CLAUDE:
You’re listening to Limitless Africa, the podcast that looks at how Africa and America can work together for shared prosperity. It’s sponsored by the US Department of State and the Seenfire Foundation.
ADAM GRANT:
I think you’re speaking to something that a lot of people misunderstand, which is many people believe that they have to build their confidence first in order to take action and initiative. And empirically, that’s just backward. It turns out that you don’t need confidence to act. It’s acting that actually builds your confidence.
CLAUDE:
Adam Grant, welcome to Limitless Africa.
ADAM:
Thank you, Claude. I’m honored to be here.
CLAUDE:
Well, I’m glad we’re doing this, but I first want to introduce you quickly to our listeners. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
His books have sold millions of copies. His TED Talks have been viewed more than 30 million times. He is the author of books you may well have read, books like Originals, How Nonconformists Move the World, as well as Hidden Potential, and Think Again. In fact, the last two have been translated and published across Francophone Africa by Nouveaux Horizons. It’s a publishing house imprint funded by the U.S. Department of State.
I’m so happy to welcome you, Adam. Do you remember what we talked about when we first met?
ADAM:
We did. We talked about givers and takers, and we also talked about personal initiative training in West Africa, if I remember correctly.
CLAUDE:
Well, you have a great memory. And that was a memorable dinner for me. But at the beginning of Hidden Potential, you refer to a study that was done on 1,500 West African entrepreneurs.
This study was based on an entrepreneurial program that I set up in Togo.
And this study separated 1,500 West African entrepreneurs into groups. One group took a business course where they studied finance, accounting, HR, marketing, pricing, etc. These are what people like you call cognitive skills.
And the other group attended a class designed by psychologists who teach personal initiative. They studied proactivity, discipline, and determination. We’ll call those character skills.
So because I have firsthand knowledge of the study and its results based on the 1500 entrepreneurs who were sampled, I’d like to ask you why you decided to focus on that specific study and those specific insights in part one of your book, Hidden Potential.
ADAM:
Well, first of all, Claude, let me just say thank you for helping to make that study possible. It’s one of the most powerful studies I’ve read in the last decade. And I was drawn to it because there’s this assumption that cognitive skills are the most important skills we can teach.
And if you’re an entrepreneur in particular, making sure that you have the expertise and the fundamentals of business is the best thing we can do to elevate your success. And as you know well, this experiment suggested otherwise.
The founders who were trained in the character skills of proactivity, discipline, determination, ah actually got nearly triple the benefit of the founders who learned the cognitive skills.
And that’s when you know when tracking their hard financial outcomes more than a year later. And I thought, one, that was striking, that character skills beat cognitive skills.
Two, I think there’s an assumption that cognitive skills are learnable, but character skills are fixed. I think most of us assume that Whether you’re a proactive person depends on your genes and your upbringing.
How much grit you have is something that was instilled by your parents. And yet what this research shows is that even if you’re an entrepreneur in your 40s and 50s, you can, just by spending about a week practicing, you can actually build these character skills. And I think that for me the biggest point, that a little bit of practice actually went a long way.
This wasn’t a year’s worth of training. It was a week of thinking about what are the challenges that other entrepreneurs might face? What are the obstacles they might run into?
And how can I be proactive and persistent in anticipating those problems and then overcoming them? And I think you put all those points together and I had to write about this research.
CLAUDE:
I would love to see if you could read one paragraph on character skills.
ADAM:
Character skills training had a dramatic impact. After founders had spent merely five days working on these skills, their firm’s profits grew by an average of 30% over the next two years.
That was nearly triple the benefit of training in cognitive skills. Finance and marketing knowledge might have equipped founders to capitalize on opportunities, but studying proactivity and discipline enabled them to generate opportunities.
They learned to anticipate market changes rather than react to them. They developed more creative ideas and introduced more new products. When they encountered financial obstacles, instead of giving up, they were more resilient and resourceful in seeking loans.
CLAUDE:
Well, this research is extremely important to me personally because, as you know, Adam, I was born in Togo and I was raised in Togo in an environment that was and military dictatorship where young people were never supposed to speak up. There was very little that was bottom-up.
Everything came from the central government and the head of state. And many of us young Togolese were taught that we didn’t know anything. And so personal initiative is not something that was normal for us.
And so I want you to talk a little bit more about personal initiative and how people can actually improve and level up, which is the central thesis of your book, Hidden Potential.
ADAM:
Well, but first of all, let me just say I’m sorry that you had to go through that. And it’s it’s just a travesty, right, that in the 21st century, we still see countries denying people of freedom and voice.
And I would love to see that change. Unfortunately, as a psychologist, that’s a little more macro than my expertise normally lives. So what I’ve been focusing on is, okay, when people are stuck in those circumstances, how do you help them find the skills and build the motivation to try to change them? And I think personal initiative is so vital there. I think about personal initiative as you know, beginning with proactivity, saying, I’m not just going to wait until things happen to react.
I’m going to be proactive in trying to imagine what are the likely circumstances in front of me um And then you know if the following threats happen, how do I turn them into opportunities?
If I run into a brick wall, what’s the fastest way over it? If I can’t get over it, how do I get around it? If I can’t get around it, how do I dig a hole under it? And it’s just, it’s really using your imagination um to begin to foresee the possible futures in front of you.
And then yeah hopefully a little bit of ingenuity to figure out, okay, what would I do in light of those futures? And then when something unexpected happens, you’re a little bit more prepared. Claude, you you don’t just think about this topic, you’ve lived it. You’re a poster child for personal initiatives. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how you’ve built it and put it into practice.
CLAUDE:
Well, I have to say a lot of it was driven by what I learned in the United States. I mean, I moved to the United States in my twenties to become an entrepreneur as a founder of a media business.
I learned the can-do American spirit and the encouragement that comes with learning from failing, which is why I love your book Hidden Potential so much because my first venture failed, but I still kept going and people didn’t stigmatize me or push me away.they did give me a second chance. And when I launched my media venture trace, it became a big success. I got funded by Goldman Sachs, raised $15 million, and sold my company. And that came from learning by failing, learning by doing, and getting started, taking that personal initiative to actually do it as opposed to just talking about it.
And that’s something that I really credit the American mindset for. And I’m not just trying to promote America as this incredible country, but America does encourage people to take risks. And the personal initiative thing is something that I learned really here.
ADAM:
So interesting. I think you’re speaking to something that a lot of people misunderstand, which is that many people believe that they have to build their confidence first in order to take action and initiative.
And empirically, that’s just backward. It turns out that you don’t need confidence to act. It’s acting that actually builds your confidence. And I think this is sort of the American spirit of entrepreneurship at a basic level to say, you know, entrepreneurs are people who don’t just recognize opportunities, they’re people who put in the effort to try to make them a reality and put their visions into action. There’s a famous saying that ah vision is, excuse me, let me say that again. There’s a famous saying that vision without execution is hallucination. And I think that great founders understand that.
And you know so sometimes you just need to act according to the hallucination. And then the hope is that the dream becomes something you can begin to see in front of you.
CLAUDE:
So within the African context, I would just want to stay there for a little bit longer. There’s a lot of outside factors that end up changing the outcome.
And I’m thinking of outside factors like poverty, lack of electricity, lack of internet connectivity, lack of government support, lack of regulation, and just really important factors that the average entrepreneur cannot solve on their own.
How does psychological training help to kind of overcome some of these kinds of systemic challenges that these African entrepreneurs are facing?
ADAM:
In the short run, it often doesn’t. But in the long run, what you see is that psychological training can give people both the knowledge and the motivation to take collective action. So if you’re an entrepreneur, for example, without sufficient internet access, um you know there’s strength in numbers. and you’re more likely to be able to get access to the technology that you need if you can build a community of people who are seeking that access together.
Without psychological training, you might sit around and think, well, what can I do about this? Or I don’t have the power to make change. With it, you’re a little bit more likely to reach out to people that you know and say, hey, here’s the challenge I’m in. Do you know other people who have similar needs and goals?
Do you know anyone who might have resources they could share with us? And you start to build what psychologists call a micro community, a small group of people who are willing to support each other to take initiative toward a desired change.
And I think that individual change is daunting. Group change is much more doable. And group change begins with individual psychology.
CLAUDE:
What are perhaps three tips that you might be able to give African entrepreneurs who are listening to our Limitless Africa podcast and seeking to develop personal initiatives?
ADAM:
I think beyond what we’ve covered so far, three tips. Number one, I would say find somebody who’s willing to be a member of your challenge network.
I think most entrepreneurs know the importance of a support network, of having cheerleaders and sponsors and mentors who have your back. But you also need thoughtful critics and coaches who are willing to tell you what your shortcomings are and then help you become a better version of yourself.
Number two, I think if your goal is to develop personal initiative, one of the best things you can do is actually try to reduce the number of priorities on your plate.
I think that many entrepreneurs end up over committing and overextending themselves. You feel like you have to be every single part of the business. And the reality is that the more things you take on, the harder it is to do anything well.
And also the less time and energy you have to think about the future and plan in a proactive way. So I think sometimes less can be more.
And then I think number three would probably be along with a to-do list, you need a to-don’t list which is a list of rules you’re not going to break and bad habits you will not adopt. They could be simple things. So Claude, my to don’t list includes don’t scroll on social media, ah don’t turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch, don’t pick up my phone right before bed, right? Simple things that I know can waste a lot of time and in many cases interfere with my sleep or with my focus.
CLAUDE:
Well, the final question I have for you is actually a question that I didn’t think of, but it actually comes from one of your readers. That reader is Saiba Ngousmon.
He is from Chad, and he runs a platform called AfroSlam. Afro-Slam promotes slam poetry in Africa. And actually, Saiba is an ambassador for the publishing house Nouveaux Horizons. This is the publishing house that publishes your books in and in French for the African continent. So I’m going to now read out the translation of his question.
So Saiba’s question is, you talk about thinking flexibly in Think Again, right? That’s your book, Think Again. How would you encourage critical thinking in Africa, a place where authority, tradition, and conformity are encouraged?
You have to think again in order to be innovative. But in Africa, the education system and cultural contexts actually value discipline, loyalty to older generations, hierarchy, and repetition.
How would you introduce critical thinking without causing conflict or rejection?
ADAM:
Well, thanks to Saiba, that’s an incredibly thoughtful question. And I should just say, I am not an expert on Africa by any means. So take this with a few grains of salt. I think from from studying the principles of rethinking around the world, so I think You’re right, Saiba, that the skills are even more important in a context where they’re rare, but they can be a little bit threatening.
And so I like to start with the low-hanging fruit, which is to ask people, what’s a simple tradition that you think maybe isn’t relevant anymore?
And that starts the conversation of, well, maybe, maybe some of our traditions and best practices were built in a world that no longer exists. And it’s important in order to to evolve, um to to update how we think about our norms and routines.
One of my favorite memes says that tradition is peer pressure from dead people. And so I think that’s, it’s worth taking to heart, right?
CLAUDE:
Wow, I love that. Yeah.
ADAM:
I think at a basic level, your responsibility is not just to please your predecessors.
It’s to create a better future for your offspring. And that means that we shouldn’t just be dutiful descendants. We should strive to be good ancestors. And I guess that’s the other way I would frame the conversation about rethinking things is to say, you know, okay, we already know what it looks like to be a dutiful descendant.
It’s very easy to be a custodian of the past. We also want to be good stewards of a better future. So what would you have to change in order to feel like you’re a good ancestor and you’re not just making your elders proud, you’re actually making your children proud?
CLAUDE:
Thank you for your time.
