of teaching and a lot of thinking and writing, and you have the opposite traits, and that job sounds like a death sentence for you. So at minimum, shouldn't you go out and find people with similar interests and tastes to yours?

Dan Gilbert: Well, that would be preferable, but my contention is even a randomly selected other person will be better than your own imagination. Remember, I never said that other people's experiences are a perfect guide to your own. I just said they're better than the alternative. Right? Winston Churchill's wonderful line that democracy's the worst form of government except for the others? Well, surrogation is a terrible way to predict your future. Except for the other way, which is to use your own imagination. So we showed in a series of experiments, for example, that people could improve the accuracy of their affective forecasts by listening to one randomly selected stranger. On average. Imagine how much you could improve if they weren't randomly selected, they were selected to be like you in many important ways, and if it was more than one stranger, it was 10 or 12 people. 

Adam Grant: I think that that also suggests that the questions you ask really matter. So I might not go to that stranger and ask, "How happy you are you in this work?" I might be more inclined to ask, tell me the highlights and the low lights, and then see how those map onto what I'm looking for. 

Dan Gilbert: Yes, you really identified one of the rubs here, which is, okay, I'm convinced by this Gilbert and Wilson Paper that says I should use other people's past experience as a guide to my future experience. How can I find out about their past experience? And unfortunately, you often have to ask them. And really unfortunately, they often can't tell you accurately. So how about parenthood? You're thinking, I'm trying to decide if I should have children. I, I don't know if they would make me happy. And so you go to some parents and you go, do children make you happy?

And parents will say, oh, of course they do. They're the best thing about life. They make me happier than anything else. We know from tons of data that those parents are wrong, that children in fact have a small but negative impact on the happiness of their parents, but their parents don't know it. So simply asking them that question, do your children make you happy? Is the wrong way to find out if their children make them happy. What's the right way? The way that economists and psychologists do it, which is just to go up to people with children and go, hi. How happy are you right now? Don't ask them why you're asking. Just how happy are you right now? If you do that, if you go up to a thousand people with and without children, I assure you the average response you get from the non-parents will be either equal to or slightly higher than the average response you get from the parents, and those data tell you something about parenthood and happiness. There may be many reasons to have children, but making yourself more happy in the moment is not one of them. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. Which I, I think also tracks with the, the evidence on spikes in happiness when people become empty nesters. 

Dan Gilbert: Say more. 

Adam Grant: Well, I'm just, I'm just thinking about if kids make you happy, then kids leaving your house permanently should be a source of misery.

 I mean, I feel sad when I think about our kids leaving. In fact, I've already started to tell our, our oldest teenager, like, that I'm disappointed in her preemptively for choosing to leave. But I, I also know from the research that when the last child leaves the house, on average, parents get happier, don't they?

Dan Gilbert: Yeah. The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling. I mean, as far as we can tell. You still will have those children. You will still be their dad, and they will continue to give you joy and maybe even a greater ratio of joy to worry once they're living their lives as successful adults than they do when they're kids who are whining, you know, are we there yet? How come she got more? So it's not exactly a fair comparison, but you're exactly right. 

Adam Grant: What's the question you have for me? 

Dan Gilbert: Do you ever worry that with all of your outward facing activities, all the public exposure from podcast, television, et cetera, that you could be in danger of losing some part of yourself that I assume for you is very valuable and very important? And it's that part of you that is a scientist. That sits and carefully goes through data and does work and discovers new facts. I ask this only because I've had some experience doing outward facing things, and as I did those things, I often had to remind myself how to remain me and not become a chameleon that was responding to applause. It's very hard. It's a very addictive thing. 

Adam Grant: It's an extremely important question, and I think I worried about it a lot in the first few years of this public facing role, and now I, i, I reflect on it a lot, but it doesn't come with anxiety like it used to.

It felt like I was going through a portal and I didn't know what was on the other side. Am I still gonna be able to get back if I want? Was the thing that I worried about. I guess I've been doing this for a dozen years now. What I've discovered is what gives me the most joy is teaching and research, and the writing and speaking is an extension of that.

So without the time in the classroom, without the, the deep immersion and data, I wouldn't have anything to say. And so I'm constantly going back to that well, both to serve the, the external facing work that I do, but more importantly to, to feed what energizes me. And I've repeated that pattern enough that it's clearly my revealed preference. It makes my day when someone tells me to stop stringing citations in my random sentences in a keynote or in a, in an interview, or even in a podcast for that matter, because it's just so my impulse, it's the way I think, it's the way I love to learn. 

Dan Gilbert: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: And so I, I think I've, I've grown comfortable with the fact that it's just, it's too wired into me to ever lose sight of it.

Dan Gilbert: We both know as scientists and researchers and university professors that the kind of outward facing things we've done raise eyebrows among many colleagues. It's just their impression was once you're on television and you're on camera and you're doing these sorts of things, you can't possibly be a serious scientist anymore.

You're saying that's not true, and I know you're right. Do you worry about the fact that in the academy, the perception is often you can't do both of these things? 

Adam Grant: A lot of our colleagues who do brilliant research are now entering the public domain, and I've watched a lot of people who 10 years ago might have looked down their nose on us as sellouts writing books and giving TED talks and taking their work and, and sharing it. And so I, I think the norms in our field have changed a little bit. 

Dan Gilbert: It's really a generational shift. People my age still arch an eyebrow. It's like, you did a PBS show? But people your age just say, oh, well, they say, what's PBS? But you did a TV show. Marvelous. Can I do one too? That would be fun.

And I do, you know, I, I think your answer is right. I see all of these as an extension of teaching. I always loved teaching. And in 2004, this little conference called TED said, would you like to come give a talk? We're thinking maybe we'll videotape them and put them on the internet. To which I think I responded, how do you put videos on the internet?

And they said, oh, we think it's coming. So what I learned when that went on the internet and lots and lots of people watched it, was that the world is my classroom and I could give psychology away to a much, much bigger audience. So that's how I see all of these efforts. And probably like you, I turn down lots of opportunities to do things that might kind of fun and sexy, but don't feel like they're true to the mission of giving science away to the world.

Adam Grant: Dan, before I let you go, I have to ask, you've done research on ending conversations. 

Dan Gilbert: Yes. 

Adam Grant: How do I wrap this thing up? What do most of us do wrong in light of your data? 

Dan Gilbert: Well, most conversations don't have a natural termination point, and the people in them usually like each other, and they don't wanna offend the other person by saying, I'm now tired of talking with you.

And so in our research, what we found is conversations actually go on oftentimes much longer than either of the people in them wants them to. And when I say that, everybody shakes their head and they remember those conversations. But what we also found is because we can't be honest with each other about when we want to end, many conversations end long before either person wants them to, they go on too short. Saving grace? It doesn't seem to matter that much to people's happiness. Conversations go on too long. They end a little too early. What we find is everybody leaves them pretty much happier than they were before. 

Adam Grant: Well, then I'm gonna resist the temptation to ask you how we can get in sync on that. 

Dan Gilbert: Not necessary. Better that we should all go away with the illusion that our conversation lasted exactly the right amount of time, if not for us, than for the other person we were talking to.

Adam Grant: Well, I think on that note, it's been too short for me, but I'll assume that it was the right length for you. 

Dan Gilbert: Too short for me as well. Let's do it again.

Adam Grant: My main takeaway from Dan is that the impact of negative events rarely last as long as we expect. The changes in our lives matter, but how we adapt matters more.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

I am glad to be the less bald guest for once. 

Dan Gilbert: There are degrees of being bald. Isn't that like degrees of pregnancy? I mean, there's how many months we've been bald and I could beat you on that, but I do think it means the total lack of hair, so. 

Adam Grant: Bravo, Dan. You've already made me think again. Redefining baldness. It's binary. 

Dan Gilbert: Yeah, let's, we, you could sell that show, believe me. 

Adam Grant: I guess there's a big audience for that one. Uh, maybe not a diverse one.