You're Doing Relationships Wrong | Adam Grant

Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10 Percent Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're going to debunk some myths about how to manage your relationships at home and at work. Here are some myths. Never go to bed angry. Agreeing to disagree is the right way to resolve conflict. It takes a long time to develop a close relationship. If you want to have good teamwork, you should all be in the office together. And this is the one that really got me. In order to have good teamwork, you need to like your colleagues. My guest today is Adam Grant, who's a professor at the Wharton School. He's written many, many, many bestselling books. His latest book, sure to be a bestseller, is called Vibe, The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. Adam Grant, welcome back to the show. I think this is your sixth time on the show. It's always a pleasure to be here, Dan, but I'm especially looking forward to this one because I feel like we built a connection through podcast conversations, more or less. So this is a little meta to be here to talk about connections. You're absolutely right. I think we've met in person like a grand total of three or four times. You say this book, which again is called Vibe, you say it's your most personal yet. What do you mean by that? I think writing about this topic, it forced me to be more vulnerable than I've been before. And frankly, one of the voices in my head while I was writing this book was yours. Which is, you gave me some very direct and helpful feedback that I'm pretty comfortable talking about my past struggles and mistakes, but I'm overly guarded when talking about my current challenges and sometimes that puts distance between me and other people. I don't want to be someone who puts distance between me and other people. And, you know, I took this topic on because we're in, I think, a lonely, divided world. A lot of us are experiencing that. And in the age of AI, human connection is more important than ever before. And yet a lot of us are struggling at it. And I started thinking about my struggles with it and yeah, it was sort of, it smacked me right in the face that I had a really hard time making and keeping friends as a kid, as a very shy, nerdy introvert. Now I'm in this incredibly fortunate position where people didn't want to talk to me when I was a kid. And now they show up to listen to me, talk to other people. And sometimes that goes really well. And other times it's a train wreck. And I care a lot about having effective interactions and meaningful relationships, and it's something I've been working on my whole life. And every time I think I figured it out, I stumble again. And so I think this, it's just a topic that's, you know, it's complicated. It's messy, but there was no way to write about it other than to say, yeah, and here's how I've fallen flat and continue to do that every day, even as somebody who professes to have some expertise on it. I mean, I think you're making the right decision. Personally. Um, I obviously, um, lean on vulnerability myself, but I do think deployed correctly and we'll talk about, uh, it's, uh, uses and misuses at some point in this conversation, but deployed correctly, it can be really, really powerful. I, I mean, as we've discussed, I'm, you know, we've haven't spent unlimited amounts of time together. I think the first time we met was in 2018, when I came to Wharton to do, uh, to shoot a story with you to interview you. And, um, I've found you charming and engaging right from the jump. Are you saying that before that you actually, or as a younger man or a child, you, you weren't that way and you really, you had, by the time I met you, learn some new skills. I think so. I hope so. I think where, where you saw me was probably a big driver of whether you found me charming or not as a kid. I think when playing sports or trading baseball cards, I got along fine with my friends in school. I think I was like, I was a little annoying and some of that spilled over into like, into actually baseball card trading. Like my friends called me Mr. Facts and that was not a compliment. Like we, we would organize our own fantasy football and basketball leagues and, you know, keep track of the statistics by hand. And like, I was always jumping in and correcting people and wanting to be right, even when, you know, when I wasn't. And I think that was off-putting and I got a lot of feedback that I needed to think about whether I wanted to be liked and respected, not just whether I wanted to have the answers. And I think that, yeah, that was something I had to unlearn. As you came into the book, what would you have described as your biggest relational challenges and then what changed and where did it leave you? I think coming into the book, I don't think this actually crystallized until I finished a draft of it, but my biggest challenge was just ruminating constantly about, did I say the wrong thing? Did I do the wrong thing? Uh, did I, was I, was I too eager to connect? Was I too stoic and aloof? Like what's, what's the right balance? And I think one of the effects of writing Vibe on me was I'm much more accepting now of the fact that social interaction is supposed to be complicated. It's like, it's part of the messiness and sometimes delight of being human. And I'm not afraid of, of awkwardness anymore. Like I used to be. I used to come out of interactions and think, oh my gosh, that was so awkward. I can't believe I said that. Like why, what was I thinking? And now when that happens, I'm like, yeah, that was awkward. All right. Like maybe that wasn't me. Maybe that wasn't them. Maybe it was us. Maybe like, you know, it was just, it was just something that happened. And when I see the same person in a different environment or when I see somebody else, there's no reason why we're going to have the same kind of awkwardness, but if, even if we do, it's not the end of the world. I have lots of, I have lots of friends that I started off on a very awkward, uncomfortable foot with. Uh, awkwardness has never ruined my relationships and I'm not going to let it ruin my life either. Just to make sure I've got that. You're saying like the, the, there used to be a lot of mental churn around how did that interaction go, et cetera, et cetera. Now you recognize some awkwardness is just part of the deal when you're interacting with other human beings and you don't let it send you down the toilet as much. Yeah. I think I've learned some Dan Harris, self-compassion for social interaction. How's that? That's beautiful. I mean, because here's the thing, it really does become in my experience, a toilet because in your head, thinking about how the last interaction went, which means that in your current interaction, you're less available and it's more likely to, uh, become awkward and down you go. Oh, I mean, it, it kills any ability to have flow in a conversation. It just jolts you right out of the absorption that's natural and necessary for, for having some feeling of chemistry. And it also, I think it, it teaches you bad lessons a lot of the time. I mean, to, to take the example of, you know, did I come on too strong or, you know, was I too stoic? I think when I'm excited to meet somebody, like I can be over eager and I come across like a fan boy and I make that mistake once. And then the next person I meet, I show no energy whatsoever in the interaction and they think I didn't like them and so I've, I've overcorrected. And I wasn't, I didn't know who they were. And so not being a fan boy was not even a relevant concern in the next interaction. And I think that, I think we do this very often. The, the most recent interaction stumble we have is the correction we make as opposed to zooming out and saying, okay, like if I have damaged relationships or failed to get off on the right foot in situations where it really matters, like a, you know, a first date or a job interview. What are the consistent mistakes that I've made? And let me triangulate that feedback before I act too quickly on it. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show, wherever you're listening or watching right now, that really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons, I remember one year. When I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year. I didn't like that either way. Even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory and it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie now streaming on prime video. The first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer, Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago. What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on prime video. You don't consider yourself to be a self-help writer, and yet, you know, they're at the end of the book, you do include what you call actions for impact. You know, so nuggets of things you've learned that we can incorporate into our life. What advice would you give to people who experience what you experience, which is ex post facto after a conversation, kicking your own ass for how you handled said conversation? What's the move? Well, I think there are a lot of different moves. I think one that I've found surprisingly helpful is actually to name the mistake with the person I I would I've actually found myself going to the person and saying, hey, I'm sorry, that was awkward. And usually one or two responses comes back. The first one is I didn't notice what you're talking about. And I realize I've just massively overthought the whole thing. And it's it's a past haunting of my friends dropped me in middle school. And there's a voice in my head that still thinks that I'm that kid or, you know, we laugh about it and they say, yeah, that was awkward. And it actually becomes a bonding moment. I wrote about this in the book, so you'll you'll probably be familiar with it. But the moment they kind of shifted my thinking about this was when I sat down with an acquaintance of mine. I didn't I didn't think we had a meaningful connection. And his wife showed up and she said, you two are so awkward. What do you mean? And she said, well, do you do you think you're friends? And the only thing I could think to say in response, Dan, was, well, now that you're asking, I'm assuming yes, because it would be even more awkward if the answer was no. Like, we must be friends. And she said, yeah, obviously you're friends. I've watched you become friends and neither of you has acknowledged it. And you don't have to say it. It's not like, you know, you're dating and you're naming an exclusive relationship. But both of you want to be friends with each other, and neither of you is actually acting like it because you think the other person is not your friend. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I just want you to know it. And I came out of that thinking, oh, this is such a fun conversation to have of, wait, are you my friend? Wait, you thought we were friends? And what do I have to lose by just kind of putting the awkwardness on the table? So that is I don't know that that is everybody's cup of tea, but I think that, you know, actually talking about the interaction or the relationship is much less terrifying than I thought and often leads me to a better place and us to a better place. What do you make of that? I'm just curious. I mean, I'm thinking about your I mean, I love everything you said. I'm thinking specifically about this interaction you described with the dude and the wife who said, are you are you guys friends? Do you think this particular thing, friendship, is more awkward among men? I don't think that women struggle with this on adult women struggle with knowing whether they're friends or not the way that you and I do. What is that? I think it's probably male discomfort with vulnerability. It's reluctance to show weakness, having been raised in a culture where men are stereotyped as strong and tough and confident. And, you know, we're not supposed to talk about our feelings at all. We're not supposed to talk about certainly feelings that might put us at risk. Right. There's it's a gamble to show that kind of vulnerability and say, hey, Dan, I'd like to be your friend or what what what is this relationship to you? And what's legitimate is to say, hey, do you want to do you want to go get a drink? Which may or may not involve any meaningful interaction. Let's go watch the game or maybe we play a sport together. And beyond that, the lanes available for men to open up, they're just not as many. They're not as familiar. They're not as socially accepted. And so a lot of men just don't go there. I think that does obviously a disservice to to half the population. I mean, there's a lot been written about the the male friendship recession, and there was a great SNL skit about wives and girlfriends taking their husbands and boyfriends to a dog run in New York City where they can meet other guys. And it's all really weird. Yes, a man park. I love that. And, you know, I think that. This is not to say that women don't run into challenges with connection to, but if our loneliness crisis is disproportionately affecting young men, which it seems to be the inability to figure out how to vibe with other guys is a piece of that puzzle. And I think that, you know, we are facing these emotional constraints, but we're also missing the social scripts. What are you supposed to say if you want to become? better friends with the guy? How do you cross the bridge from, hey, let's watch the game, to I can have a real conversation with you? Not always easy. How do you answer that question? For anybody listening, you feel like you don't have good friends, you haven't found your people, what's the answer? Well, for me, this is where it's really helpful to distinguish between allies, pals, and companions. I just love the fact that here's this self-described nerdy guy who writes a whole book about getting better at vibing with other people, and of course he turns it into a four-part framework. What was the alternative? Did you want five? That, see, even that question proves my point. No, I mean, the alternative is to do what I do, just be much messier about it, but I love that you've turned it into a framework, and I think you're turning, what you're doing here, and it's quite beautiful, is turning your quirks and foibles into something deeply helpful for other people. So having said all of that, please share with us the framework. I'm just trying to be a good social scientist, Dan, but it's funny because you're right. I mean, I love to classify and categorize things, and people are so much more complicated than frameworks, but I have found this framework enormously helpful and clarifying in my own life, and as I started talking about it with other people, they experienced something similar, so I thought, all right, I need to really put some teeth in it. I need to put the evidence behind it. I need to unpack how it works. So for me, friend just has been, it's always been too coarse of a category. A friend could be a casual buddy. It could be your bestie. Could be anything in between, and I think when we look at the domains of our lives, we often think about people in buckets of what part of our life do they fit in? So you've got your friends, and then you have your family at home, and you've got your colleagues at work, and that framework just, it tells me nothing about why you connect with those people. It tells me nothing about why do some coworkers feel like friends? Why do some friends feel like family? Why do some family members feel like you'd rather not be related to them at all? And I thought I needed to really explain how to vibe, which I think is the heart of your question. I needed to try to unpack in a more nuanced way, what are the different kinds of meaningful connections that exist? So associates, I think, are the most basic connections. Those are basically people who just have compatible needs. So my painter is my associate. I had a wall that needed to be painted. He had a business to run. We were able to align on that. My neighbor who has kids who do the same activity as our kids is my associate. We have a carpool rotation, and those connections are fine. They are not particularly infused with emotion because they're very much transactional. They serve a purpose, right? And when I think about meaningful connections, I think about three different wavelengths that we can bond on. This is where somebody can be an ally, a pal, or a companion. I think about allies as people who share your goals. You're on a mission together. Pals are people who share your interests and hobbies. You have fun together. And companions are people who share your values. You care deeply about each other. And of course, people can be in multiple buckets. But we run into a lot of trouble interacting with people and forming bonds because we're not on the same page about what this interaction is. So Dan, if we go back to the question of, okay, I'm a guy struggling to make friends, what I would say to try to enlist you as a companion and sort of confide in you, seek emotional support and compassion from you, is really different from what I would do if I were trying to turn you into a pal and I wanted to have fun together. And I found it enormously helpful to say, let's start there. Are you looking for allies that you can collaborate with? Are you looking for pals that you can chill with? Or are you looking for companions that you can confide in? And I don't know, where do you wanna start? So it seems to me the place to start is what are your goals? So what am I looking for? Do I want just people to chill with? So I wanna up my pal quotient. Do I need somebody to talk to? And I think this is specifically a problem for men because we make our, if we're a straight man, we make our romantic partner, wife or otherwise, the only person that we're confiding in and that's putting too much weight on one relationship. It just can't be load bearing in that way. So if we want a companion, if we want a pal, if we want somebody to share our goals and be our ally, it seems to me like having the self-awareness is the first step. I think that's right. And I think we all need a mix of allies, pals and companions in our lives because they serve different functions. But the paradox here is if somebody is all of those things to you, you are likely to be closer. But to your point, you're also putting more pressure on that relationship because that person is your go-to for everything. And there's research that's come out in the last few years showing that if you go to different people in your life for different things, you actually have higher wellbeing because you have a more versatile network of support that's good for relationships. It might even make you 10% happier. And although I don't know if we can quantify it that precisely here. I know you would like to. I'd really want to. You can feel my frustration right now. But you know, Dan, it's funny. I've never really thought about this before, but you said, do I want to up my pal quotient? And I think there are two different ways to think about that. One is to say, what am I missing in my life? If you're a man who has some pals and some allies, I think the default is men are short on companions outside of straight men with their wives. I think the second layer of question that you just surfaced is also, do I need to diversify where I get that? I may have enough companionship, but not enough companions. How would one take a pal and move them into the companion zone? Ooh, this is fun. Okay, so as far as I know, there are probably three good options that have evidence behind them. And that also I've lived, and it's been fun to kind of experiment with these and say, you know what? Worst case scenario, this is gonna be material. There's gonna be a good story that comes out of this, even if it's unpleasantly awkward. So first option is you put yourself out there and show a little bit of vulnerability. And you reveal something, and most people reciprocate little vulnerability with something in kind, and then that opens up a new channel of conversation. So you know the research on deep talk. You can skip the small talk, and you can start just by saying, hey, something really embarrassing happened to me. And you pick something that's not humiliating or mortifying, but it's not something you would necessarily share on a public stage. And then you have signaled to that person that you trust them. And they tend to respond in a way that opens that up. That's the first option. I'm just thinking of, I organize a lot of dinners for men. Well, two recurring dinners for men, actually more than that. But one of them of some dads in the suburban area where I live, and another for guys in New York City who are interested in Buddhism. And the former, the dad dinner in the suburbs, I didn't do it with much of an agenda other than just I met a bunch of guys I liked and thought it would be nice to get together with some regularity. It seemed like a good community service on my part. And very quickly, I noticed to me and to each other, the guys were just starting to say things that I don't think they would normally say. I remember on the first dinner, a guy I didn't know that well mentioned to me, we were just chatting, and he mentioned that his daughter was going away to school and that she was most likely doing that because there was so much fighting around the house. Wow. And immediately I was like, oh, I feel really connected to this person and I wanna know more. And yeah, that just struck me as a very skillful use of a certain amount of vulnerability without oversharing that immediately got me invested in his life. Yeah, I think that's a great example of bounded vulnerability, which I think is the antidote to the oversharing problem. We've all had people trauma dump and your reaction is TMI, too much information. And I think that it's a little bit of, hey, I'm telling you this is rough, but I'm not forcing you now to carry my pain. I'm inviting you to a conversation about it. And Dan, the thing that's striking to me about this is I'm willing to bet knowing you, you're not even accounting for the opening bid here, which is you have spoken so publicly and so openly about some of your own challenges, including panic attacks on TV, including being unkind to your employees, that anybody who comes and talks to you has already been invited into the kind of the cone of vulnerability, so to speak. I think you're gonna start seeing more of that in the wake of this book because people always want, I think people have wanted to talk to you for a long time because you're writing these fascinating and really helpful books, but I think it's going to intensify now that people feel they know you a little better. Gulp, for better or worse, more parasocial relationships, here we come. So I think that little gesture of putting yourself out there, that's the first option. I think the second option is to ask as opposed to share. And I think psychologists have studied lots of questions that can help accelerate moving from small talk to deep talk or pals toward companions. And some of them are actually pretty safe, like what's your biggest regret? Or my favorite one is instead of asking someone what do you do, what do you love to do as an opener? And then as soon as you feel comfortable, you can get closer to, one of the questions that shows up in the fast friends research is, tell me about your relationship with your mother. Everyone has something to say about that. And it's vulnerable, but it's not too vulnerable in most cases, hopefully not in every case. But I think you either put yourself out there a little bit or you put a prompt on the table that makes the other person feel comfortable sharing. I like those two. Not everybody's a talker. Some people are much more comfortable being vulnerable side to side, shoulder to shoulder as opposed to face to face. And there I think my favorite step is to add some emotional intensity into what you do together. So I think the easiest example of this is the research on going to a haunted house. Take an acquaintance or a pal to a haunted house together. Even if they're a stranger, if you go to a haunted house together, you will come out with a tighter bond, but only if you debrief afterward because that's when you open up about the emotions. And that's when it becomes a shared experience that the two of you uniquely went through and then can make sense of as, yeah, this is something we did because we are, I don't know, we might be pals and we think it's hilarious to jump scare each other. But I felt real panic for a second in that moment. Now we're companions all of a sudden. I think leading with that intense shared activity accelerates connection. That's really interesting. So you could do an intense activity like two guys could go golf, the world's hardest golf course, or two women could compete together in a doubles tournament or whatever it is, and it's really intense. But if they're not talking afterwards, it almost doesn't matter at the level of their relationship. Yeah, unless it's a really unusual shared experience that they can reference without even having to talk about it, I think it's probably unlikely to have the same effect. I think a lot of the sweating together, building relationships is real. I think if you are physically sweating, if you're doing some kind of exercise or athletic challenge, sweating together is social grease. But it doesn't have to be physically intense. It could be emotionally intense in a whole number of ways. I have met people who have come out of silent meditation retreats together and become best friends literally sitting together not talking because afterward then they know what it's like to have suppressed the impulse to speak. And they found that to be really taxing. Dan, you've done this. Have you made friends that way? I'm gonna answer that question. I'm just inevitably just thinking about our many year, almost 10 year back and forth on your aversion to meditation. And I'm thinking of various ways to bait you and goad you, but I... We agree too much now, though. We agree too much? How? I mean, I think I have found almost everything you've ever said on meditation to be reasonable and compelling. And I think you've neutralized most of my objections personally. So I don't have a lot of ammo for this one at this point. No, your problem, and I agree with your beef with the meditation world and its proponents is that many of them are over promising and also getting too sweaty in their evangelism and pressure campaigns. And I'm just four square in your camp on that. To answer your question, though, about silent retreats, I, every year, do a pretty long silent retreat with two friends, neither of whom even lives near me anymore. And so I don't get to see them much outside of our retreats. And when we're together, we're often not talking, but the depths of those bonds, it's really hard to overstate. We do talk at the beginning and at the end. And then we, of course, talk throughout the year. But as we've gotten better and better at doing these retreats every year, like these are, that kind of intimacy is really hard to replicate. I've spent hours and hours and hours sitting in silence with these men and then talking about it afterwards. It's so interesting. I think, I mean, it almost sounds like you're orchestrating individually profound experiences and the connection comes then in the ways that those moments open you up to each other. Yes, yes. You know this because you did me a huge kindness and took a look at a rough draft of a book that I've been working on for a long time and still haven't been able to put out. But so I'm not, what I'm about to say is something you already know, but I devalued my relationships for way. too long and have spent the last seven or eight years just really focusing on making them stronger because it has just increased my quality of life immeasurably. And I think in one key area, especially around anxiety, I'm such an anxious person and it's in my nervous system in such a deep way, the low-grade anxiety, but that also can escalate to panic, and having strong ties at home, out in the world, a variety of strong ties at various levels just makes me feel much safer. Well, I'll give you the personal reaction first, which is it's fascinating to hear the way that you narrated that, which I think is one of the problems with bonding that we have in our culture, particularly among men, which is you said, I've deprioritized and devalued relationships, and I'm now investing because of how I feel. Like, Dan, it doesn't have to be all about you. I mean, obviously, we live in an individualistic Western culture where if you can't justify something in terms of my happiness or my success, why the hell are you doing it? But I have come around to the view that even we overachievers who struggle with feeling like we're not accomplishing something every moment of every day can accept the fact that relationships are valuable ends in and of themselves. I don't need to get anything out of interacting to say, this person, I respect their values, and I think time with them is worthwhile, even if it stresses me out more because I see that they're accomplishing things that I'm falling short on, or they make me feel insecure. Like, you know what? This is just a quality person to be around, and I think that's something that should be valued in life. And so I guess my mild challenge to you here is do relationships have to relieve your anxiety or boost your well-being in order to be worth committing to? Definitely not. I just think there are these profound benefits on offer, but there's some expression, atelic or something like that. There are many activities in life that are worth doing for the doing alone, and that is just also true of positive bonds or vibing. Well said. Yeah. And I think for me, as somebody who actually has deprioritized pals over the years, that's been part of the fun of this is saying, you know what? I don't need to think about what's the relative happiness dividend of hanging out with a pal versus reading a book that I'm going to enjoy. I just think spending time with other people is something that we should do as social creatures. The less I have thought about how much am I going to enjoy this, ironically, the more I enjoy it. So I think there's something there. But okay, the social science part of this is, this is very gendered. Shelly Taylor's work on biobehavioral responses to stress, years ago she first captured, and there's been a lot of science following it, men tend to default to fight or flight under stress, whereas women are more likely to respond with tend and befriend. I wonder if part of the antidote to our male loneliness crisis is saying, you know what? If you had 10% less fight or flight and 10% more tend and befriend when you are stressed, overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, not only would that have the kind of mood benefits that you're describing, but collectively, we would have a better functioning society. We would have less polarization, we'd have less division, we'd have a stronger sense of community. So I actually wonder if the idea of tend and befriend is something that we ought to be teaching and, you know, even just for me to say, okay, I'm stressed right now. I'm like, I'm either powering through it or I'm avoiding it. No, I need to reach out to somebody. I wear a lot of t-shirts because I work from home and I'm a podcaster and so I can be as casual as I want and it's a nice little way to rebel against several decades in the news business when I had to wear a suit all the time. And anyway, the other day I was putting on a t-shirt and I thought, man, is this one of these? It looks really good. 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It's all in one, remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay higher on board and support your team and you can do it from anywhere. They've got automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, computer benefits, workers comp, 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash happier and get three months free when you run your first payroll. Get three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash happier. One more time, gusto.com slash happier. I mean, don't you think it's crazy that the quality of your relationships, given the way we evolved, is among, if not the top variable for the quality of your life, physiologically and psychologically, and yet very few of us are ever given relationships 101 in school, but we get trig? It is sort of unbelievable, and I think trig is at the top of my list of classes I would cancel and replace with social and emotional intelligence. And I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, but it should. There's a whole course that was tested at Yale called Ruler. I don't know if you've seen it. It's demonstrated evidence that it not only builds social and emotional skills, but it's good for academic performance, and it's good for well-being. How is this not part of our curriculum in every school? I don't know. It's crazy. And also, I hate trig. Yes, I'm with you on that. Love algebra, love calculus. No one needs trigonometry. Okay, well, you lost me on liking algebra and calculus, but we can agree to disagree. Speaking of agreeing to disagree, you say that agreeing to disagree is not the right way to resolve conflict. Just to step back for a second, you learn so much in the course of writing this book, and we're not going to get to all of it. People should read the book. Again, it's called Vibe. But I want to talk about some of the myths you identified, and one of them is this notion that agreeing to disagree is the right way to resolve conflict. Why is that not true? Well, I think that there are relationships where at some point you just have to agree to disagree. Otherwise, you are not going to remain friends or family or even colleagues, because the issue is so emotionally charged and moralized for both of you that you cannot accept and respect the other person holding their view. And so you just need to put it aside. I just want to acknowledge that there's a time and a place where that's necessary. I don't think most disagreements meet that criterion. I think in many disagreements, people are afraid of conflict. They're concerned that if we argue, it's going to damage our connection. And therefore, they walk on eggshells or avoid it. And so they say, you know, let's just agree to disagree. And what that guarantees is that you are at best compromising and not learning from each other and maybe finding some alignment that you have overlooked. But more importantly, it also guarantees that you are not building the muscle to have difficult conversations with each other. You are building a relationship that can't handle friction. And a relationship that can't handle friction is not a relationship. It's a charade. So I think that a lot of times what people do is they say, well, we're going to pick our battles. This is not worth fighting about. And what that means is you only fight about the big things that are really hard to do without getting heated, without maybe having a little animosity. And you never practice. You never hone the skills on the small stuff. And so for years, I tried to fight this dynamic. And one of my favorite examples was my kids were in the car one day with me and they started calling each other names. And the argument just got out of hand. And it was one of those moments where every impulse I had was to say, kids, stop fighting. I got tired of doing that. And I ran out of synonyms like, OK, stop bickering, stop picking at each other. And finally, I just said, you know what? You can say whatever you want to each other as long as you're both smiling. As long as the two of you are grinning, I don't care what insults you hurl. We can go full on Sandlot movie. You bob for apples in the toilet and you like it. As long as you're both laughing, I'm good. And you know what was so interesting about it is after that happened, they started having better fights because they realize they could be at odds about something, but they could still kind of communicate like pals as part of it and joke their way through it. And I don't think we do enough of that kind of rehearsal. I don't think we do enough of that, that practice to say, let's argue about little things. Let's have silly debates so that we learn how to stay pals, companions, allies when we have to fight about really hard things. One of the key arguments in the book, and this is not new, but it's very, very important and it bears repeating is, and you've said a little bit of this, is that we need to learn how to have healthy conflict and to avoid what has sometimes been called high or toxic conflict. One of the key moves here, and this is, there's a lot to say about this, but one of the key moves here is, you know, bringing something up with someone when they've done something you don't like. In other words, giving feedback. You have some stuff in the book about how to do this skillfully, and this is something a lot of us struggle with. So can you just say a little bit about how we can give feedback without, you know, making everything worse? I think where most feedback goes off the rails is not actually the message. It's what the message means about your relationship with the messenger. And so it's not that people can't hear hard truths. It's that they can't hear hard truths that make them feel like they're stupid or worthless or bad human beings in the eyes of the person who's giving the feedback. And so most of the time that we spend crafting the right message and sugarcoating and serving up a feedback sandwich with a slice of, you know, with the meat of the criticism buried between two slices of praise, most of that gymnastics is unnecessary. What is necessary is establishing your intentions and saying, I care about you. This relationship is important to me. And I want to share something that I'm doing for your benefit or our benefit. And there are lots of different ways to do this, but one of my favorites is just to sit down with somebody and say, hey, I noticed something and if I were in your shoes, I would want to hear it. Are you, you know, are you up for that? Or I thought of something that would make you even more effective. Can we talk about that? Or, you know, for a long time, I've been the friend who never told other people that they had food in their teeth. And I realized I'm doing a disservice to the people I care about. What is the harm in saying, Dan, you got a piece of broccoli there? I want someone to point that out to me. And so I'm trying to be more of that friend to other people, you know, can we have that kind of relationship? The tone of that conversation is completely different from, let me tell you, Dan, something you're doing that I think is very problematic, which is I have judged you, I have attacked you, I have put you in a position to be on the defense and best case scenario, a little bit of my message is going to get through as opposed to I care about this relationship. For me, having healthy relationships is being able to be forthcoming and us trusting that is coming from a place of, you know, of care, of kindness, of benevolence, of concern. And if we don't have that, we should not be having this conversation to begin with. I was kind of raised by wolves on this issue. I worked in television news for many, many 30 years. And at one point, I remember getting called into the office of a major anchorman, and he was preparing to send me overseas to spend time in Israel and the West Bank and then Iraq. And at this point in my career, I had spent a lot of time as a combat correspondent. And at the conclusion of the meeting, I was getting up and he said to me, I hope you do a good job because there's a perception that you're not very good at this. Now go off and get shot at. Wow. That's brutal. Yes. Yes. And those kind of role models who are giving feedback in ways that were just like devastating and not constructive at all. And by the way, there is a perception. You're the dude with that perception. Just own it. Yeah. So fucked up on so many levels. So wrong. But those kinds of bad role models can make for somebody who goes off and is a bad role model for other people. to unlearn a lot of bad habits. And I love the little scripts that you came up with. And for me, really, it's been about saying to somebody, there's something I wanna tell you if you're open to it. And the reason I wanna tell you is because this is such an important relationship to me. Exactly, and that is the message that should come across anytime you give someone feedback or you raise a tough conversation is, I'm giving this to you because I care. Otherwise, it wouldn't bother. Yes. You know, I'm just stuck on that moment. I mean, it calls to mind the saying that people who take pride in being brutally honest are usually just interested in being brutal. Yeah. Which Bob Berg first introduced me to. And I think that is spot on. I think this should never be something that people look forward to doing. No one should relish or rejoice in the joy of taking somebody else down. It should be a little uncomfortable because you don't wanna hurt the feelings of the person you care about. At the same time, I have found it really important to say, look, part of caring about you, if we're gonna have a strong bond, part of caring about you, Dan, is being willing to say things that make you feel bad today if they help you do better tomorrow. Yes, yes. And I wanna make sure we're on the same page about that. I want that from you. And let's talk about how we can make that a norm in our relationship. I had students years ago who took my negotiation class and part of the class was you had to go off and play a role and negotiate with somebody else in the class. And then everyone would come back together and debrief because they all had similar starting points, but very, very different ending points. And very quickly you realized, wow, I'm having most of my interactions in a vacuum. And I never learned what I did that was off-putting. I never find out what actually landed well. And so a bunch of the students just got together and they said, we're gonna start a norm that after any important interaction, we're just gonna say, can we feedback? And that's gonna be an immediate invitation to take off the kid gloves and tell me the thing I do not wanna hear but I really need to hear. And what I thought was so great about that was you have to ask for it so the other person is not gonna dump it on you unwanted. And when you ask for it, you are saying, I am here ready to receive this. And I would just love to see that norm in more schools, more workplaces, and more homes. My executive coach, Jerry Colonna, often coaches people to say, what is not being said that I need to hear? And I've really tried to get in the habit of saying it. Okay, Grant, I wanna ask you about a few more of these myths before I lose you. Never go to bed angry, bad advice. Terrible advice. If you never go to bed angry, then you are having most of your fights when you're really tired and you also lack the self-control to make sure you don't say something you regret. Go to bed angry, have the argument when you are capable of having a rational conversation. That makes complete sense. It's okay to go to bed angry, get up, deal with it once you've slept. Hopefully you've slept and nothing's been, I think the logic behind the expression is you could die in the middle of the night. But I feel like that's, I think what you're saying is it's worth taking that risk to have a better fight in the morning. I think that's true. And I would add that what's most likely to kill you is having a lot of late night arguments. Well said. Okay, another myth that I mentioned at the beginning is that it takes a long time to develop close relationships. Why is that not true? Well, it's not true because of what we were talking about earlier with emotional intensity accelerating bonds. And you can see this, for example, in studies of soldiers who go to war. So you covered, you've probably seen this up close much more than I have. There's an elder and clip study where you look at soldiers and the question is what happened to them when they were deployed? And oftentimes, you'll have a group that didn't know each other before they deployed. They show up in a foreign country. They have to very quickly get on the same page about what their mission is. And they may not be together for long. 40 years later, the troops that have maintained the closest bonds are the ones who lost somebody in combat. They all grieved together. They experienced that pain together. They showed companionship toward each other. And it might have only been a day or two together or a week together. But that intense moment is something that none of them will ever forget. And it's made them lifelong friends. And they've said, you know what? We couldn't save this person, but we will always have each other's backs. And I think that that is what we see over and over again in the data that some people are able to make friends. I mean, you don't have to suffer trauma, right? It's not about adversity. You don't have to start hazing people. Fraternity and sorority, what's the worst thing that could happen to people? And then they'll really be close afterward because they shared suffering. No, it's what's the intense experience we can have that nobody else can relate to that will lead us to say, wow, that person understands me. That person has seen the real me. And I think that those are, I don't know, there are more of those experiences than we realize. Singing karaoke with somebody else. Really easy way to get that little bit of vulnerability, that little bit intensity, and coming out of that and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're like this. How do you do that in a corporate context? Because people have done trust falls and it's become a trope in the business setting as a way to have a little bit of intensity that people can then bond over. How do you engineer these kind of interactions to get an employee base comfortable or a team comfortable with one another without making it forced and awful? I think from what I've read of the research on this, the best options have to do with the work itself. So people need shared projects. And within those shared projects can be shared challenges. So I think one of the most interesting examples I've seen is NASA was trying to build bonds between astronauts and cosmonauts. And this is not an easy task because at the time, the American astronauts, they were ex-military and they had been trained to shoot at the Russian now cosmonauts who were their enemy and now were supposed to be their ally. And so they said, well, what are we gonna do to bring these people who are adversaries together as real, real collaborators who are willing to trust each other with their lives? And they said they don't have to like each other. They do have to be able to rely on each other. And I think the mistake that most organizations make is they say, okay, yeah, we're gonna do the trust fall, we're gonna do the icebreakers, we're gonna get people together for a happy hour. And the problem is that people don't really come out of their shells in those settings. You don't get to see kind of beneath the surface veneer. So what NASA did was they said, you know what, we're gonna take this crew into the wilderness and they're gonna do their initial training in the mountains with an outdoor leadership guide. And they are going to encounter some challenges that simulate what will actually happen when they're in space. So the guide just ditches them one day and they're lost and that's a simulation of what happens if you lose connection to mission control. And you say, Houston, we have a problem, and you get static back. They got to practice that, right? They got very stressed, it was cold at night, and they had to really figure out, okay, how do I bring out the best as opposed to the worst in my fellow travelers here? And then they had this great conversation where they said, let's talk about our origin story. And every person in the group, in this particular crew anyway, was asked, what was the defining moment when you knew you wanted to go to outer space? And they open up and that's the moment of vulnerability, but it is mission critical, right? You're not just talking about some random defining moment of your childhood, you are talking about an uncommon commonality, a similarity that you share that's very rare. And this is something that I think that any workplace could do, is it requires you to have a meaningful mission, right? But to bring people together and say, what was the defining moment when you decided you wanted to work on this problem? Or what was the experience that led you to say, yes, this is the culture I wanted to join, or this is the career I thought was worth spending most of my waking hours at? When people open up about that, people are able to say, okay, I understand where you came from to some extent, and I feel that we have a deep common interest that makes it really hard for me to imagine not trusting you. So just to say, obviously most workplaces are not gonna have people go out into the wilderness together, but simply asking people like, how did you get interested in this thing that we're all doing together can reveal a lot. Yeah, I think that oftentimes organizations start with future goals, but it's easier to bring people together focusing on the past rather than the future, because people haven't lived the future yet. It's often a distant dream, and it's often kind of hazy. Whereas the past is concrete, it's vivid, you can bring it to life, you have an emotional connection to the story you're sharing. And I think, depending on the team or the kind of work you're doing, it might take a little bit of ingenuity to figure out what is the most effective prompt for that. But even thinking about, I've done this with leaders and managers. What was the moment that led you to say, I wanna be responsible for mentoring the next generation? Did you have a mentor who changed your life? Or did you have a horrible mentor and you said, I'm gonna break that cycle, and I'm not gonna let that happen to anyone else? And that's not about the organization, it's not about the kind of work that's being done. Maybe people care about that or they don't. But you get a group of people who are responsible for the development of young people together, and wow, everybody's got a story to tell about why they wanna be a mentor or why they don't wanna suck at that task. And I think there's an origin story for something that will bring people together. Let me ask you about a few more work-related myths before I let you go. I mentioned these in the intro. One of them is that if you want good teamwork, you all need to be in the office together. I'm asking this question on a day when I just spent the entire day with one of my colleagues, a writing partner, and we have found that working together in person has been just a game changer for us. So I'm, I guess, constitutionally and viscerally, I'm ready to disagree with you, but you probably have the facts and the data on your side. So where am I wrong? Well, first of all, Dan, that's such a refreshing way to frame the question because most of what I run into when I talk about this with CEOs is that's not what my experience has shown, and therefore, you're wrong. Well, what would you rather learn from, the most rigorous possible randomized controlled experiments and longitudinal studies across many organizations, industries, countries, and people, or your N equals one experience? And I try not to say it like that anymore, but I prefer your intellectual humility coming into this. So I don't think you're wrong. I think the narrative that you gave is just incomplete, which is in-person work pays huge dividends. It's easier to bond with people. It's easier to read people. It's easier to develop a pattern that Anita Woolley has called burstiness, where we just feel like literally our interactions are bursting with energy and ideas. That's just harder when there's technology in the way. We don't need to be co-located all the time. That's what the data show very clearly. If you and I are in the office together four days a week instead of five days a week, we are more productive and more creative, because we're less likely to distract and interrupt each other. We get that day of deep work to focus. And also, our thoughts don't overconverge. That one day where we're separate is more likely to prevent groupthink. It allows us to develop fresh perspectives and novel points of view. And so I would just say, look, you work with people who you may know what they look like. You may be very familiar with their thinking patterns. And there is such a thing, this is Goldilocks, there's such a thing as too much time together, just as there's such a thing as too little time together. That all tracks. And I think you're also saying that it is possible to do good work and collaborate even at a distance, as long as there's some in-person connection happening with some regularity. Yeah, I've done some work with Atlassian, and their data on this are really clear. What they show is that the frequency of office attendance at their software company has no bearing on sense of belonging and connection in teams. What does matter is having a quarterly offsite where you come together to do two things. One is to bond, and the other is to solve hard problems together. And if people connect just for a few days at a quarterly offsite, the bump they get in belonging and connection can last until the next quarter in their data. And this is an intensity point. Intensity beats frequency when it comes to connection. I will take a few days of intense interaction every couple months over everyday surface interaction. Last myth, and you touched on this when we talked about the astronauts and the cosmonauts, but I was really surprised to read that you can really have good fruitful teamwork with people that you don't necessarily like. Yeah, you may not want to, but you can. I think this really goes to the heart of the distinction between being allies and then pals and companions, which is, I think we assume that effective collaborations and great teams are built on a sense of kumbaya. And empirically, that's just false. It is, you know, it can be helpful to be pals with your colleagues. It can be helpful to be companions with them, but it is not essential. And in the research, the distinction that's made, which I really like, is between task cohesion and social cohesion. So social cohesion is about you and I are connected to each other. This is an important relationship. We, you know, we are at a personal level. Like, we joke around together like pals. We confide in each other like companions. Social cohesion is far less important as a predictor of team effectiveness and performance than task cohesion, which is you and I are aligned around a common mission. We are allies. And Dan, I think that maybe the easiest way to capture that is to say people don't always need to bond within a group if they're bonded to the group. If they agree, this task we're doing really matters. This problem we're trying to solve, we are all in on trying to do the best job we can at it. Their personal feelings about each other can be put aside, and in fact, there's research on SWAT teams that really bears this out, which shows that in SWAT teams, personal feelings are almost irrelevant. It doesn't really matter whether people like each other because you know when you get the call, and you can think about firefighters or police officers or any kind of emergency responders as similar, you know exactly what the role is that everybody else is responsible for. You know somebody's life is hanging in the balance, and you're not spending a lot of time thinking about, you know, I don't really like the way that Dan talks to me. I feel like, okay, how do we get this task done? And I think that is what great allies do. Adam, just always a pleasure to talk to you, and I look forward to pushing our relationship from pal to companion as the years pass. That's so interesting. I would have said, I would have said we are allies first and foremost because we share a mission of, I mean, every time we interact, it's around a mission of helping people get a little smarter and a little bit better off, and I would have said, yeah, maybe we're companions a bit because I think I've been more vulnerable with you than I am with almost anybody that I interacted with as infrequently as you and I do, and certainly men, and I would not have thought of us as pals because we don't hang out. Yes, yes, you're exactly right. I got it wrong. No, I don't know if that's right. I do enjoy our conversations. Yes, but I would think of pals as like just hanging out to, you know, shoot the shit, and you live in a completely different city, and if you live near me, I would force you to hang out and shoot the shit or go have dinner or whatever, but that is sadly not an option. No, you wouldn't. You would force me to sit next to you in silence for multiple days and then admit that meditation could even benefit me, not just other people. I would never do that. I never force meditation on anybody. I do want to remind people that your book is called Vibe, The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. You should get it. It's really good. Adam, you have a website where people can take some sort of test? Oh, yeah. I had a lot of fun creating a little Vibe quiz, which allows you to gauge, is your instinct to seek out allies, pals, or companions, and what might be missing from your web of relationships? And what's the address? It's really clever. It's adamgrant.net. A link for that will be in the show notes. A link to buy the book will be in the show notes. Links to the many, many prior podcast conversations about Adam's many, many prior books, those will all be in the show notes, too. Please go deep on Adam. I have found his work to be incredibly helpful. Adam Grant, thank you for your time. Thank you, Dan. As always, I've learned a lot from the questions you ask and the way you react to my ideas, and I really appreciate all the ways that you make my work better and me better. And if anyone is not happy with the amount of vulnerability I've showed along this Vibe journey, I am blaming you. No, I'm crediting you. It's been great. Also, a quick ask before I let you go. If you've got a minute, head on over to danharris.com and sign up for my newsletter. It drops in your inbox on Monday mornings, often a busy and stressful time for us. I try to write a short essay that has a little bit of wisdom, actionable, practical wisdom that you can immediately weave into your life on Monday mornings. A lot of people find them helpful, and I hope you will, too. You can sign up at danharris.com. It's totally free. Now to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Cashmere, David Hart, and Hayden Broom. Post-production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative, and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces. Now, insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easier to see your options. Visit Progressive.com, find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. With Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law.