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Today on Something You Should Know some wonderful words of hope and inspiration from Mr Rogers, just in time for the holidays.
Then the latest in the fight against aging, including the power of exercise.
Exercise seems to be across the board beneficial.
In fact, if you take an exercise mouse and you take blood plasma from that mouse and give it to a sedentary mouse, the sedentary mouse is much healthier and has better cognitive function.
Also the top five traits employers are looking for in new hires and the damage done by the fear of what other people will think.
Most of us really understand what it feels like to not go for it, to play it safe and, in return, play it small so that you're not rejected, and so much so that I think it's one of the greatest constrictors of our potential.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hello, welcome to Something You Should Know.
This is the time of year when we speak of hope for the new year and helping others.
So let me share some great words of hope and caring from the beloved Mr Rogers from The World.
According to Mr Rogers,
He said It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to.
He also said, Most of us, I believe, admire strength.
It's something we tend to respect in others, desire for ourselves, and wish for our children.
The really important great things are never center stage of life's dramas.
They're always in the wings.
He said when I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air or picked up buildings with one arm.
They were spectacular and got a lot of attention.
But as I grew, my heroes changed so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.
We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility.
It's easy to say, it's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.
Then there are those who see the need and respond.
I consider those people my heroes.
Those are the words of Mr. Rogers and that is something you should know.
Can you really significantly make it so that you live a lot longer than you would otherwise?
In other words, is all this talk of diet and exercise and what seems like sacrifice really going to dramatically lengthen your life and keep you healthy?
In short, is it all worth it?
And if so, what should we be doing to get the most bang for our buck?
Well, here to discuss and reveal the very latest research on aging is Colleen Murphy.
She is a professor at Princeton University, director of Princeton's Glenn Foundation for Research on Aging and author of the book How We Age The Science of Longevity.
Hi, Colleen.
Welcome.
Glad to have you on Something You Should Know.
Hi, Mike.
So right now, people live, well, I don't know, how long on average do people live today?
Well, so Americans live into their 70s and early 80s.
Different countries have higher life expectancies like Japan.
But we already know that people could be living longer if they're a little bit healthier.
So I think it's a question of are we talking about the people who are already doing everything to live as long as they possibly can versus, you know, median or mean life expectancy, where there are a lot of people in the country who you know for various reasons perhaps they are obese, maybe they have some metabolic disorders, cardiovascular diseases.
So we could raise the average lifespan as well.
And I think those are two different questions.
You know, maximizing the lifespan versus getting everybody a little bit healthier.
Yeah, but there is some sense, I think, whether right or wrong, that people have is you know, when your number's up, your number's up.
That you could live a pretty healthy life and die sooner than somebody who doesn't.
So it can't all be up to your lifestyle and it's got to be other thing.
Plus, you could get hit by a bus.
So, I mean, you know, you never know.
You know, actually one of the reasons when I get asked what I do, I never say because I am very worried about getting hit by a bus the day after.
I say something like that.
So, but your point is is well taken.
You know, there's lots of stuff that we can do to improve lifestyle.
But absolutely, there's a huge genetic component to how long we're going to live.
And of course, there are people who are centenarians, right?
Those people have won the genetic lottery.
And a lot of them don't do any of the things that we would consider to be following a healthy lifestyle.
So there is a disconnect there.
And One of the points of doing work on longevity is not to just use the things that we already know now, but actually to push that further and to ask well, if you tweaked this genetic pathway or that one, could you, you know, maximize a little further, even despite having, you know, not won the genetic lottery?
Could we push that to a better limit?
So when we talk about aging, getting older, that aging is a natural result of getting older right right inevitable, right.
But i think when people often think about aging or talk about aging, they're talking about appearance rather than something else, which is not what you talk about, necessarily.
But can you really slow that down?
I mean, people talk about slowing down the aging process.
Is that a thing, or is that just a way to just to kind of shorthand describe something?
So in the lab we use what's called a model system.
That is, we don't do experiments on humans.
What we try to do is take a small, in our case, what we're using is this little worm.
It's a millimeter long nematode.
And the reason we use that is because we know a ton about it at the genetic and morphological level.
And so we use that to try to design experiments where we can understand better.
Can we do exactly what you're saying slow down aging?
And we definitely have pathways that we study where aging has been slowed.
So when you say that you took this little worm and slowed down the aging process, what does that mean?
Because time didn't slow down.
So what makes you say that the aging process slowed down?
All right, so I wish I could show you a movie, but this was observed back in 1993.
Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF found that a single mutation, so just one nucleotide change in the entire worm's genome, resulted in the worm being much healthier, crawling around, basically acting like a young worm, for much longer, and it lived twice as long.
And so that's the base on which a lot of our work is set, because we've been able to use that mutation.
That worm was called a DAF2 mutant.
We've been using that mutant and probing into like all the ways that it's better.
And my lab found that those worms have better memory.
They also slow down their oocyte aging, so they can reproduce twice as long.
And so this has been a great tool.
So, in fact, that animal does have slower aging, because all the hallmarks of aging that we can measure, or at least I think most of them, everything that we've seen shows that they actually act like younger animals and live twice as long.
Well, that's pretty cool.
It is cool.
It's my favorite thing. how do you know it improves their memory?
Do you give them little memory tests and how do you get them to hold the pencil to take the test?
Yeah.
So um, That was actually what I started my lab doing was trying to figure out can we actually test memory in a worm?
So this is much like what you would do with a dog.
So we asked, what does a worm like?
And it turns out the only thing they like is food.
And they eat bacteria.
So we developed a very simple assay, just like Pavlov's dog.
You know, instead of ringing a bell and having steak and this dog salivating, instead now we take worms and we starve them for a little while.
And then when we feed them again, we put on the lid of the plate because they live in little agar dishes.
We put on the lid of the plate just drops of an odorant called butanone.
So this chemical is volatile.
That means it can evaporate, and so the worm can smell it.
And we already knew that the worms could smell this odor, butanone, but they don't care about it.
To them, it's neutral.
And that was really key for our assay, because what we wanted to do is ask them okay now, when they smell this odor while they're eating, when they were hungry, Will they make an association between that smell and food?
So the next time, you know, we can let them sit with this, carry out this learning process.
And then, after an hour of doing that, we take the worms off the plate and then we put them on a new plate with no food, but a little drop of butanone at one end and ethanol at the other end.
And we ask them, okay, how much do they like the butanone?
And so they will crawl to the butanone spot, whereas before they didn't care about it.
Now they all go to that butanone spot.
So we know that they've learned that association.
And so if we just put the worms back onto a plate with food so they can forget, then we do that same test over and over again.
We can assay their memory.
Fundamentally, what is well scientifically, from your perspective?
What is aging?
Because i think most of us think of aging as, as time passes, things wear out, things get old, things don't work as well as they used to.
That's aging.
To me, that's aging.
Well, I think we share that viewpoint because at a biological level, what's happening?
I mean, this is why the aging field is so big and there's so many great questions to ask, but there's kind of everything at once, right?
So you have cells that normally would be dividing.
They divide nicely when we're young.
When we get old, they do that less well.
And finally, they get tired of dividing and they don't divide anymore.
So that's why some of our tissues can't be renewed.
And then we have other tissues like, you know, we have some cells in our body that don't turn over.
We never get new ones.
And inside those cells.
It's really important for all the proteins and all the jobs that are going on inside that cell to keep continuing.
But with time, you know, those stop working as well.
So you have breakdown at all kinds of levels inside the cell and then cells making up whole tissues and cells not replacing themselves anymore.
So you're not wrong.
It's basically a lot of damage that normally our bodies do a lot of work to repair and replace, and now they can't do that as well.
Yeah, which is called living life and getting older, and that's kind of the big plan.
And so not to get too philosophical here, but in some ways it almost well.
It's not that it's creepy, but
But, you know, there's this plan that you're born, you live, as you live, you get older.
These processes that you're talking about slow down, things don't work as well, and then you die.
And it sounds almost artificial, like I don't know how to describe it, but like you're kind of messing with the big plan here, and should you be.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
I do know what you mean.
Okay, so I think there's a couple of different ways to address that.
For example, most of the diseases that people have are actually age-related diseases.
And so you probably wouldn't tell somebody.
Well, I think it's wrong to cure cancer, even though that's one of the most prevalent.
You know, for many cancers, aging is the biggest risk factor, same for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
So i think it's it's people just don't think of aging as the same way, they think of these age-related diseases, when in fact aging is the reason that they get many of these things.
So i think there's that perspective.
And then what do you say about all modern medicine right?
So back a century ago, we didn't live this long.
So at what point do you slow that?
I think it only gets creepy when you really think about if you're only gonna help a few people in the world that have a lot of money.
I think that's when it gets creepy, or when yeah, I can understand it.
But I think for the most part, helping people live higher quality lives may or may not extend their lifespan, but it will help them be happier and healthier better.
We're talking about longevity and all the research going on right now to help extend life and to keep us healthy.
And my guest is Colleen Murphy.
She is author of the book, How We Age, The Science of Longevity.
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So Colleen, how far away are we in doing some of these experiments and some of these treatments that might actually do something for humans?
You know, that's a great question.
I was really happy.
You know, we developed that assay I told you about, that experiment to test worm memory.
So, we got a collaborator of ours at UCSF, Salveada.
They did an experiment where they took the same protein that we had found to be really important for extending memory in these old worms and they put it into old mice and got the exact same effect.
So, these old mice had better memory.
And to me that was like such a gratifying moment, because it suggested that okay, now we really have it.
We know something where we can extend mouse memory.
And because that is so well conserved with humans, there's a chance that if we use this then as a target to develop a drug, that that could be something that would help older people maintain their memory.
And the mice that we were using were two years old, which it's estimated to be about like a 70 or 80-year-old person.
And so you can imagine there might be.
You know, you might take a drug that would help if you're starting to notice that you're losing your memory.
That would be a good thing.
So I think that's where our work is headed and that research is being done by a lot of different people in the field.
Are we decades away, centuries away, years away?
Uh, less than decades?
You know and I think that there's an important point to make as well that it's kind of the reverse.
You know we've done all this work on aging and we know what slowing age-related declines would be, but there's also something really important about you know these drugs that are being used to treat obesity and diabetes.
Those are, it turns out, They're really great for treating cardiovascular disease.
And my suspicion is that those are going to be the first, some of the early lifespan drugs.
Because I imagine all the people who really were having trouble keeping their weight down and suffered from cardiovascular disease are going to live longer than if they had never taken those.
But because they're lifespan drugs or because they lost weight and their health improved and now they're living longer.
Well, okay, so it seems – here's the thing.
The things that are considered lifespan drugs are all going to do something to affect some sort of system or disease in the body, right?
And obesity, cardiovascular disease, metabolic diseases.
Those are all things that are really critical in – in determining lifespan.
So it's all kind of the same thing.
I think it's almost like a false dichotomy to say this is a lifespan drug and these over here are like obesity drugs.
I think they're all going to like blend into one another at some point.
Do you look at?
I remember doing an interview not that long ago about how you know there are creatures roaming the planet that live a lot longer than we do.
And one of the things they seem to have in common is that they live slower than we do.
You know, turtles go very slow.
Is that something research looks at or not?
Yeah, no, people have looked at those.
So in particular, I think examples like the Greenland shark, right?
So that lives in these cold waters and lives about 500 years and clams and things there.
So there are some organisms that seem to have a long lifespan, perhaps tied to their slower metabolism.
But there's also mammals, they don't have slower metabolism necessarily than we do.
And so there's all different types of ways to live longer that people are looking at.
But it does seem like we all have our own factory-installed equipment.
We are who we are.
I mean, you could try to extend the life of a fly that lives a week or two, but how much longer?
I mean, a fly's a fly.
You can only do so much, and we're human.
You probably only do so much, it would seem.
Or is this an open-ended, someday we're hoping we'll all live to be 1,000 years old?
I really want to fight against the latter idea.
We're not really trying to develop drugs to help people live to be a thousand, right?
The idea, and you're right.
So worms, you know, they live two to three weeks and we have mutants that double lifespan.
And there's even when you add some of the pathways together.
You know it's kind of record breaking of living like six times as long.
But as you move up the evolutionary scale, those same pathways have a smaller and smaller proportional effect.
And so, I think the goal here is to maintain function longer.
And I don't think it is.
It's neither.
I don't think it's achievable, and it's also not desirable to aim to, like you know, make someone live 500 years.
The real point is to not suffer from age-related diseases, and i think this disconnect because i know there are people out there who are saying things about living, you know, incredibly long.
I think it's kind of a turnoff for most of us, like you know, even centenarians.
If you listen to them, some of them are happy and others like miss everybody who grew up with them.
Right they, they know that they're in a weird place living in super long.
So I think you don't want to be the one who lives super long.
You want to make sure that you live long along with your friends and your family and that you live in a healthy way so you can enjoy being with them.
Can you comment on and I'm not sure if this is your area but the things that people hear about that they're supposed to do to live healthier and longer that really work or don't work, like intermittent fasting or vegetarian diet, whatever it is?
Are there things that either are myths or are in the culture that maybe aren't true or are true?
Can you straighten any of that out?
You know, on the plus side, things like dietary restriction and there's all kinds of different styles of dietary restriction, they have been shown in model systems to both slow aging and reduce age-related disease. now i think in humans there's this extra component that hasn't been discussed enough which is like the psychological component of starving yourself and i don't i myself i'm not a big fan of dietary restriction even though i know like probably if i got certain forms of cancer i'd probably start doing that so all the things that you you know people are doing with intermittent fasting and caloric restriction i mean that's fine they can do that it's not really um and there is some evidence for it i i think in the end what's going to happen is we're going to find better ways to help people things like drugs that actually mimic the effects of dietary restriction that would be great now for exercise it's almost hard to argue against exercise exercise seems to be across the board beneficial i don't know if there are any studies saying that exercise is not worth doing And in fact, this friend of mine I already mentioned, Salveada, who his work, you know, they showed that if you take an exercise mouse, and so these are voluntary, these mice are voluntarily run on a running wheel.
When you take blood plasma from that mouse and give it to a sedentary mouse.
The sedentary mouse is much healthier and has better cognitive function.
And so that tells us there's something that happens at the physiological level.
And they showed it's from something that happens in the liver secretes a protein that is really beneficial.
And so I think the one thing that people are like they're, you know, less excited about doing sometimes, but it's really truly beneficial is exercise.
Well, there is that attitude element.
You know, you hear people talk about age is just a number and you're as young as you feel.
But when you look back over the last several generations, people seem to fight becoming an old person in the sense that they don't assume the role so quickly.
You know, 60 is the new 40 or whatever the numbers are.
But that people hold on to their youth longer And don't just give in.
And that seems to be a pretty effective strategy.
Yeah, and I would say that's a healthy shift.
For the most part, people are doing this by staying healthy longer.
Yeah.
Well, I guess that's the goal.
Right is to stay healthy as long as you can and then get sick and die quick.
Exactly which is called the compression of morbidity and actually is a well-known phenomenon that the field is actually aiming for.
Because we'd all like to live as long as possible but not stretch out that frail part of life.
We'd like to compress that.
Well, from listening to you talk, it seems the whole process of aging is perhaps more complicated than people think.
And there's a lot of different fronts on which to fight the fight to turn back the clock.
I've been talking to Colleen Murphy.
She is a professor at Princeton University and author of the book How We Age The Science of Longevity.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes.
Great, Colleen.
Thanks for being here.
No problem, Mike.
It was fun to talk to you.
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How many times in your life have you not done something?
Not applied for that job or asked that person out on a date or not spoken up in a meeting.
Not done, who knows what something important to you that you didn't do because you were concerned what other people would think, especially if you failed?
There probably isn't anyone who can't relate.
And yet often you hear people say things like, well, I don't care what other people think.
But clearly we do, and maybe we care a little too much about that.
Here to discuss the problem and what you can do about it is Michael Gervais.
He is a high-performance psychologist.
He's host of the podcast Finding Mastery and author of the book The First Rule of Mastery Stop Worrying About What People Think of You.
Hi, Michael.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thank you for having me.
So what is this fear of what other people think?
Why does it have such a strong hold on people?
And how strong a hold does it have?
I think that it is a hidden epidemic that we don't talk about enough, but I think most of us really intimately understand what it feels like to not go for it, to play it safe and, in return, play it small so that you're not rejected, so that you maybe have a better chance of being accepted by other people.
And so much so that I think it's one of the greatest constrictors of our potential.
Where does that worry, that fear of other people's thinking, where does it come from?
Is it just part of being human or is it a learned thing?
Well, to our best abilities, when we think about how our brain works, it is optimized for survival.
And when I talk about the brain, I'm talking about the 32 pounds of tissue that sits inside your skull, the mass that is chemical and electrical and has tissue and a relationship that gives us our sense of how to navigate the world.
And I'm not talking about the mind yet.
So the mind is the software that runs the hardware, okay?
But if our software is not optimized, if it's not upgraded to meet modern challenges or to work in a way that is aligned with purpose, the hardware is going to run the show.
The hardware meaning the brain.
And go back, you know, couple hundred thousand years ago, and if you and i were in the tribe and we were kind of knuckleheads and we we would show up and we'd be sloppy with the way that we would handle our business, or we were constantly saying stupid things or we're letting other people down on timeliness or performance standards, or if we went hunting or we had to go gather firewood or whatever we were doing and it was substandard of an output, The elders of the tribe at some point would be like Mike Mike, I'm so sorry, but you guys got to go.
So that rejection, that kicking out, being kicked out of the tribe, was something that was a near death sentence.
And that was a couple hundred thousand years ago.
And now rejection is not a near death sentence, but we haven't changed that programming.
So the brain still responds to the potential of rejection as if it is one of the most dangerous things that could happen, and that is one of the more unexamined 200 000 year ago programming that we're still experiencing in modern times.
But we haven't really brought it to the surface, and the last couple of years of mine has been to really examine what is this process and how do we work with it and How can we find some relief and some optimization by better understanding this deeply ingrained programming to fit in, to belong.
Because at the deepest level, belonging is safety.
And at the cost of it is that we end up living life on their terms, not ours.
And that's why you didn't ask that girl out in high school and always wonder what would have happened if you did.
How did you know?
Did you know her too?
Yeah.
Same thing.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course.
But you know, in high school there was that guy, Mr Confident guy, who had no problem asking her out and got a date with her.
Yes, of course.
Confidence is a trainable skill.
Now, that doesn't mean that everybody that is authentically confident trained it.
They could have had great teachers.
And those teachers could have been parents.
You know uncles aunts, coaches.
You know, fill in the blank.
But it is a trainable skill.
And most people don't know how to train confidence and they just kind of look at other people that are confident and want to label them as being arrogant maybe, and or think that they're just kind of lucky.
But that's something for them, not for me.
But come to find out, confidence is a trainable skill as well.
It does serve a purpose sometimes to be careful what you say or do, because other people's opinions do matter.
I mean, sometimes they really do matter.
And so...
Would you agree with that?
I would a thousand percent agree.
I think that some people's opinions hold great power.
It would be quite callous to think that the opinions of others are just an opinion and don't actually influence the way and the direction of our future.
Your supervisor, the coach that you're playing for.
There's so many people in our lives that have incredible power from their opinion.
So yes.
So how do you determine when it's okay to not worry about other people's opinions and when you do, or is it usually fairly apparent?
No, I don't think it is apparent.
Unfortunately, I'm going to give you a piece of research that is not.
People don't like to hear this.
And when I say it, you might go, oh gosh, that's terrible.
Or you might say, yeah, I know that's true to me too.
But some of our closest people in our lives.
They have an opinion about who we could become, about the choices that we make, the behaviors that we take, and they don't necessarily want the best for us.
What they want is to feel comfortable.
They want us to be in our station in life.
They want us to be exactly who we are now.
Not exponentially better not going from 100000 a year to 100 million because we might leave them behind?
We might create an environment where they don't feel as good about themselves because they're doing pretty good relative to you.
And so sometimes, the people that we think ought to be the opinions that matter are actually the ones that are keeping us stuck.
So the deepest way to think about whose opinions matter is to have at least two criteria.
And I think about it like a round table.
And my round table is not very big.
It's got eight chairs on it.
It's the people who care, who have invested in my well-being, who have demonstrated that my growth arc, independent of their growth arc, matters to them.
It's those people who really care, who have put time under tension with me to get to know me, to get to understand my unique challenges in life, my pain points, my traumas and my wonderfully, you know ambitious vision of who I want to become and how I want to contribute to the world.
They've spent the time to know that.
And the second criteria is that they've been in the arena.
They have tested themselves.
They know what it's like to work from a place of pressure where stress is real, in their environment too.
So they understand that intersection.
And those are the opinions of others that matter to me.
And so what is your take?
What is your advice on when you're faced with something and the thing that's stopping you is, you know what, if I look like an idiot.
What are these people going to think if I fail?
How do you push through that?
The first order of business is awareness how your thoughts and emotions work together to influence your behaviors.
How your thoughts and emotions and behaviors work together to influence your performance.
The way you're expressing your ideas, emotions and behaviors.
And so that's where...
That's where we need to start is increasing awareness of how we work from the inside out.
So there's three best practices.
Those best practices that hold up in the laboratory of research as well as on the frontier of high stakes, high pressured environments, mindfulness journaling and conversations with people of wisdom.
Those three are the best practices that we know that those hold up the best when it comes to increasing awareness.
From that, once you are aware, then you've got some decisions to make.
And the question that you're asking is, how do we push through it?
I don't think we push through, we work with.
So we become aware of the triggers.
We become aware of our reflexive response.
And then we decide from that place, once we're aware it's like now we realize there's a fork in the road and which direction am i going to move forward with?
And so that's the difference between reflective reactions versus contemplative responses.
It's just that nanosecond of awareness that gives you a path in the direction that is closer, closer aligned to the person that you want to be.
So can you, can you give me an example, either from your life or from your research, or what just like kind, of how this works?
Give you actually, instead of me being analytical, i'll tell you exactly how it shows up for me.
We're in the holiday season right now, and there is such a thing, for me and for others, called pre-party anxiety.
So you're going to a place where you're going to see some people that you know and some people that you don't know, and you can feel that sense of anxiousness just walking into that environment.
So there's also a parallel path that you could take, where you're walking in and you're excited and you're feeling generative and you're curious about catching up with people.
So let's call it path A and path B.
Path B is that generative excitement and path A is that nervousness.
Well, that begins in your closet when, and it begins well before that.
But we'll just start at the closet.
When you're going and picking out your clothes and you're making some decisions about what, are you going to feel comfortable in path B as opposed to?
How will Susie or Xander or Johnny like the clothes that I'm wearing?
Am I going to show up in my best because it's going to look a certain way?
And am I going to wear that watch because it's my best watch?
Or am I going to wear the watch that feels comfortable to me?
So those are path A, path B, And path A is really about a performance-based identity.
Is that you have to look a certain way and you have to perform in a certain way relative to other people to be okay?
And as long as I can outperform somebody else, then I'm okay.
But if I'm underperformed or I'm not showing up in the right way and they are judging me or potentially rejecting me or they're accepting me, then I'm okay.
I'm in the right slipstream. but it's contingent on them.
And so I shapeshift to be okay in front of them.
Call that again, Path A back in my closet and I'm choosing clothes that feel comfortable, that feel celebratory, that whatever whatever, whatever.
And I'm walking into that party and I'm saying to myself, oh, I can't wait to catch up with.
I can't wait to see how Roger's thinking about this new venture that he's doing or whatever.
So that, it's a whole different way of going.
And that is purpose-based identity.
So the from to here is, is from a performance-based identity.
And Mike, most of us in the Western world have a performance-based identity.
And it makes perfect sense because we live in a outcome and performance-obsessed world.
So it makes perfect sense that from a young age we start to figure out who we are is really how well we're able to do something.
That is why public speaking is one of the great dangers and great fears in the Western world is because it's all about how you perform, as opposed to an environment that is more purpose-based.
And a purpose is like it's something far greater than you.
It's not a reflection of you.
It's that you're contributing to something in a meaningful way.
And all of the greats, all of the historical greats and I'm not talking about the high performers in the NBA or NFL.
I'm talking about the real changers across the planet that have made a difference.
Most of them are purpose-based, that they are fundamentally committed to a purpose larger than them.
Think about Mother Teresa Mandela Gandhi Jesus Buddha Confucius, Dr King.
Keep going down the list and you'll say hmm, I see the common thread there.
So I think people have heard This thing about the spotlight effect, that we worry about what other people think when oftentimes they're not thinking anything.
They're not paying attention.
They're more worried about what you think of them than they are about what they think of you.
Talk about that.
Cornell professor Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues.
They devised a social experiment and this was back in early 2000s.
And it was to see whether people are really observing and judging us at every turn.
And so what he did is he gathered 100 college students and he entered them and just kind of put them in a room.
And then he had a handful of folks that he gave in a separate room these really ugly t-shirts and it was a photo of the pop singer barry manilow that was on the front of it and the the students that were wearing that barry manilow shirt were like oh god, like you want me to walk in there with this and yes.
And then they just went through a series of you know, experimental questions saying how many people do you think in the room of your friends you know the the room of 100 people are going to notice?
And then they asked the people in the room, like how many of you actually noticed what the shirt was that the person that walked in the room was?
Come to find out is that we overpredict how many people pay attention to what we're actually wearing and doing and thinking by the order of about 50.
And so the takeaway that what he dubbed the spotlight effect is that we walk around and thinking that they are looking at our hair, that they're looking at our clothing, that they're focusing on you know what we're doing and saying when, in return, they're actually focusing on their hair and their clothes and what they're about to say.
And so we are walking around with our own spotlight, because we are again go back to almost the first point is that our, our brain's mechanism is designed for survival our survival, not the survival of our friends necessarily.
So that's where the spotlight effect comes from, where these selfish self-focused, a bit narcissistic and i say that in a non-clinical way, but self-absorbed approach, trying to figure out how to be okay in social settings, and so The fun takeaway is that most people are not paying attention to you.
Grandma had this kind of right, is that they're focusing on themselves.
So maybe just drop the whole drama here.
Right, right.
Know that you're okay.
You've mentioned it a few times.
I'd like to really drill down and make sure people understand the distinction between a performance-based identity and a purpose-based identity.
A performance-based identity.
The definition is I am what I do and how well I do it relative to you.
Purpose-based identity is completely different.
It is focused on what is my reason for being here and how well am I able to contribute to that.
So how do you crosswalk the two?
Again, it begins with awareness, and if you think about the things that scare you, the things that threaten you, the things that create anxiety, Is it that your purpose is going to be compromised or is that you're going to look a certain way and that you're going to get kicked out of the tribe, or you're going to get fired or thought less of?
So if you are on that performance-based side, which is what I just described, then it begins with kind of pushing your chair back from the table and taking a couple deep breaths literally, but figuratively as well and just thinking like what am I doing with my time here?
And that's a very big question.
That is a rite of passage to modern day adulthood.
What is my purpose?
What am I doing here?
Now, there is a science underneath of it.
So for purpose to be true, purpose needs to have three factors.
The first is that it has to matter to you.
Nobody can give you purpose.
It's something that is uniquely special to you.
So that's purpose, the first part.
The second part is that it's bigger than you.
It's something that you can't solve on your own.
It's something that extends beyond your capabilities alone.
So it's big, it matters.
And the third leg is that there's a future orientation, meaning that you can't solve it today.
It's something that takes time, time under tension even.
So those are the three.
And if that feels too big, like, oh my God, like...
I've been thinking about that question my whole life and I'm not going to do that.
Like I just, I don't know where to start.
You can start by thin slicing this practice, and you would thin slice it by saying well, what is my purpose today?
And you wake up in the morning and you just say like, what is my purpose today?
And then as you get better at that for, I don't know, a couple weeks, you then extend it out.
What is my purpose for this month?
What is my purpose for this next quarter, for the next six months, for the next year?
And then you start to just practice it.
And over time, it does get a little bit more simple and a little bit more clear.
And just like so I come from the world of sport and, you know, high performing sport.
And what I just described is how we practice every skill.
We start in a calm, controlled, simple environment, and then we layer on top of it more speed or more accuracy or more pressure.
And so we go from a calm, controlled environment to something that is open, and wild and has high stakes or pressure.
And we practice that, that laddering effect.
And we realize like, oh, it starts to break down.
Let's say it's a scale of one to seven, seven being the most stressful, the most consequential or pressure-packed.
And our ability to be proficient breaks down at step or condition three.
So calm is one, a little bit more intense is two.
And so three, we start to see some inconsistencies.
Oh, okay.
Well, now we break that down.
What is happening?
Like, what do I need to specifically get better at so that I can be great at that skill?
And it's the same here in purpose, which is start in a calm environment and then start to practice being connected to that purpose throughout your day.
And you'll find the days that you're tired or the days that have a little extra stress, or the days that you didn't kind of find a way to be connected to your purpose that there are some common culprits that hang out there.
And that's where the conversation with people of wisdom and journaling and mindfulness can also pay dividends.
To be more clear,
So this is a practice, Mike.
Well, this is such an important topic, especially this time of year, as we wrap up one year and look into a new year and new goals, new opportunities.
And I think your comments in this discussion help remove one of the roadblocks to people's success in achieving those goals, which is worrying about what other people think.
I've been talking with Michael Gervais.
He is a high-performance psychologist.
He is host of a podcast called Finding Mastery and author of the book The First Rule of Mastery Stop Worrying About What People Think of You.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes.
Thank you for sharing this, Michael.
Yeah, thank you.
With a new year coming soon, maybe you're thinking about a new job or a career change.
And if so, Forbes magazine has a list of the top five personality traits employers hire most.
At the top of the list is professionalism.
Do your research, dress the part, and act professional.
High energy gets hired next.
Don't overdo the energy, just be sure you're enthusiastic and know your stuff.
Confidence is a must.
Your potential employer will notice, for example, how you enter a room, how you extend your hand and make eye contact.
Self-monitoring is a sought-after trait.
You'll need to show what you've accomplished and learned on both your resume and during a face-to-face interview.
And intellectual curiosity is another big personality plus.
Show your passion for learning new things and be prepared for some interesting questions.
And that is something you should know.
A reminder, as you're doing things around the holidays and need some company.
We have a whole big catalog of back episodes of this podcast that I know you would enjoy listening to.
So please take a look at all the back episodes.
I'm sure you'll find some you'll find really fascinating and give them a listen.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
Doug.
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