KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Tasha, welcome back.

Tasha Eurich
It’s so great to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, it is great to be chatting with you. I am excited to talk about the insights of your book, Shatterproof. I listened to it in its entirety and then had to get the text as well. And there’s so much good stuff to get into. Maybe, could you orient us a little bit? You’ve mentioned that this is the book that you needed as well, and that’s the first time this has happened for you in your author journey. Can you expand a little bit about the health backstory and how that plays into this?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, I mean, I think my last book I needed. I needed to become more self-aware, even though I didn’t know it when I first started out. But when I say I needed this book, in the context of becoming shatterproof, it was literally, it felt like a matter of life and death. And I look back and I know that it was.

And basically, the very, very short story is I’ve had a lifetime of mysterious health ailments that nobody could diagnose, that nobody really thought was real, like all the tests would come back normal. And I did my best to manage, resiliently, to push through, to power through, to be the fifth-generation entrepreneur that I am, and suck it up and keep going.

And starting in early 2021, when the world was starting to recover from COVID, I started getting very, very sick. And within a couple of months, I was bed bound. I had 10 out of 10 pain every day. My resting heart rate was 150 beats per minute. I was fainting all the time. I couldn’t remember what I had done 10 minutes ago or even the names of my family or my longtime friends.

And the way I started to cope with this was what I’ve always done, right? Which is, you and I were joking about our resilience spreadsheets. I had my list of practices: gratitude, yoga as much as I could, social support, reaching out, telling my husband at the time what I felt and what I thought, trying to reframe challenges as opportunities, and active coping.

I went to every single specialist under the sun, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was having more anxiety than I’d ever had before. I was more depressed than I ever was before. And, eventually, I had the experience that I eventually uncovered, as a researcher, kind of along right around the same time, where I hit my resilience ceiling, which means I sort of lost all ability to cope, and the tools that I’ve been using my entire life stopped working.

And so, I was in a position where I knew there was an alternative because we had this in our data. Some people are able to take the hardest things that happen to them and become better, stronger, wiser. And finding that answer was so personal to me that, you know, I probably spent longer on it than I would have.

I think I was able to dig into, like, the complexity of the solution and tried to make it simple. So, simplicity on the other side of complexity. But the point there was, I think no matter what all of us are facing, we all need this book. We all need an alternative to resiliently powering through, being mentally tough. There’s a point at which that doesn’t help us anymore. And if we keep trying to do it, it hurts us.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Very well said. You had a lovely quote. It’s ascribed as a Chinese proverb. Can you give it to us about when the wind blows?

Tasha Eurich
“When the winds of change rage, some people build shelters and others build windmills.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that just viscerally paints a picture of what’s unique and fresh and lovely about your work here. Because we just recently had Dr. Aditi Nerurkar on sharing about the five resets, and that’s all very good. Yes, indeed, exercise is great. Breathing is good.

Tasha Eurich
And if it helps, yeah, keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Gratitude journaling and such. Like, these are all great, great uses of things to do to feel better, to overcome some stuff. But that shift from shelter to windmill, I think really, really captures it. Because that’s how it can feel sometimes, like, “Oh, man, I’m getting battered. Well, I got to exercise more. I got to breathe more. I got to do some more yoga.” Yeah.

And as you identify, sometimes that just runs out, it’s like, “Oh,” and that’s a spooky feeling, just like, “Uh-oh.”

Tasha Eurich
It is. It is. And what I’ve found, in talking to high achieving-people, you know, of kind of all walks of life, is it is the most distressing for the strongest people because we look back, and we say, “Gosh, maybe this isn’t even the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” which was the case for me. I’m like, “Why can’t I just show up with my gratitude journal and do my meditation and find some relief?”

And then you start to do something that I called grit gaslighting, right, which is where we blame ourselves for struggling under the weight of the very real difficulty of living in this world in the year 2025.

And so, yeah, I think, especially for high-achieving people like your listeners, part of what I want to do with this conversation is normalize that you are not failing at resilience. You are hitting your resilient ceiling, and everyone has one.

Pete Mockaitis
And, boy, the grit gaslighting is something sometimes I even do to myself, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete. Like, I mean, your business is like stellar. Compare this to, like, seven years ago, man. Like, this is great. You’ve got three wonderful children, a wonderful wife, a nice house.”

It’s like things seem like they’re rocking here, and I have been through some tough stuff, and then, throughout history, it seems like folks had it way tougher. You read about the folks fighting the Revolutionary Wars, like, “Oh, jeez.”

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, “What am I whining about, for God’s sake?”

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, and I don’t want to linger too much here because it’s kind of like the nonfiction, the obligatory nonfiction book intro, “Today is, like, so difficult and unprecedented, and that’s why this book is exactly what you must buy.” So, I mean, in a way, that’s quite obvious.

Tasha Eurich
And yet it is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we could maybe briefly hit us with, “Okay, why could we be okay with being not okay in the current climate? And why are we not just weenie babies who can’t tough it out? Like, the folks fighting the Revolutionary War or dealing with ‘real hardship’”?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, like Marvel characters and business casual, right? So, there is a thing, so I’m a scientist. I am a quantitative scientist at heart. And when I first started this research program five years ago, I wanted to answer that question. Because what I was seeing all around me, and I’ve been coaching CEOs for 20 years, was a completely new level of exhaustion, chaos, stress, demands, and not just professionally, personally, in all of their lives, and in my life, too.

And so, what I wanted to see was, like, empirically, was that true or did it just feel that way? And I stumbled upon this excellent, very, very sort of scientific metric called the World Uncertainty Index. And it uses a variety of factors to come up with every year, basically, and it plots the level of uncertainty.

And what I thought I would find was kind of crazy, like, after 9/11, it went down; went kind of crazy during the Great Recession, maybe went down; COVID, it spiked, went down. But what I found was, like, a pretty consistent high level of uncertainty until 2023, 2024, and it went like this, “Boop!” exponentially higher.

And when I show it, when I get to speak about this book, and I show it to audiences, people’s eyes get wide, and they go, “Oh, it’s not just me.” And so, I think you’re right. There is always the sort of drama of the beginning of a nonfiction book. But, for me, as a scientist, like, it’s real. You’re not imagining it. It’s real.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Uncertainty Index, and it’s intriguing. So, 2023, 2024, it doesn’t seem like anything happened. Or, am I overlooking something that happened?

Tasha Eurich
Well, it’s worth going to their website to look. It really gets crazy this year, which is interesting, right?

Pete Mockaitis
With AI, that’s kind of wild.

Tasha Eurich
AI is pretty wild. In the business world or organizations, a lot of sectors are being disrupted that people never thought would be disrupted because of a lot of external factors, and the effects of COVID are still being felt. I think all of that together, along with just the pace of life. Like, think about right now, at this moment, the number of people that need something from you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, geez, I don’t want to.

Tasha Eurich
Right? Like, if I think about that too hard, I start to flip out because it’s like, “Oh, well, this thing I was supposed to have to them a month ago, and this other thing.” And so, even something as “simple” as the cumulative demands, they don’t stop. Like, nobody’s saying, “Well, I’m going to just really need all this stuff from you, and then I’ll go away, and you can go on vacation for three weeks.” So, that’s the piece of it, is the chronic compounding stress across multiple areas of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That really gets me. And I’m thinking about the email inbox, which I struggle with. My buddy, Brent, shout out, listener, sent me one of those Someecards, it said, “Congratulations on hitting inbox zero. Oh, sorry about that.”

Tasha Eurich
Brent for the win. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s how it is, like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, at this very moment, I am caught up. Oh!” And it lasted about nine   seconds.

Tasha Eurich
That is such a great example of this, right? It’s, like, this is Sisyphean, for anybody who’s into philosophy. We’re pushing that boulder up and the boulder rolls right down, and we’re back to zero.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess we got that in terms of modern humans. The folks who had their own challenges of poverty, starvation, war, extreme challenges, no doubt that is brutal. We, however, have our own flavor of brutality being waged upon us that they did not. And it’s so unprecedentedly high levels of uncertainty. And you mentioned in your book that we humans have a real hard time with a lot of uncertainty. What’s that about?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, human beings were not designed for the world that we live in right now. If you think about it, our ancestors were, you know, their lives were difficult. They’re sort of hunting and gathering. They don’t have the comforts that we have now. But they were punctuated by danger, but things would sort of go back to normal.

So, you imagine you’re out hunting, and you see a tiger, and your stress system goes crazy, your cortisol goes up, all of your stress hormones, your fight or flight, and you’re able to escape the tiger. And then you go on with your day, and you go back home, and you have a nice night by the campfire. But the way that we are living now is our bodies actually are built to perceive a passive-aggressive email from our boss, for example, as that tiger running towards us.

And then if you multiply that email with all of the other emails just in your inbox, we have stress hormones coursing through our bodies all the time. So, we were sort of designed to have that danger, go back to normal, and our bodies can restore themselves. But what I say in the book is living in perpetual fight or flight mode isn’t just stressful, it drains the very resources we need to cope with stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s brutal. So, the traditional resilience practices are useful. They have their place and they do some things, and yet they can run out. And you reveal there is another path for us. What’s the path?

Tasha Eurich
So, the best way to think about it is to contrast it with resilience, okay? So, resilience is about putting our heads down, powering through so that we can bounce back. And that’s really important. So, resilience is the capacity to bounce back after hard things. That’s kind of the agreed upon consensus in, at least, for researchers.

What becoming shatterproof means is proactively channeling adversity to grow forward. And we don’t do that by powering through our pain. We do it actually by harnessing the broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And there’s a great analogy, like conceptually, and we’ll talk about what that looks like practically, but, conceptually, have you ever heard of the Japanese art of Kintsugi?

Pete Mockaitis
I have a couple of times. Why don’t you paint the picture?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, so it’s this beautiful art form where the artist repairs a broken piece of, usually, it’s like pottery or ceramic, with lacquer and precious metal. It’s usually gold. And, basically, like, mending broken objects with precious metal. What that does is it creates a whole new object that is stronger at its broken places.

And the question I always ask is, like, “Instead of powering through our pain and our cracks and our breaking points, what if those became fodder for us to identify what in our environment is tripping us up?” to understand, “What are the needs that we have that are going unmet? What are the self-limiting patterns that we’re showing up with that are making things worse for ourselves? And then how can we actually use that opportunity to pivot?”

And not change everything about who we are, but to try to find new ways of getting our needs met? That’s the idea, is kind of leaning into those cracks, not in a way where we’re pain shopping or anything of that nature, but to lean into those cracks as an opportunity for, you know, I say it’s self-awareness walking.

It’s finding those moments in our worst times where we can find unique insight about ourselves, how we interact with our environment, how we make our choices, how we live our life, so that we can access that best version of ourselves. And I think that’s what we all do, right?

All we want is to be happy and to enjoy our lives, and to find that version of us that we know is there, but that feels like it’s being, you know, it’s handcuffed to a furnace somewhere, and, like, locked up because of all the chaos that can’t come out.

So, that’s kind of the contrast between resilience and shatterproof is don’t just grit your teeth and push through to gain back a status quo that probably wasn’t that good anyway. Use this as fodder for self-examination and self-improvement. And that’s the contrast I make is it’s bouncing back for resilience. When you’re shatterproof, you grow forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say needs, you’ve identified the three to thrive. Can you share what are these needs? And how, of all the needs we might have, Tasha, do we know these are the three to thrive?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. Well, the good news is it is not I who has uncovered these needs. It is hundreds of researchers over more than a half century that have been researching this theory, that it’s actually my favorite theory in psychology. It always has been, and I’ve worked with it, gosh, 20 more years ago in grad school. It’s dating me. It’s called self-determination theory.

And the theory itself asks a really simple question that I think is so unbelievably practical, it’s, “What brings out the best in humans? And what brings out the beast in humans?” And what they’ve identified, and the main researchers are Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, is that there are three biologically programmed psychological needs that every single human existing on earth is programmed to seek.

I’ll tell you what they are, and then I’ll tell you what happens when we get them and when we don’t get them. So, the needs are, number one is confidence, and that’s the need to feel like we’re doing well and we’re getting better. We’re kind of showing up. We’re meeting challenges.

The second is choice. And what that’s about is feeling a sense of agency in our lives, as well as authenticity, “I can be who I am. I can be centered around my values. I don’t have to pretend or fake.” The third need is connection. And that’s a sense that we belong, and that we have close and mutually supportive relationships.

And what they found, these researchers in self-determination theory, is when these three needs are met, we are the best version of ourselves. No matter what is happening in our lives, no matter what fresh chaos is erupting around us, we can rise to the occasion.

But when any one of these needs are, especially, actively frustrated, not just unmet, but being frustrated by the situation we’re in, that’s what brings out the worst version of ourselves, the reactive version, the person that falls back into comfortable but self-limiting habits in the face of these sorts of triggers all around us.

And so, it’s so interesting because, when I was doing this research, it took me a couple of years. It took our research team of 12 people a couple of years to finally figure out that that was what separated shatterproof people from everyone else, was this idea that, “If I’m not getting my needs met in my environment, I need to find new ways of crafting them myself.”

And it sounds so simple. But if you think about the world we live in, that’s sometimes cast as selfish, right? Like, “Well, why are you meeting your own needs when everybody needs something from you?” And it’s the opposite, right? When our biologically programmed psychological needs are met, we become better for ourselves and better for everyone. We can be a better spouse, a better parent, a better employee, a better leader.

So, I think we sort of get it wrong. It’s like the idea that, “I’ll finally be happy when…” It’s like, “I can finally focus on my needs when…” But you have to reverse the equation. That’s where you have to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so powerful, and I find it reassuring. It took y’all a couple of years to get into it. It’s because I think that many of us have probably dealt with that question, like, “Man, what’s my deal? Like, why can’t I just be awesome like I was last year or whenever?”

Tasha Eurich
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it’s sort of like mysterious. And yet, when you just look very clearly, it’s like, “All right. Well, let’s see. Well, how well are my needs, these needs being met – my needs for confidence, my needs for choice, my needs for connection.” It’s, like, “Oh, well, that’s my deal. That is my deal. There it is, right there.”

Okay. And so then, I would love to hear, within the research, because I’ve heard different typologies for needs. So, we got Forrest Hanson and his resilience book, talking about safety, satisfaction, and connection. So, I see some overlap. And I remember my teenage idol, Tony Robbins, had a rundown of, like, six. Like, certainty, uncertainty, significance.

So, could you maybe expand a bit about, so self-determination theory, what’s some of the most compelling evidence that, “Yup, these are the three as opposed to not nine, not maybe this other thing over here. But, no, no, focus on these three”?

Tasha Eurich
So, I want to differentiate between self-determination theory and every other theory of human needs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tasha Eurich
Self-determination theory. The first paper was published the year I was born, 1980. And if you go to Google Scholar, and you type in self-determination theory, it is article after article after article where, and it’s, actually, it’s not even a theory. They call it a meta theory.

There are so many facets to it that have been rigorously empirically supported that it sort of rises above any theory of needs as a meta theory. So, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Everybody sees that as like the end all, be all, of human needs. There is almost no empirical research to back that up. So, it’s one thing to have a model. It’s another thing to have 50-plus years of rigorous empirical research being done by hundreds and hundreds of well-respected academicians.

And from my standpoint, there’s just no comparison. And, again, it doesn’t mean that we can’t pull from multiple theories. But I think about, you know, I talk about this in the book, a CEO I was coaching as I was writing the book, was leading his company through this massive organizational transformation. He and his wife were caring for aging parents. There was so much going on, and he didn’t have a sense of confidence.

His board was at his throat all the time. His employees were unhappy. Everyone was just saying, like, “Why can’t you be doing this better?” He had very little choice, which is strange as a CEO, but he was constrained by so many things. He was constrained by the health challenges that he was helping to manage.

And then connection, you know, it’s lonely at the top. It’s shockingly lonely. And he would always say, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” and I knew he wasn’t fine. And one day, he called me and, he was like, “Guess what happened? I just got on a call with my team and, like, through the most minor thing that just happened, I started screaming at them. So, I guess I’m not fine, right? I guess I’m not fine.”

And he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” And my response is the response that I would give all of your listeners and that I try to remember myself, which is, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You are a human being whose biologically programmed needs are under threat. And what that’s telling your body is you’re being chased by a tiger.”

So, the good news is there are ways to move through that. But the way, one way to not move through that is to resiliently power through.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. You mentioned Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” And you mentioned in Nietzsche’s, in fact, very own life, he disproved that shortly after writing it. Can you tell us that tale? And then unpack, well, what does determine whether or not an injury makes us stronger or weaker?

Tasha Eurich
I love that question. It really gets to the heart of it. So, this is probably my favorite story in the book. Nietzsche, what I tried to do is trace that expression, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” as early as I possibly could. And I found in one of his books that was published in the late 1800s

And so, he published “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” A month later, he was strolling through a square in Turin, and he came across a horrible scene, a man beating a horse. And for some reason, something snapped in Nietzsche at that moment. Something just snapped. He started hysterically crying. He rushed over.

He threw his arms around the horse. People started gathering. The crowd started gathering. The police were called. Someone was sent to, like, escort him home. And the next day, he was taken to what they called, at the time, an asylum and basically went mad, and he never emerged again. So, what I think is so powerful about that story is saying things, saying things that sound right or that sound good, doesn’t always make them true.

And I think we have to start pressure testing some of this commonly held wisdom about navigating adversity, “Does it sound good or is it actually the right advice?” And I think that, to answer the second part of your question, if I boil it down, the difference between resilient people and shatterproof people, the most fundamental difference is instead of powering through, they use that opportunity to proactively reinvent themselves.

In other words, pausing, observing, looking at some of the things within themselves that might not be the best things, and then intentionally pivoting to find, as we were talking about, new ways of meeting our needs. But I think it’s this orientation of, you know, “There’s got to be a better way. And even if I don’t know what it is, I’m going to set out on this path.”

And, by the way, I give four steps of the shatterproof roadmap in the book, “I’m going to set out on this path to build a better me and what might be one of my worst moments.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love bettering here at How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Tasha Eurich
Better is great.

Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned that personal growth, self-betterment, is just about the tops, a way that we can find positive psychological outcomes. Can you expand on that?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, I talk about, I call it the shatterproof six. And there, in the book, is a list of empirically supported goals that if we start however small, like whatever small step we take, but if we start to pursue them, we’ll meet our deepest psychological needs. Those three to thrive needs that we talked about.

And self-development is one of them. Especially, if our need for confidence is being frustrated, if we commit to personal growth, to expanding our horizons, what the research in self-determination theory shows us is, just by pursuing that goal and by asking, “What’s one step I can take today to get a little bit closer to feeling confident and, like, the best version of myself?” that feeds our needs no matter what’s happening in the situation around us.

And I don’t say that lightly. There’s been research showing that three to thrive need satisfaction works for people who are living in extreme poverty or who are refugees. There’s one really compelling study that was done with Syrian refugees, that showed that a really simple intervention where they pursue these sorts of need-based goals, their entire lives get better. And not in a sort of toxic positivity way, but you start to feel real fulfillment that feeds you during these tough times.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s walk us through this four-part process.

Tasha Eurich
So, the first step is to probe your pain. And what that means, in a nutshell, is to pause and say, “Pushing through my pain or avoiding it is going to give me temporary relief, but there’s two problems.”

Number one is this thing researchers have called negativity rebounds, which means that when we sort of deny the emotional reality that we’re experiencing, especially when it’s really negative, we’re okay for a minute, and then it comes back in full force. So, that’s the first problem.

The second problem with not paying attention to our pain is we’re missing really valuable data, right? So, the question to ask is, well, there’s two. The first is, “In the last week, what are the negative emotions that I’ve been experiencing that are kind of higher than my baseline? So, maybe I’ve been feeling a lot more shame recently, or I’ve felt anger, or I felt sadness.”

And then the second question is, “What is that pain trying to tell me?” So, for me in my health journey, I sort of, I hit my resilience ceiling, I gave up for a couple months, it was not pretty. But one day, I kind of woke up and I started asking myself this question, like, “What am I feeling? I’m feeling helpless. I’m feeling powerless.”

And what I realized was my pain is trying to tell me that I have totally lost control over my life, right? There’s no cavalry that’s going to come save me. I have to save myself. So, that leads us to the second step, which there’s so much richness to this, but again, I’m going to try to boil it down, which is trace our triggers.

So, we look internally first at our pain. Then the next thing we have to do is say, “Okay, what is happening in the world around me that is sort of creating this internal state?” And sometimes we don’t help, but almost always there’s going to be some kind of external trigger. So, it might be, and there’s different triggers for different need frustration.

Someone might have criticized us, hurts our confidence. We might have a micromanaging boss, which hurts our choice. We might have recently ended a relationship, which kills our connection. And so, once we have that trigger, we’re not done. We don’t just get to blame it on everything external. We have to go back inside and say, “Okay, what need is that trigger getting in the way of?”

So, for me, what I realized was the trigger was sort of just being pushed through this healthcare system that is designed for patient volume and not patient helping, right, and being told over and over that what I was experiencing wasn’t real. And that was triggering my choice need. I was massively undernourished in the choice department, and I wasn’t helping myself.

So, that’s actually what leads us to step three, which is to spot your shadows. What happens in the face of triggers, what happens in the face of need frustration, is we have these instinctive responses that feel helpful, but that are actually pushing us further and further away from our need. So, in my example, I was, and I talk about different ways these shadows can show up in the book, but just as an example, I was giving up.

So, there’s some of them that are really counterintuitive. Like, “Why would I, when I’m totally powerless, when by the way, I make a living bossing around CEOs, why would I give up? It makes no sense.” But what I’m doing there is sort of, like, assuming that I’m not going to be able to fix it, and conserving energy, and saying, “I’m not a doctor, I can’t diagnose my rare disease, so I’m just going to sort of go along to get along.”

But what that shadow was doing was leading me further away from a solution. So, the question I always tell people to ask if you’re trying to spot your shadows is, “How is my behavior right now different from when I’m at my best?” And the example that I just gave is a good one, of like, “Normally I do this, but right now I’m doing this.”

So, that brings us to step four, which is pick your pivot. Pivoting means proactively moving away from these familiar shadows that make us feel better, and towards new paths to need fulfillment. And we do that through something called need crafting. And the good news, for step four, is we sort of already talked about this, right? These shatterproof six or the goals, where if we say, for me, like as an example, instead of letting myself give up, my number one goal in life is maximizing my physical health.

And that’s one of the goals that’s been shown that if we pursue, we will have greater need fulfillment, specifically in this case with choice. So, what did I start to do? I changed the way I was showing up. I changed the way I was engaging with doctors. I spent 30 minutes, this is pre-ChatGPT, I spent 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases.

And, eventually, it took me a minute, a couple months, but then I had a list of these are the diseases that I might have. And then I finally had like the one that I knew I had, and I started changing the way I engaged in doctor’s appointments. I would show up with a summary, with a list of objectives. And they would open their mouth and I would say, “Thank you so much for being a participant in my care. Here’s what I would like to accomplish in this appointment.”

And some of them didn’t like it and I had to find new doctors, but I had to become the CEO of my medical journey. And the beauty of this process, just to kind of put a period on the end of a sentence, is, it wasn’t right away, because I had to find the right specialist, but within a few months, I finally had the diagnosis that I knew that I had through my research, which is something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disease where your body can’t produce the two proteins that are in every system of your body.

And so, it leads to these really kind of unrelated, confusing symptoms that usually show up as normal in diagnostics. And I can say with 100% certainty, that if I had not discovered this in our research, I certainly wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I’d be here at all. And if I was here, I would be a shadow of my former self.

And so, when I tell people this works, there is no better way for me to share that than to say, “You know, I didn’t sort of find this as a dispassionate researcher. I found it as a human being whose life felt like it depended on these solutions.” So, that, my friend, is the shatterproof roadmap.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful.

Tasha Eurich
So, there are six kinds of overall objectives. And then, for each of them, there’s a couple of options. So, the first is to rise. And that is making myself better. We already talked about self-development. That’s a perfect example of a shatterproof goal. And those, again, are largely geared towards building confidence.

The second kind of category is to flourish. And that’s making my life better. The health goal that I mentioned is in that category. Something as simple as joy, like rediscovering the love of the game by immersing myself in something I like to do. The third is to activate. Oh, and by the way, sorry, flourish mainly focuses on rebuilding choice, as does the third, which is activate, and that’s kind of making things happen around us.

And I’ll give a couple of examples, because this kind of has different flavors. One of them is advocacy, right, speaking up for myself, making my needs known. Another one is agency, making my own choices, being my own person.

Then we’ve got another choice-based aim, which is to align. And that’s kind of making authentic choices. The best example of a goal under this is authenticity. It’s not going along to get along. It’s not sort of pretending to be something that I’m not. It’s expressing my values and showing up as who I really am.

And then the last two shift over to connection. So, if your connection is thwarted, you might decide to relate, which means that you’re making meaningful connections. I’ll give you a couple examples under this because I think it’s so rich.

One is closeness. So, that’s kind of deepening close relationships by giving and getting support. It might be reactivating a connection that you’ve kind of let slide because of your busy, stressed out, striver lifestyle. Or you might choose forgiveness. Letting go of old grudges, not for them, but for my own wellbeing.

And then another one I really like under this is spirituality. Whatever that looks like to you, religious or not religious, connecting to something greater than ourselves is kind of a powerful but underutilized way of maximizing connection.

The sixth, and final shatterproof kind of category, is contribute, making the world better. And when we engage in service, we’re actually powerfully meeting all three needs. So, you think about Adam Grant’s work when he wrote Give and Take, his first kind of big mega hit book.

There is so much behind that, where when we give, when we contribute to the greater good, when we try to make positive change, it’s satisfying our deepest fundamental human needs. So, when we give, we get. And I think that’s why it’s the one objective that meets all three needs.

Pete Mockaitis
And is it your recommendation that we pick a single goal?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. My goodness, yes. Sometimes people are shocked when I tell them that, in my job of coaching CEOs, we pick one behavior to work on, one high-impact behavior for an entire year. And everyone’s like, “Well, I mean, could that possibly be helpful? Why don’t you do more?” And the reason is, in my experience, if we have any more than one thing we’re trying to focus on developmentally, we’re not going to do it.

I’m coaching a CFO right now who brought me his development plan that we were going to kind of blow up and rethink, and he’s like, “It has five components.” And I covered up the paper, and I said, “Name them.” He couldn’t name a single one. And we both laughed. We said, “Uh-oh.” So, that’s why making your growth and development easy isn’t a crime. It’s a present to your future self.

So, one shatterproof goal, even break it down to one shatterproof habit. Like, for me, it was those 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases. Start there. Keep it something that you can regularly focus on. And that’s something that you go crazy on for a week and then get so overwhelmed that it becomes the last thing on your list.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some more examples of a single behavior of a senior executive for a whole year, just so I get a sense for the scope of a “behavior”?

Tasha Eurich
So, I’ll give you one from someone I just got off the phone with who is doing an amazing job. He’s killing it. His CEO is thrilled, which is improve collaboration with open-mindedness and empathy.

And sometimes it’s even simpler than that. Sometimes it’s, “Listen better.” But if you think about it, if you’re a CEO and you’re not very good at listening and, all of a sudden, you start listening to people, the ripple effects are endless, right? So, I think it’s counterintuitive, but as long as you’re picking something that, in this case, like, your stakeholders are saying is limiting you, it can have a bigger impact than we think.

And I think we just try to overcomplicate development because we’re all type A overachievers, but that’s not how breakthroughs happen, in my experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just to follow this through a little bit more, if we did pick listen better or whatever, what might that mean in terms of, is it a daily behavior that we settle in on next or what’s the very next step?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, so this is kind of getting away from the shatterproof framework, but I think this is a great way of operationalizing it. Usually, what we’ll do is we’ll come up with that development goal, and then we’ll have an action plan that is 10 to 12 specific behavioral elements that they’re going to try to do every day.

So, it might be specific to a certain relationship. It might be how to show up in meetings. Like, the executive I just mentioned, his goal of improving collaboration is asking a question before he provides his opinion. Like, that level of specificity. Or, “Making sure that I find something to agree with before I disagree with someone.” So, it’s 10 to 12 things like that, and then we actually track them.

Most of my clients have a checklist every day. And this is from the Marshall Goldsmith School, “Did I do my best to listen before I talk?” “Did I do my best to amplify others’ contributions?” So, yeah, breaking it down into that level of detail, I think is, again, it feels tedious. It feels something. But that’s how change happens.

And the data are there, like, that process on its own. There’s a reason I have a money back guarantee. If I’m coaching a senior executive and there isn’t quantitative improvement in their targeted behavior as rated by their stakeholders, theoretically, never had to do it, they get their money back. So, that is how serious I am about this process and how much it works.

I think there’s going to come a day when it’s going to happen, right? And that’s what it’s going to be, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then, when we were talking about the operationalizing, so if we’re zeroing in, it’s like, “Okay, betterment is the thing.” And then I’ll maybe take another step of specificity into, it could be fitness, it could be listening. You sort of, then, identify a sort of specific daily thing that you’re going to be getting after.

Tasha Eurich
That’s it. And it is not a crime to make it simple, easy, and fast. For me, 30 minutes a day, that’s all I had to do. And I talk about other examples in the book of people who maybe had a little bit more, like, resources mentally and physically at the time. Like, I talk about one woman who had five sort of daily habits, but they were really simple.

It was, like, “Wake up.” She had just gotten out of a really toxic marriage. And one of the things on her list was, “Wake up every day, grateful for the freedom that I now have,” right? Or, “Make sure I ping one or both of my sons and tell them how much I love them.” And all these things to kind of reconnect with herself and her life beyond her ex. I think if we keep it simple, it’s even easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And that’s just the magic. I’m thinking now about the 80/20 Rule, in general. So, in terms of, if we have in the entire universe of what’s your malfunction, what’s your deal in life, it’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, hey, it’s within the zone of the psychological needs of confidence, choice, or connection.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re already eliminated a lot of noise.”

Tasha Eurich
We have.

Pete Mockaitis
But even further, we got, “Okay, hey, it’s choice. Choice is the thing.” And then we can get even, even further, it’s like, “By golly, I’m going to be renovating this house I hate,” or whatever.

Tasha Eurich
Whatever, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And that, in fact, can become transformational.

Tasha Eurich
Over time, like, think about it. If you get one percent closer every day to a full sense of confidence or choice or connection, and if you do that most days, I’m a realist, not all days, most days, you’re going to see some pretty significant improvement in a shorter amount of time than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic! Well, Tasha, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Tasha Eurich
Oh, one thing that I want to mention, because it’s very cool and it’s in service for your listeners, is if anybody is curious about that idea of my resilience ceiling and how close am I to my resilience ceiling, for the launch of Shatterproof, we put together, it’s a really cool tool. It takes about five minutes. It’s an online survey.

You actually have the option of sending it to someone who knows you well, if you want their perspective on how you are kind of showing up, and you get a report back showing you your overall, like, how close you are. You get dimension scores. You get tools. So, if anybody wants to take that, I’m sure you’ll put it in your show notes, but it’s totally free, no strings attached. It’s Resilience-Quiz.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now can you share a favorite quote that you find inspiring?

Tasha Eurich
“Whatever you do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And I love this quote so much by Goethe, it is tattooed on my body. So, that’s my favorite quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Tasha Eurich
Well, I would go, just because it’s fresh in my mind, but that study that I talked about with Syrian refugees and need crafting, this whole idea of crafting our own needs is so new in the research. It took a brilliant young woman named Nele Laporte to kind of introduce it in 2019. But there’s so much promising research around that. I just think it’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Tasha Eurich
I would say nonfiction is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals. And I would say fiction, without question, number one, The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Tasha Eurich
Favorite tool, ooh, we didn’t talk about this, the 222 tool. So, when you are super overwhelmed, you feel like you’re hitting your resilience ceiling, you take a deliberate time out. You ask yourself, “What do I need in the next two minutes, two hours, and two days?” So, the two minutes is psychological first aid. It’s breathing. It’s splashing cold water on your face. It’s saying out loud, like, “I am struggling and I feel overwhelmed.”

Two hours is something that is just for you, something that makes you happy, that relieves the pressure a little bit. Netflix marathon, happy hour with a friend, going to the gym. Two days is a deliberate pause on ruminating, analyzing, and problem-solving, as much as possible, with the thing that’s pushed you to this point.

I use this tool all the time and what I find is, because our subconscious mind is still working on it, but if we give ourselves the space to just relax and be, when we come back to it, not only have we helped a little bit with our need satisfaction, we usually have a better perspective on the problem. So, again, the 222 method, I use a shockingly large amount of days. I think I’m on, like, three by now, so. yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tasha Eurich
My favorite habit is drinking water.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people really resonate with, they respond to, they retweet in your speeches and such?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, the grit gaslighting idea seems to be really resonating with people. It’s giving language and permission to experience something that, I think, we shame ourselves for.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Tasha Eurich
Oh, goodness, I’m everywhere. TashaEurich.com. Every social media. I’m trying to build my Instagram, so if anybody wants to come hop on there with me, that would be amazing. But, yes, very findable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a final challenge or call to action for someone looking to become awesome at their job?

Tasha Eurich
Two-part question, “What would the best version of you do? And what if you could be you, but better?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tasha, thank you. This was fantastic.

Tasha Eurich
Thank you so much. Great to be here again with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome!

Mark Gerson
Pete, great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ve been so excited to have this conversation with you for a while. One of my good friends and mentors, Mawi Asgedom, episode one guest, said you were one of the most unique, interesting people he has met in his life.

Mark Gerson
That’s so nice. Wow! I would say the same thing about him. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, no pressure, Mark, we’re just expecting uniquely interesting things to be falling out of your mouth, nonstop here.

Mark Gerson
We’ll see.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom here, and you’ve got an interesting book title that’s a little different than some of the book titles we’ve had on the show and I just want to set the stage a bit. Religiously speaking, our listeners come from all sorts of backgrounds – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, the so-called nones from the Pew Research folks.

And you’ve got a provocative title, God Was Right: How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah Is True. Can you set the stage for us? Is the goal of this book to convert folks to Judaism?

Mark Gerson
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, what are we doing here?

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, the first question to ask is, “What is the Torah?” So, the Torah is the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, what’s called The Five Books of Moses. What Christians call the Old Testament, we call the Torah, we Jews, or The Five Books of Moses. And then you have to ask, “What is the genre of the Torah? What kind of book is the Torah?” And that’s the first question you have to ask approaching any text.

If you’re reading a book of science fiction, and you think it’s science, you’ll say it’s not true, but then the answer is, “No, no, no, you’re reading science fiction. It’s not meant to be science.” So, the first thing we got to do is to get the genre right. What kind of book is the Torah? What kind of book is the Bible? The Bible, and I go in the book as to why it’s not the following things.

It’s not a history book. It’s not a science book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s exactly what Moses says in Deuteronomy 29 it is, it’s a guidebook. Moses says in Deuteronomy, “This book is for your benefit.” The Bible should not be in the religion section of bookstores. It should be in the self-help section of bookstores because it gives intensely practical guidance for everybody about how to live better lives, how to make better decisions, how to find meaning, how to find purpose, how to be healthy, how to negotiate any kind of challenges facing you, how to approach any kind of opportunity that you seek.

The Bible is the most relevant, eternally practical guidebook ever written. So, whatever anyone is thinking about, the Bible is likely to have the answer. And the Bible makes, in the course of being a guidebook, it makes hundreds, maybe thousands of psychological claims, sociological claims, all of which have intensely practical relevance to our daily lives in 2025, regardless of what faith tradition we come from.

And so, what I do in God Was Right, in several dozen chapters, on several dozen subjects, I go through, “Here’s what the Bible says. Here’s what modern social science says,” and then, “Do we see if they line up?” And they always do. And the reason why I approached it that way is because, for 3,000 years, people have asked, “Is the Torah true?”

And until now, we’ve only had faith and experience to go by. But in the 21st century, social scientists have, usually without knowing it, asked the same questions that the Biblical authors asked. So, now we can assess, with social scientific certitude, “Is the Bible true? Is it false? Or is it just a good book that’s right some places, wrong other places?”

And what I’ve discovered, in the course of doing this research, is that the Bible is true on every subject it touches, and it touches every subject relevant to our lives today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Mark, thank you. Well, I just want to set the scene, set the stage, in that folks of all stripes can appreciate this, and if listeners are thinking, “Well, hey, this book seems to be doing it for people for thousands of years, and some folks are finding wisdom in it to this day, and Mark has some extra layers, then there’s richness to be enjoyed here in this conversation.”

And I love it, like you’ve got dozens of chapters in 700 pages unpacking this with fun titles, like, “Why the Israelites Hated the Perfect Food,” and “IKEA Succeeds the Torah and Science of Effort,” so it’s really fun to dig into these pieces. So, lay it on us, Mark, here, we’re all about being awesome at our jobs, why don’t we dig into maybe three insights or so that are really rich?

And if I may be choosy to prioritize, I’d like you to think through what are some of the most transformational insights that can really just be game-changing for a career, and yet are often overlooked? They’re not common practice, so they’re rare but powerful and they point to this ancient wisdom text. No pressure, Mark, but lay it on us.

Mark Gerson
So, let’s just talk about one example. Let’s talk about the Biblical Joseph. So, Joseph is the only person in the Bible who’s called a success.

So, Joseph has the most amazing career of anybody in the Bible. He goes from being an arrogant young man, and then he’s sold into slavery by his brothers, he becomes a slave, then he becomes a prisoner, and then he rises to become the number two man in Egypt, and the number two man in the world. So, he has an incredible career, and he’s the only person called a success.

So, then we have to ask, “When is he called a success?” He’s not called a success when he’s the number two man in Egypt, the pharaoh’s right-hand man. He’s called a success when he’s a slave in the home of Potiphar, and when he’s a prisoner in pharaoh’s jail. So, he achieved success in both these places. And the text goes through, not only that he’s called a success but that he receives promotions in both places.

He goes from being a lowly slave to the head slave. He goes from being a lowly prisoner to the head prisoner. He’s a success. He gets promotions. He achieves success in the same way that we would look at success. So, then we have to ask, “How does he achieve success?” So, what Joseph is, is the God-laden man in the Bible. He talks about God all the time.

So, what does that tell us? That tells us that Joseph is always finding meaning in his work. And when he’s always finding meaning in his work, when he thinks that God is with him everywhere, then he becomes a success. Okay, so how do we think about that in 21st century context? Well, in the 21st century, social scientists have identified a term called job crafting.

So, what is job crafting? Well, a great example of it was, and this story is attributed to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, but one of them visited the NASA headquarters, and they noticed how clean the premises were and they complimented the custodian on what a good job he was doing cleaning the floors.

And the custodian said, “I’m not cleaning the floors. I’m putting a man on the moon.” We see the same thing in a 2001 study from the University of Pennsylvania about hospital custodians, where certain hospital custodians view their jobs as cleaning the rooms, and other hospital custodians view the same job as creating a healthy healing environment for patients.

The people who find meaning in their work, the custodians who view their job as creating a healthy and healing environment for patients, end up getting far more promotions, making far more money than those who don’t. So, what does this teach us? It teaches us that success is not defined by the job you have but how well you do in that job.

So, Joseph is a success as a slave and as a prisoner, but he does very well in those jobs, therefore, he’s called a success. And by the virtue of being successful, he gets promotions. And what we see is exactly the same thing playing out in our day, it’s that those who find meaning in their work, those who can tell themselves a story about how they’re an integral part of creating something important, they get promotions and they make more money than those who don’t.

That’s job crafting. Joseph is the first job crafter. Now there’s a whole social science literature about it.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Mark, I like that a lot. We had Gary Burnison on the show, who’s the CEO of Korn Ferry, and I think, “Well, this guy probably knows a thing or two about advancement in career.” And I go back to this quote all the time, and he says, “I think you have to first start with purpose and start with happiness, because, if you’ve got that purpose and happiness, you’re probably motivated. If you’re motivated, you’re probably going to outperform and love what you’re doing.” And I think that that just resonates deeply right there.

Mark Gerson
Absolutely. The studies on job crafting just keeps showing how beneficial it is for one’s career. There was an analysis in 2019 of 122 independent studies that found that job crafting was associated with improved job performance, job satisfaction, and reduced burnout. And that’s in addition to the promotions and the financial benefits that accrue to people who job-craft.

So, I think what Gary said is exactly right, people who find meaning and purpose in their job, and people can find meaning and purpose in every job, because whatever job someone has is contributing to the production of a good or service that’s valued by others who are willing to part with their money for it.

So, there’s satisfaction, there’s meaning, there’s purpose to be found in every job. And people who find that meaning and purpose in their job, people who job-craft, just like the Biblical Joseph, end up getting that promotion and enjoying successful careers.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And what you described are some roles that seem like they wouldn’t be the most fun or rewarding in terms of janitorial services or, in Joseph’s case, you know, being literally a slave.

Mark Gerson
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet they’re bringing this purpose, this perspective. When you say job crafting, how does one do that in practice?

Mark Gerson
So, one does it in practice by, first, asking oneself, “What job am I in?” And then recognizing that every job has an important function and a crucial purpose. And then they have to articulate what that purpose is. So, the perfect example, I think, is of the hospital custodian from the University of Pennsylvania study. Hospital custodians are creating a healthy, safe, and healing environment for their patients. All they have to do is tell themselves the truth. They’re doing that.

And by telling themselves that truth, they’re setting themselves up for not only to be awesome at their job, but to be successful in the ways that we conventionally define success. So, no matter what job somebody has, the person with the job should think, “What purpose am I serving? What function am I realizing?” And by asking those questions and giving the very truthful answers that will come out of those questions, they’re job crafting and they’re setting themselves up for success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, just to get some reps in, could you share, let’s say someone works in the finance function of a content streaming organization, like Disney Plus or Paramount or something. Lay it on us the job crafting and the purpose.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, great example. So, if someone is in the accounts receivable department, they could say that, “Because of me, our company is able to get the revenues that it’s earned and, consequently, is able to pay all these employees, all my colleagues, and to create a life and a living for all of their families. If the finance function of the streaming department of a content studio did poorly, there would be a lot less revenue to go around. The company wouldn’t get what it earned, and lots of people would not be able to provide for their families.”

If that person in the finance function is in charge of, let’s say, audit or something like that, they can say, “Because of me and because I’m performing this role excellent, because I’m awesome at my job, the company’s books are going to be honest.”

And when a company’s books are honest, it’s the fundamental thing. It’s the foundation of any enterprise’s success. The company’s books have to be reconciled. They have to be honest. They have to be true and they have to be right. And without really good finance people, no organization can make that claim confidently.

So, if someone is doing audits in the finance section of a streaming company, they should tell themselves the absolutely truthful story that, “Because of me, my CEO, my colleagues, my shareholders, my vendors, every other stakeholder, can trust the numbers and, consequently, trust the business.”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I like that pathway in terms of, because, in a way, we can point to multiple stakeholders. Because where I thought that we were going to go first was the end consumer or customers.  And so, in a way, if you’re in the finance function, you’re a bit more removed from the end consumers’ experience of actually streaming the stuff.  But I suppose that you might draw your purpose pathway connections along that vector instead.

Mark Gerson
Right. I mean, the customer is not going to have any music to listen to or films to watch if the company blows up because its books are wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Mark Gerson
And who’s there to assure that the books are right? The person at the finance function of the streaming company.

Pete Mockaitis
Now it’s funny, Mark, I’ve done this sort of exercise, and when I do so, sometimes it’s really inspiring and motivating, like, “Heck, yeah, I do have this purpose, and it’s really meaningful and that’s cool.”

Mark Gerson
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And other times it’s just like, “Yeah, I guess.” It doesn’t have as much sort of emotional resonance for me. And maybe that’s just the human condition of moodiness that we all have. But do you have any pro tips for thinking through, getting the most motivational purpose juice force from the exercise?

Mark Gerson
Let’s just take your example of the finance person at the streaming company. Everything that I said that he should think is absolutely true, right? If the revenues aren’t collected, the company’s in trouble. If the costs aren’t reconciled, the company’s in trouble. There’s no customer experience if the company is in trouble. There’s no other employees being paid and their families being provided for if the company is in trouble.

So, the job crafter is telling the absolute truth. He just has to liberate himself to tell that truth and to give meaning to his work, all of which is completely right. I mean, take the hospital custodian, no one would want to be a patient in a dirty hospital.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve smelled the urine in medical facilities and it’s a real bummer. A real bummer.

Mark Gerson
It’s a real bummer in a lot of ways. So, how much do we appreciate the custodian who makes it smell like the clean establishment it should be, the clean hospital it should be? A lot. We should a lot. And that custodian should be the one who appreciates his work as much as anybody because patients can only have the kind of experience that leads to health if they’re in a clean and sanitary environment. And the environment can only be clean and sanitary if the custodian is awesome at his job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I like about this is the chains of logic feel unassailable, like, “Yeah, this is true and it is hard to argue the counter.”

Mark Gerson
Well, that’s exactly the gift of the Torah. The Torah’s chains of logic are unassailable, exactly as you said so beautifully. It’s exactly right. Which is why we said at the beginning of the conversation that the Torah is a book, it’s a guidebook that can be appreciated, learned from and lived by, by people of all faiths because its secular logic is unassailable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I think we got one really handy nugget here associated with job crafting and purpose and how that ties to the story of Joseph. Lay another one on us, Mark.

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, the Bible says, “Six days you shall work.” God says in the Bible, “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest.” Okay. It’s interesting. He doesn’t say six days work shall be done. He says, “Six days you shall work,” teaching us that there’s something fundamentally important about work, independent of the output. That it’s important for the human soul to work. And there are lots of ways to work.

Someone who throws themselves into volunteering is absolutely working. Someone who’s home with her kids is absolutely working. There are lots of ways to work, but, “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest.” Okay. So, let’s say someone follows that, and observant Jews follow it, Sabbath-observant Jews follow it, how many hours a week can you work if you follow that?

So, let’s say you can work 10 hours a day for five days a week. Now the sixth day, you really can’t work the whole day because part of the Sabbath is preparing for the Sabbath. So, you have to get home before the Sabbath and prepare for it so you’re ready for the Sabbath. So, let’s say you can work a half day on the sixth day. So, five days at 10 hours, one day at five hours, 55 hours a week. Someone who follows the Biblical formula for how much you should work and how much you should rest, and we can get into what rest is, it’s definitely not relaxing, can work 55 hours a week.

Social scientific studies of machinists in World War I and of Twitter employees in 2018 found that the optimal amounts of hours to work in a week is 55, the exact number. From 55 to 60, you have significantly-diminishing margin returns to your work. After 60, the work turns so bad that you start to compromise what you did in the previous 59.

So, the Bible gets it exactly right. The Bible’s telling us you should work 55 hours a week. And modern social science has completely, independently, the study of machinists from World War I and the Twitter study from 2018, they weren’t thinking about the laws of the Sabbath at all. But it turns out the Bible has exactly the number, to the number, of the amounts of hours that a week one should work to optimize production.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, 55 hours. That’s a good number to have in mind. And I’m thinking we had Morten Hansen on the show who had done a great deal of studying associated with high performers and what was the story there.

And I think he also landed in that zone. It’s, like, what they see when they study high performers, it’s somewhere between like 50 to 65-ish hours a week is the max. And beyond that, it’s sort of counterproductive. You’re better off just not doing that because it’s a negative. It’s harmful to push there.

Mark Gerson
Exactly, yeah. After 55, it goes to diminishing returns and then it quickly goes to negative returns. And the shocking thing is that’s exactly what the Bible says, “Six days you shall work,” 10 hours for five days, half a day on Friday, and that’s it, and then you have to rest. And what’s the rest? And this has also been proven by modern social science.

So, six days of work, the seventh day of rest. The rest is not relaxing. The rest is purposeful rest. So, what do we do on Shabbat? What we do on Shabbat is we inaugurate Shabbat on Friday night. We have a dinner with our family and friends. We pray. We have a great time. And then on Saturday, it’s not a day of sleeping as late as you can. Someone who sleeps as late as he can is considered a Sabbath violator. It’s a day of purposeful rest.

We play games with the kids. You might go to synagogue. You might study. You’re renewing the soul. And in that time of purposeful rest, what we’re effectively doing is preparing ourselves to be awesome at our job in the six days to come. So, if you want to be awesome at your job, what the Bible says is work six days and have purposeful rest on the seventh. And that purposeful rest will give you the mental and physical energy that you’re going to need to be great in the following six days.

So, if you want to be great at your job, keep the Sabbath. And, of course, someone could say, “I want to keep Saturday,” “I want to keep Sunday,” “I want to keep Wednesday,” whatever it is, but take one day and commit that day to purposeful rest.

Pete Mockaitis
And again, to the notion of work, a portion of that can be…it’s funny. If we count the childcare, Mark, then I’m blowing past my 55 hours, and maybe that’s why I’m so stressed and exhausted so often.

Mark Gerson
Right, yeah. Well, I mean, childcare can be, I guess some of it can be considered work and some of it can be considered purposeful rest. But let’s just take what we traditionally define as work. Like, more than 55 hours, people who brag about working 60, 80, 100 hours a week, they’re just wasting lots of hours and they shouldn’t brag about it. They shouldn’t do it. No boss should ask it. Why shouldn’t they ask it? Because modern social science is very clear that there will be limited productivity after 55 and negative productivity after 60.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I believe there’s also studies about video game developers will commonly enter a crazy busy season shortly before the release of the game. I don’t know if they call it crunch time. They have a name for it, but they see that exact phenomenon in terms of, actually, you’re just causing problems that you and others have to, now, undo.

Mark Gerson
Oh, very interesting. Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah, very interesting. I mean, it applies to everybody, and that’s kind of the point of the Bible. And why I wrote this book is because it doesn’t say, “Six days, you shall work, and seven days you shall rest for certain jobs.” It says it for everybody. So, the Biblical author might not have known about video game developers, but this formula certainly works for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you brought up the point at the very beginning, like, “You shall work.” It’s not so much about output needs to unfold, but rather we, as humans, need to do work for our own benefit, the doing of the work is necessary. And even if AI makes universal basic income unlock for everyone effortlessly, it would be to our detriment to not be doing work.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, exactly. I remember, so Dr. Ruth was a very close friend of ours, and she would come over for Shabbat on most weeks. And I remember, I had a friend who was over and she said to him, “What do you do?” And he said, “Well, I just retired.” And we just saw this look on her face and she stares right at him, and she says, “You cannot retire. You can rewire but you cannot retire.” Dr. Ruth, as always, was exactly right.

And, Pete, getting to your point, we see this in the social science literature, too. This is the IKEA effect, which was discovered in 2011, which is that people value things more when they build the things themselves. People value the work of their hands. They value work independently of the thing. And the IKEA effect is so interesting because one would think that we would value pre-made furniture more than we would value furniture we have to make with our own hands.

Because everyone would say, “Well, I value my time at something. If I don’t spend my time on it, I should attribute that value to the thing, and I should value the pre-made thing more.” But we don’t. We value the things that we create with our hands more than those that we don’t. Now, why is this? It’s because the Bible was right when it says, “Six days you shall work.” Work has a psychic, spiritual benefit, independent of what the work is and even what the output is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s just true. There are also studies associated with elderly folks, folks that maybe they don’t expect much from them because their health is poor and it’s hard to get around and they’re long retired. And yet, when they adopt real responsibilities associated with doing some mentorship and tutoring, for example, this is a good study, their stress levels increase because, okay, now they got some responsibilities on their plate, and yet their life satisfaction and joy increases all the more.

Mark Gerson
Totally right. And, exactly, the Bible says, “Six days you shall work, the seventh you shall rest.” It doesn’t say until age 65, in which case you should rest all the time. It could, but it doesn’t say that. It’s because it’s a fundamental human need. Now, of course, the job that one can do at 20 is probably not the job that one can do at 80, or it might not be. But the person at 80 or at 50, just find another job.

And again, it doesn’t have to be a paying job, but find something else that can be considered work. And your example, Pete, is great. A mentorship program that imposes responsibility. Not something you pop in and out of, but saying, “I have to be at this place to do mentorship, to do teaching, to do tutoring, to do counseling,” which people of all ages can do really well, that’s work.

And if someone hits a certain age when they can’t do the work they used to do anymore, totally fine. Just identify what skills, what gifts, what talents you have and see where else it can be applied, but the answer can’t be nothing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mark, lay it on us a third timeless insight to help us be awesome at our jobs.

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, let’s start with the story of Rebecca.

So, you have Rebecca and her husband, Isaac. And the question becomes, “Which son gets the birthright?” In other words, “Which son gets the mantle of Jewish leadership?” And Isaac, who has the ability to bestow it, he’s going to give it to Esau. Rebecca wants to give it to Esau’s twin brother, Jacob. Rebecca is right. Esau has his strengths, they’re discussed in the text, but the qualities needed for leadership, to perpetuate the Jewish people into the future are not one of them. The birthright has to go to Jacob.

So, Rebecca engineers in the moment, she’s a brilliant woman, engineers in the moment this ruse where Jacob is going to trick his father into thinking that he, Jacob, is his twin brother, Esau. So, how does Rebecca tell him to do it? Rebekah tells Jacob, “Put on Esau’s best clothes.” Now that’s interesting because the old man, Isaac, he’s blind so what does it matter what Jacob is wearing? But she says put on his best clothes.

So, what do we learn from that, and the many other mentions of clothing in the Bible? Well, the reason why Rebecca tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes is because of her insight, which is amplified throughout the Torah, which is that we are what we wear. So, she’s telling Jacob, “If you want to imitate Esau, if you want to be Esau, you have to wear his clothes,” because what we wear defines us.

Okay. So why is this relevant? Well, first, is it true and is it relevant? Well, there was a study out of Northwestern in 2012 where one group of participants was given a white coat. There were two groups of participants. They were given the same white coat.  One group was told it was a doctor’s coat. One group was told it was a painter’s coat. Then they were given tasks that required paying attention to detail.

Those who were told it was a doctor’s coat did much better. Just by thinking it was a doctor’s coat – it was the same coat – by thinking it was a doctor’s coat they did much better on attention-seeking tasks. There was another study out of Yale from 2014, which was a negotiation workshop. And the young men who wore suits made triple the profit of those who wore sweatpants. Same cohort of students, but those who dressed in a suit did vastly better than those who dressed in sweatpants.

And so, what does this teach us? It teaches us that what we wear is of fundamental importance for so many things, particularly being awesome at our job. Now, I think it’s a fortunate thing that this whole work from home culture is ending. But even if one were to work from home, what would be the lesson from the Bible, which has been validated by modern social science? Dress like you’re in the office.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, it’s funny, as we speak, and you’re looking so sharp, I’m looking at my blazer in the corner, I was like, “I should probably put that on right away.” So, thank you for that. And we have had that come up with Dr. Srini Pillay, what he calls psychological Halloween-ism.

Mark Gerson
Interesting. Great term.

Pete Mockaitis
When we dress the part, it psychologically impacts how you’re approaching things and showing up, so I could see that pathway with the suit. But could you actually give us some more detail on that study, the whole tale there?

Mark Gerson
Well, yeah, the two studies from Northwestern about just by wearing the same coat and being told it’s a doctor’s coat, you get attention-seeking tasks. And you have the Yale study, which showed that men wearing suits did three times better in the negotiation workshop than their colleagues from the same cohort of Yale students who were wearing sweatpants.

There was another study out of UNC from 1998 that said that female students who wore swimsuits scored worse on math tests than those who wore sweaters.

So, the lesson for being awesome at your job is no matter where you are, even if you’re working from home, just dress like you’re working from the office because, I love your term, psychic Halloween-ism, I would have used that in the book if I knew about it at the time, but it’s a great term and it says that we become what we wear, which is exactly what the Bible is telling us in so many different ways, in so many different places.

The canonical place is when Rebecca tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes. Interestingly, not any clothes, “Put on his best clothes. You put on his best clothes; you’ll be Esau. And you got to be Esau to trick your father.” And it works. And, interestingly, there was another study that showed that much of the cure for female depression is in the woman’s closet.

Because when people are feeling depressed, you wake up in the morning, you’re feeling depressed, what will most people typically do? They’ll put on like baggy sweatpants, a big sweatshirt. That makes them more depressed.

So, what this study showed is that if you’re depressed, put on a flowery dress, mix up the colors, and then you feel the vitality that your clothing reflects. So, it’s such an easy hack right from the Bible, which is that if you want to be a certain way, dress that way. Don’t dress how you feel. Dress how you want to feel.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Mark, this is so good, and it’s funny. I mean, I’ve had years of working from home, and there was an era of my life in which I put a great deal of attention into my attire, and I had shirts made to my measurements, and it was when I was peak dating times, like, find a wife time. And I put serious time and money into my clothing, and I have not since my wedding day.

Mark Gerson
Well, it’s interesting. We can talk about the secrets of the top performers, too. So, Deion Sanders, of course, the NFL Hall of Famer, great quote from Dion Sanders, “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good.” I mean, Tiger Woods, he always wore red on tournament Sundays because red, he said, is his power color.

Michael Jordan. So, Michael Jordan started the trend of wearing baggy shorts in the NBA. Why? He was wearing his UNC shorts under his bull shorts. Why was he wearing his UNC shorts? Because, to him, it channeled his beloved coach, Dean Smith.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, boy, there’s so much there in terms of the garments. And then, well, now as we talk about these athletes, it feels sort of like in terms of, like, ritual and memory and – what is it – embodied cognition.

Mark Gerson
Embodied cognition, that’s a term, yeah. Or enclothed cognition.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, sit in this place or with these things or see these reminders, that’s triggering an emotional, physiological state of being, and some physiological states of being are way more conducive to having smart, creative thoughts that are useful, versus just the opposite.

Mark Gerson
Right. And so, what it teaches, you want to be awesome at your job? What you wear matters. That doesn’t dictate what you should wear, but it does dictate that you should be intentional about what you wear.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Whether it’s your UNC shorts or a sharp orange jacket, whatever it may be.

Mark Gerson
Exactly. And so, why do I wear this orange jacket? Because I co-founded the charity United Hatzalah of Israel, which is the country’s crowdsourced system of volunteer first responders. We have 8,000 volunteers throughout the country. All EMTs are paramedics. And our goal is to get to a 911 call within the 90 seconds that separate life from death. We do about 2,300 calls a day.

Well, orange is our color because orange is the safest color at night. And we have a thousand volunteers on motorcycles, and so we have to have the safest color at night. So, I wear this jacket every day to channel United Hatzalah and the love I have for the organization, the respect I have for the volunteers and the purpose that I have with being the chairman of this great organization.

So, I have one of our board members sold his fabric company, and I asked him to make me an orange jacket, and I did. I started wearing it every day. He said, “Well, you can’t wear the same jacket every day.” So, he made me five of them. And I have our logo right here.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is perfect. I remember, I got this suit made to my measurements. It felt amazing. It was delightful in terms of, like, how I felt ready for anything.

Mark Gerson
Exactly, yep. Exactly. You totally nailed it, exactly. By wearing that suit, you felt ready for anything and everything. And what the social science suggests is you were probably more awesome at your job because you felt that way, and you felt that way because of what you’re wearing. It’s one of hundreds of great practical life hacks right from the Bible.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Mark, tell me any final things you want to share before we hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Mark Gerson
Well, first, what a great conversation. So, I so appreciate it. But, no, I mean, I’d love to share anything and everything in the book. And “God Was Right” will be out in June. And you talked before about, before you were married, you paid great attention to your clothing.

Well, clothing is a separate chapter, but the Biblical formula for dating, romance, and marriage is totally fascinating and it’s been proven absolutely right by modern social science, and it’s unfortunately not practiced today nearly as much as it should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is not a dating show but we can’t just let that lie. Mark, can you give us the two-minute version of that we need to know?

Mark Gerson
Okay. Okay. Now I’m so glad you asked. Okay, so, the happiest marriage in the Bible is between Isaac and Rebecca, which leads us to ask, “Well, how did they decide to marry each other?” So, Abraham sends his servant, Eliezer, to find a wife for Isaac. So, Eliezer sees this young woman, and he only knows three things, and this is key, only three things about the young woman.

He knows she’s from Haran, which is important because Abraham had made souls in Haran. He knows she’s very fair to look upon, and she’s exceedingly generous. She brings water for him and all of his camels. On the basis of those three and only three things, Eliezer says, “She’s the woman for my man, Isaac.”

Then this young woman, Rebecca, is given the choice, “Do you want to go with Eliezer and marry Isaac?” She has never met Isaac, but she knows only two things about him. One, that he’s rich, so he’s a good provider, and, two, that he loves God. So, on the basis of knowing only two or three things, they decide to get married.

Then the text tells us in Genesis 24:67, he married her, she became his wife, and he loved her, in that order, teaching us that the Biblical formula for finding your spouse is identify two or three characteristics, no more. Whether his friends are funny, or whether she likes to ski, or go to the beach, they’re not in there.

Identify two or three genuinely important characteristics, and there aren’t that many to choose from, then just get married. Then start doing spouse-like things, probably iterative acts of giving, and then love will follow. The opposite of that is what people in secular society do now, which is they date for years, often the same person for years. eHarmony said the average dating before marriage is 2.6 years.

In the process, they’re looking for all kinds of characteristics which are completely irrelevant to a happy marriage. In so doing, passing up perfectly good people for no good reason and they eventually decide to get married when they fall in love because, as I said in the book, you can’t fall in love. Love is something you have to cultivate. Love is saying it’s intentional.

You might fall on your face, you might fall down, but you don’t fall in love. What the Bible tells us is that love follows commitment. First, they get married, then she became his wife, they’re two different things. So, marriage is obviously a legal process, then becoming a wife is a much more substantial process, iterative acts of giving, and then love follows.

And the social science demonstrates that the Bible, as usual, totally gets it right. So, the lesson for young people is identify two or three characteristics, then just get married, then start doing spouse-like things, and then you’ll experience love.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, now I’m curious about hiring in terms of do the same principles of having a very short list of critical factors in a candidate apply there too?

Mark Gerson
Yes. As long as those characteristics are the right characteristics, and that’s true in dating too, that two or three characteristics have to be the right characteristics. In hiring, it’s going to be two or three characteristics. And then, of course, you have to do background checks and references and all that.

Pete Mockaitis
May I ask for, I mean, you’ve hired a lot of people in your day, what are your top characteristics?

Mark Gerson
Well, I think one of the underrated characteristics is “What’s the character of the man or woman?”

Pete Mockaitis
Character.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, because if you can find, if you can identify, you can do tests or look to experience for technical capabilities, but you want to work with people of good character. You can trust them when there are, inevitably, adversity and challenges. You can have the confidence that they’re going to stick through it and work through it and be with you. That they’re going to be really concerned about customer problems, they’re going to be really good colleagues. So, yeah, I think character is a very important trait to look for in someone you hire.

Pete Mockaitis
So, character, in a way, can encompass many, many different virtues. Here it sounds like you’re talking about honesty, integrity, and, like, discipline or fortitude. So, when you say character, is that kind of what you mean by that?

Mark Gerson
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Character is encompassing. It’s honesty, integrity, diligence, rigorousness, taking responsibility.

So, I would say, look for people who have it within their character to take responsibility because problems are going to happen, mistakes are going to be made, and someone who takes responsibility for them, that’s the kind of person that you want to work with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there another key factor in addition to character?

Mark Gerson
Character, I would say, is the most important thing, and it is the encompassing thing. But also, problem-solving ability and resilience. And I have a chapter in the book on anti-fragility, which the Bible asserts in Exodus. And then modern social science has completely validated it as something that is both possible and very positive for people.

So, in Exodus, we’re told the more they were, talking about the Jews in the early days of the slave experience, the more they were afflicted, the stronger they became. Now, one would normally think the point of afflicting somebody is to weaken them. But the Bible says the more they were afflicted, the stronger they became.

So, teaching us that afflictions can be strengthening and modern social science has totally validated that, for instance, scientists who’ve had their first paper rejected have more successful careers than scientists who had their first paper accepted, so long as they stay in the profession, showing us that these setbacks, these challenges, these rejections can be a real impetus for growth.

So, I think, when looking for someone to hire, when looking for a vendor to work with, that’s a really important thing. What’s going to happen when things go bad? Are they going to take responsibility? Are they going to complain? Are they going to seek a solution? These are not easily detectable in interviews, but it’s something that every employer should consider and try to ascertain as best as he can.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Gerson
Well, I’ll just go with my favorite from the Bible, which I think it was Leviticus 19:2, which is very simple, “Be holy.” Holiness is something that’s available to everybody of every faith in every time, at every strata of society. We can all be holy.

And what does that mean? It means that when confronted with the decision to do the right thing. And it’s such an inspiring piece of wisdom from the Bible because it’s telling us that holiness is completely accessible.

Everybody, anybody can be holy, should be holy. We can understand what holiness is because the Bible wouldn’t tell us to be holy if it were inscrutable. So, we can understand what holiness is and we can do it. And it’s just a great piece of Biblical wisdom to live by.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mark Gerson
So, there was one study in the early 2000s, it’s a fascinating study, which is available for anybody to look up on YouTube, just go to Gorilla Experiment, where you have a bunch of girls throwing a basketball to each other. And then this big guy in a gorilla costume comes in the middle of the game and starts beating his chest. And then he goes off screen. He’s there for like 10 seconds out of the 60.

And then the question is, “How many people noticed there was a gorilla interrupting the game?” And the answer was fewer than half. So, you have this one-minute game of girls throwing the ball, a guy comes in with a gorilla, but because noticing is so hard and so counterintuitive, very few people actually noticed.

Then there was another study out of an Irish insurance company on this that says, “Who are the best drivers?” And this class of people are the best drivers to such an extent that this insurance company, Carole Nash, gives them lower rates. They’re motorcyclists. So, why are motorcyclists the best car drivers?

Well, let’s look at the cause of motorcycle accidents. The bulk of motorcycle accidents are caused by what the traffic experts have named “Look but failed to see.”

In other words, the driver, he looks at the motorcycle in front of him, but he doesn’t see it. So, it’s in his eyesight, the motorcycle, but because he’s not used to seeing motorcycles on the road, because his brain is conditioned only to see cars, he doesn’t actually see the motorcycle right in front of him, he crashes right into it.

So, that’s how important noticing is, is that car drivers very often don’t even notice the motorcyclist right in front of them, even though they can physically see him. That shows how hard noticing is. So, who are the best car drivers? They’re motorcyclists. So, why are they the best car drivers? Because if you’re a motorcyclist, you better be a really good noticer because there are all kinds of perils on the road.

So, motorcyclists become really good noticers and, consequently, they become really good car drivers. And this is the inspiring thing about it, it’s a skill that can be cultivated. The motorcyclists have cultivated the skill of noticing and, consequently, it helps them as car drivers and elsewhere in life.

And then we have to ask, “Well, why is this relevant in my life?” Well, the answer is motorcyclists know. And lots of accidents, and not just car accidents, lots of mistakes that we make in all endeavors of life just come because we’re not noticing things. I mean, maybe you don’t notice that someone in your life is having problems that you can help with. You just don’t notice it. And you just think it’s a normal course of things, but if you notice it, you’d see there’s something different, and you can step in and help that person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Mark Gerson
Probably the most important part of my routine is I run six miles a day, I’ve not missed a day in over 20 years. I have an addiction to exercise. I need to run. And I do my Bible study on the treadmill.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And, Mark, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mark Gerson
They can go to GodWasRight.com or email me at Mark@GodWasRight.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mark Gerson
Realize that what you’re doing is important. What you’re doing is, if someone is parting with his or her money for a good or service that you’re involved with creating or producing, what you’re doing is really important.

And you should just understand the importance of it and properly define the importance of it, just like we talked about with the hospital custodian who said, “I’m not just cleaning the floors. I’m creating a healthy environment for patients.” And there’s so much wisdom in that hospital custodian. And I think everyone who wants to be awesome at his job and to find meaning and happiness in his work should take that to heart and be like the Biblical Joseph and job craft.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, this is beautiful. Thank you.

Mark Gerson
Thank you so much, Pete. What a great conversation.