David Yeager: The Science of Motivating Young People

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This is a special episode of Remarkable People because we're going to get into parenting issues in which I am an expert, not in solving, but experiencing basically the remarkable team and I we're on a mission to make you remarkable and helping me today is David Yeager. David is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He co-founded and co-directs the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute.
He is, and I say this as the highest form of praise, part of the Carol Dweck fan club. That includes Mary Murphy and Katie Milkman. He received his PhD in Developmental and Psychological Science from Stanford University School of Education. And prior to his career as a researcher, he was a middle school teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So he has real world experience.
David's research focuses on adolescent development and he examines how social cognitive factors interact with structural and physiological factors to shape youth behavior. In other words, he can help you with your parenting mysteries, frustrations and insecurities.
David's recent book is called 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. This book explores how adults can effectively engage young people by adopting a mentor mindset. This mindset respects the need of young people for status and autonomy. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now here is the remarkable David Yeager.
David Yeager:
Guy. I have to tell you, first of all, I'm very happy to be on the podcast, but I read your first book when I was like, I'm going to say ten, maybe eleven.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh My God.
David Yeager:
My dad was in tech and sales specifically. He was doing Ethernet, setting up the foundations of Ethernet, and that became internet backbone in the early nineties. But he was always in Silicon Valley, and he brought your book back one time and I read it, and he loved it because he always felt like at the time in the late eighties, big business was vilified.
You've got the kind of Wall Street, all the movies, the Christian Bale and all that kind of stuff, but he always loved your philosophy that when you're selling something great, you're making people's lives better. And that was his philosophy of life. So he wanted me to read it as a teenager. He's read maybe one book every ten years. So I don't know. I have no memories of him being literate except when he handed me your book as a teenager.
Guy Kawasaki:
He clearly understood the ten to twenty-five year-old brain, I guess. Oh, that's a great story. That made my day. Let's just end the right here.
David Yeager:
There we go.
Guy Kawasaki:
So just explain to my audience the state of the ten to twenty-five year-old brain.
David Yeager:
Yeah, we'll do this very quickly. No, just kidding. I would say that there's a lot of narratives around there about the ten to twenty-five year-old brain being incompetent, being shortsighted, being impulsive, impossible to reason with, and that's not my perspective. My perspective is anytime you see that someone's hard to motivate, it's often because there's a difference in what they're paying attention to relative to what we're trying to use to motivate them.
I think that's true for babies. I think that it's also true for teenagers just in a different and more subtle way, and it's true for twenty year-olds. So the big punchline is that young people when they seem like their brains are turned off and we can't reach them, in fact a lot of what's happening is that they're paying attention to their social standing.
Where are they compared to peers? How are they being treated compared to adults? And the keywords for me are status and respect. And I don't mean a superficial version of status like having the most likes on social media. What I mean is the feeling like you've earned a valuable reputation in the eyes of someone whose opinions you care about.
And young people are really hungering for that kind of feeling that they've done something socially valuable and impressive. And when we tap into that, then we can really light them on fire. And when we don't, then it causes all kinds of problems.
Guy Kawasaki:
In a negative way, would you explain why kids then join gangs? Is it for the social status and the belonging?
David Yeager:
Gangs are really complicated. We got to remember, street level gangs that affect youth are like the tentacles of major, almost corporation like entities that have huge plants for distributing illegal goods or drugs and so on. And they'll say and do anything in order to recruit people. So they're more clever in their marketing than the best junk food manufacturer, tobacco companies.
So it's amazing that there aren't more kids involved in gangs given how much money is on the line, how much power is on the line, and how much they really need young people to be on the streets distributing things. So that's a very important kind of background for gangs. Gangs are not really driven by one local eighteen year-old that recruits a bunch of thirteen to fourteen year-olds. It's a global corporation really even if street level people aren't aware of that.
What are the motives that work? They're the same motives that work for getting young people to join. I don't know, a pre-Olympic team or the debate team or baseball, right? It's a sense of affiliation, it's a sense that your work might matter.
Sometimes it's fear that you'll be ostracized or harmed if you don't join, then those are powerful motivations for a kid just starting puberty, not knowing who they are, figuring out what their place in the world is and they become even harder to overcome if your brothers and cousins are involved because they vouch for the organization.
I think the kids joining gangs is not that hard to explain. I think it's the same mechanisms that are involved in lots of other things. I think it's more interesting a lot of times is the kids who have all the risk indicators and don't join, and that's actually the majority of kids. So what are they doing? How are they thinking more about their future than we're giving them credit for? I think that's the more interesting question.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what's the answer to that question?
David Yeager:
I think that in general, adults have concluded that young people are shortsighted and impulsive and can't think much about the future. And I look around and I see young people with amazing potential. We're about to start the Olympics and we're going to see the most amazing performances in a diverse array of sports where the young person who's the best in the world is like fourteen to seventeen years old.
Those young people were staying up late, waking up early, they were listening to coaches, they were sacrificing. And that's just one example among many of how young people can have a lot of self-control and think about the future when it's for the sake of something that matters to them.
What's the big reward in the Olympics? It's not really professional sports. A lot of it is your reputation and your sense of acclaim, and I think that's a kind of supercharged version of what happens on a day-to-day basis when a young person is really committed to a cause, often something bigger than themselves, a sense of purpose. They're willing to delay gratification and wait for the second marshmallow or whatever you want to call it, for the sake of doing something important.
Guy Kawasaki:
Have you noticed a male/female difference in these factors and how they react to these factors?
David Yeager:
So the reason I have ten to twenty-five as the age range in the book I'm talking about is because age ten is about the age of onset of puberty and puberty does a lot of things to the brain. Among the most important in my perspective is what happens through gonadarche, which is the kind of onset of gonadal hormones like testosterone, estradiol, and those sensitize the brain to social reward and also social punishment.
Twenty-five is the other side of it because we're talking about the social offset of adolescents, the adoption of an adult-like role in our culture, basically the premium on advanced technical skills. It's pushed back the adoption of a first major career or role to later and later in our global society.
But let's back up and talk about that ten year-old age. So we know girls start puberty around a year and a half earlier before boys. There are some race and ethnicity differences. So Latino girls tend to start puberty median around seven or eight years old Asian boys in the US more fifteen. So you've got a wide range of when puberty is starting and therefore when a lot of this kind of hypersensitivity to status and disrespect is starting to affect the brain.
So the only real kind of notable difference is the onset of some of these processes, little earlier for girls, little later for boys. But once young people are in the middle of this social reawakening, then you tend to see very consistent differences or consistent trends across the two. So there are few differences.
So in a great study that Eveline Crone did, they took teenagers around ten to eighteen or even twenty-five and they had them provide saliva samples and they looked at testosterone levels at two different periods, two years apart, and they're boys and girls throughout that whole range, which is that both boys and girls go up a lot, girls a little earlier than boys.
But the extent to which your testosterone increased over two years was just as correlated with brain functioning and boys as it was for girls. So it's not really the case that testosterone is just a male hormone, it's in greater supply in men versus women, but its influence on the social reawakening of the brain is very similar.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to say that after I read your book, all I could conclude is that I really suck as a parent. I just want to know what's the effect of parents nagging a ten to twenty-five year-old person to do his homework, clean her room, whatever, wake up early, take out the garbage can. What's the effect of nagging?
David Yeager:
Yeah, I'd say that first, Guy, I have a growth mindset about your parenting. I think you can improve and so everyone can get better. But I would say that the more serious point is that there are studies of nagging and there's a great paper by Silk and Colleagues and my colleague Ron Dahl is on this paper, I write about it in the book where they took teenage girls and they put them in the FMRI scanner. So a big magnet that's detecting different levels of blood flow in different regions of your brain.
While the magnet is spinning, they play a recording of the moms nagging them. The moms had a few weeks earlier recorded themselves saying things like, "I could tell you to clean your room and you just don't do it. I tell you to get your shoes and you don't do it, and I tell you to be nice to your siblings and you never listen to me. You just need to calm that down." And so the question is, what's happening in the teenage brain?
And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Oh, the teenage brain is probably saying, thank you mom for this important feedback on all of my behavior. I really can't wait to implement all of this wonderful sage advice because you've thought it through and I haven't apparently. And so I can't wait to comply without question." Actually, no, that's not at all what's happening.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
David Yeager:
What you see instead is a massive decrease in regions of the brain related to planning. So the medial prefrontal cortex, the region related to thinking ahead, logical reasoning is shut off. The lay stereotype is it's a kind of nagging induced frontal lobotomy that teenagers are going through. But the other parts of the regions that are really interesting is the temporal parietal junction, the TPJ.
And that region is implicated in what's called social cognition, which is mind reading, inferring what someone else thinks. And you also see a huge decrease in the TPJ and that matters because a lot of times what parents are doing when they're nagging is they're not actually that clear on what the young person needs to do.
In the example I just said, the mom says, "I'll tell you; your room needs to be cleaned and it's a mess." And the mom's mind, it's very clear that she said, "I want you to clean your room right now."
But the kid could hear that and be like, "Sounds like someone should clean my room. You're right, this is a mess. Someone should get on that." And so it's an inference to get the implied meaning of the mom in that case, that the mom wants you to clean up your room and that region of the brain, the TPJ is what allows them to make that inferential leap and that's shut down during nagging.
So the punchline is if it looks like it's going in one ear out the other, it often is, and that's what we see in the neuroscience, but that's not a developmental fact of the adolescent brain.
That's a circumstance, that's a situational response to the tone and tenor of what adults are saying. And that can be changed. And when it is changed, then teenagers can show much better motivation and listening and responsiveness.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so what's the punchline? Okay, clearly I've been shutting down my kids' TPJ for four kids. Now how do I get them to clean the room?
David Yeager:
Four kids? That's tough. I have four kids too, and there's a lot of mediocre parenting happening in my house. I'll just be the first to say. And I'll also say that my twelve year-old was very excited for my book to come out so that way he could be my first Amazon reviewer and tell everyone what a fraud I am. That was his plan. And I was like, "Yeah. That sounds about right."
I feel like my theory still is true here. I'm nailing it. But I think that the parenting coaches I interviewed for my book who really have some good insight, one is Lorena Seidel. It's like a philosopher talking to parents. The first thing she asks us to think about as parents is why are we so hung up on the specific thing that we're asking them to do in this moment?
I get it. It's infuriating, right? Your kids won't put on shoes or pants and you're like, "I have to go to work. I have an actual job. So this is really frustrating." But a lot of times what happens is that parents aren't mad about the behavior. They're mad about what it means. So part of this is this invisible audience. Am I the kind of parent who can ask my kids clearly to do something and they say no, and they reject me?
What does that mean for me? And if one of my peers saw this or one of the other helicopter parents in Silicon Valley who are judging everything I'm doing, if they see this, what are they going to think? And I've had those experiences living in Palo Alto, other parents coming up to me implying and being a bad parent, my kid is playing with a truck in the wrong way or whatever.
There's this invisible audience and we're often ashamed in front of that invisible audience, and that causes us to overreact to our kids. So we go down this path of yelling, telling, blaming, and shaming in part because we're responding to what we think their behavior means, not what it actually is. So the first step really is to ask ourselves, why are we so hung up on this? What are we really trying to accomplish? And is that really in our young person's long-term best interest?
Guy Kawasaki:
So are you telling me that the fact that my kids' room is a mess and drives me crazy, that's my problem, not his?
David Yeager:
I mean some level, yeah. I mean, I think that what Lorena says a lot is that we're often overreacting to our emotions not theirs, which doesn't mean that she lets the kids run the show. It's not the inmates running the asylum or whatever. I've seen houses where she works with parents. Instead, what she does is she has conversations with them where you take them seriously as adults and she figures out what's the reason why they're not doing it and talks to them respectfully, and then they make a plan.
They jointly and collaboratively troubleshoot. And a lot of people don't do that because what happens is we come home from work, we're super busy, we're like, "This house is a mess. It's a disaster. You guys need to clean it up." Then you ask once and you ask twice and then you yell, not you, but this is what happens a lot.
And then all of a sudden the kid hates us and they're not going to listen to us the next time. And I think it's a pretty predictable pattern. Let's say that instead of the example being you getting your kids to clean up the room, it was a math teacher where the kids never turned in their homework, which is the same kind of thing. Kids don't want to do it. It's tedious. It feels like an unfair imposition on their time. It's not fun.
And they mostly just have to listen to grownups. If I was a principal, I walked into a classroom and none of the kids were doing their homework, I wouldn't say, "Look at these idiots who can't get it together." He'd be like, "Teacher, you need a better plan." That's the first thing I would say. And whether it's middle school or a good kindergarten classroom, all the kids clean up. So if they can get twenty unruly four year-olds to do it, we should be able to do it for one kid as parents.
And there's nothing secret. It's really just procedure and planning in conversations. But we don't typically do that as parents because we're in a hurry. And so we pick the short-term solutions. And the short-term solutions, in my book I write about this one is what I call an enforcer mindset where you come in there guns blaring, yelling, telling, blaming, shaming, listen to me, and then they don't because the TPJ and prefrontal is turned off and then we get matter and matter.
Or what I call a protector mindset, which is more like, "Oh, I see this is inconvenient for you, so just don't do it. Don't worry about it." And in both cases, the room never gets cleaned, but it's a different set of problems. And what I find that works a lot better than either of those is something we call a mentor mindset. And that's the idea that you have super high standards so high that some people from the outside look at you and think you're lunatic. That's what I often hear.
But you're so supportive that young people can meet those standards. And if you walk into a math classroom where low-income, urban schools and all the kids get their homework out immediately and they listen to the teacher and they're curious and they raise their hands and they ask questions and they come after class.
I've seen it lots and lots of times. They're all very high standards, very high support. None of those classes with great behavior where the kids do what they're supposed to do are authoritarian dictators or low standards pushovers, none of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
So David, if I understood you correctly, I go to my son and I say, "Son, I have very high standards for what our house looks like. So you and I are going to come up with a plan to reach my standards for this house." Is that what you're telling me to do?
David Yeager:
I don't often see mentor mindset or great leaders say it in those terms because that can come off as robotic. Or they could be like, those are your standards. They're not mine. I don't care about those. So I'd have to meet your kids and figure out your personality a little more to give you more specific advice.
And there are parenting experts that are better at the very specific advice. But in general, what I see is they turn the conflict into a problem that's both of your problems, not just your problem. And then the young person has a reason to problem solve with you. And then it's a lot of questioning and a lot of asking and waiting for legitimate answers. Now, the wrong way to question is, "I told you to clean up and you didn't. What were you thinking?"
You don't really want to know what they're thinking if you say what were you thinking? Because clearly your implication is that you were not thinking and you're an idiot and I'm disappointed in you for all time. That's the implication in their minds, right?
There's a great story Lorena told about a family who their kids were just fighting on the train in New York, and it was so embarrassing for the mom. They're being brats and the mom sitting there mortified and every fiber for being wants to just yell at her kids or grab them, be like, "Stop what you're doing right now. All of these people are judging me for being a horrible parent and a terrible person."
And so she coached the parent previously, and instead she leaned in, she's like, "I have a problem right now." She wasn't loud. She was like, "You guys are being so loud. And I think all of these people are just judging me. I think they're saying I'm a bad mom and think I'm a terrible person and I can't live like that.
It's just really hurting me. So I don't know what to do because I know you guys have a conflict. You need to figure it out one way or the other. I'm not saying you don't need to figure that out, but what I'm asking is how can we solve your problem in a way that doesn't make me feel so embarrassed in front of all of these strangers?"
And then the kids were like, "All right, why don't I just give him the toy." And then, "Yeah, can you just give him the toy? Yeah." And then the problem was over. And so there's almost always a solution like that. Now, I don't know in your specific case, what is your son's history of trauma and PTSD of former room cleaning experiences? But I will say in general, you can get do-overs as long as we lean in and listen respectfully and jointly problem solve.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just for the record. So people listening to this, I love my kids and my kids are my greatest source of joy. And I look at this and I say, compared to some of the problems that other kids present to their parents, my kids are angels.
David Yeager:
No, I know.
Guy Kawasaki:
I just want to go on the record.
David Yeager:
No, it's great. But I'm sure they would like to just not have those conflicts and then hang out with their totally cool, awesome dad more. It's in everyone's best interest to figure out a solution to not argue as much.
Guy Kawasaki:
The same son who won't clean his room, we just surf together a few times. We surfed together today before this.
David Yeager:
In Santa Cruz?
Guy Kawasaki:
In Santa Cruz, yes.
David Yeager:
Yeah, that's where I learned how to surf.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, come down, Madisun and I will both go surfing with you. But David, I thought you're going to give me this magic solution where, "Guy, I'm going to tell you how you can increase your son's feeling of status and respect by cleaning his room." But I guess that's not to come, huh?
David Yeager:
I honestly think a lot of what frustrates us as adults is a conflict over something that's not actually the most important thing for them. And I think young people rightly perceive that we're squabbling over details when they're focused on more important stuff, like feeling socially accepted by their peer groups, which feels like life and death to them. So I think there's a lot of stuff like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you touched on it, but can we just make a complete definition of the incompetence model that many adults have about kids? What is this incompetence model?
David Yeager:
Yeah, the incompetence model is the belief that young people's brains and hormones, et cetera, make them crazy and incapable of wise decision making, shortsighted, selfish, just really not full-fledged thinking rational adults. And there's a long history for this model. You can look back in Plato's dialogues for metaphors of the kind of unruly, youthful passions that need to be tamed and tempered by the reasoned, philosophically aligned goals of the more rational brain.
And modern neuroscience took a lot of those plutonic metaphors and made them be the canonical take on young people's brains. When we said that the reward sensitivity regions of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, et cetera, that these are too powerful for the prefrontal regions to reign in control.
And the reason for that incompetence model originally was really positive. It was often used in support of youthful defendants who committed heinous crimes and were being sentenced to life without parole or the death penalty before they were eighteen.
And what neuroscientists successfully argued to the Supreme Court was that the teenage brain can't be fully accountable for its choices because it's not fully formed. That would be holding a four-year-old accountable for saying a curse word. And so that neurobiological incompetence model ended up being really powerful but also a little bit misguided.
Guy Kawasaki:
So have we basically refuted that model now?
David Yeager:
So what the neuroscientists now think is that it's at best incomplete, that it's not like the teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex instead that their prefrontal regions are more sensitive to the reward sensitivity regions. So there's more of a linkage between the goals we have and what we want and how we want to feel. And the prefrontal regions in that early age. You can think of it as in the old model, the prefrontal was teaching the affective or emotional regions to basically cool it and calm down.
So it was a top down approach. What we now think is that starting with puberty, young people are trying to figure out how to be socially successful. And a big way to figure that out is by paying attention to what feels rewarding socially or avoiding what feels painful socially like humiliation. And so you can think of the emotional regions as the teacher of the prefrontal.
So what should the prefrontal be planning? What should it be focusing on? How should it logically be reasoning? That's a product of experiences that either felt good or felt bad earlier on. And so that reverses a lot of what we now think, and there were some scientific reasons why this happened.
So scientists started using scanners that had a different kind of resolution where it could look temporally at links from one region to another rather than just was it offer on? And then also just some rational thinking that it just can't be the case that teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex.
They plan lots of stuff all the time. Like I was saying, Olympic athletes and so on, they learn calculus, they learn foreign languages, they do a lot of stuff or even deviant behavior takes a lot of planning, like sneaking out of the house without your parents catching you.
They're like General Patton in the European theater with a million plans and charts and it's actually complicated. Or getting someone to fall in love with you, it takes so many plans or even just asking someone to prom, right? It's more and more elaborate.
There's all kinds of planning and prefrontal cortex happening, and just because we don't see it on the math homework or cleaning the room doesn't mean their brains are incapable of doing it. It means that they're aligned with what they care about, not what we care about.
Guy Kawasaki:
And could this have an unintended consequence that some enthusiastic prosecutor will say, "Okay, so we've refuted this incompetence model fifteen year-old kid should be sentenced to life for this crime. He's in more control than we thought."
David Yeager:
I think that first of all, that's a very real concern. Any scientific idea should be scrutinized for someone who could use it with the worst possible intentions. And I think that one thing the first wave of neuroscience did really was they tested different messages about the teenage brain before they used them in court. And I think someone should do that again with the new consensus. But everything I'm saying is coming from a lot of the same neuroscientists who were the expert witnesses.
Adriana Galvan, who's at UCLA, she did the original studies that people thought meant that teenagers lack of prefrontal cortex compared to the emotion regions. And then she's a great scientist, she kept doing the work and realized, "Okay, here's what the story really is." So everything I'm saying here is coming from the same people who, and for the most part, who contributed to the first wave of neuroscience.
And what I think needs to be done is to think, "All right, how do we frame youthful indiscretions or even youthful crimes as a teenager's responsiveness to the environment, which is definitely what it is. And that environment could change, and their brains will change without concluding that they lack any self-control or any potential." I think the main point is they're more responsive to the experiences in the environment that drive social status and respect.
So that could make them do crazy stuff sometimes, or it could make them learn to play the trombone or the piano or learn how to surf. And so there are a lot of things that environmental responsiveness can do, but just because it's influencing them then at that age doesn't mean it always will. And that's the legal test. The legal test is, is your brain going to be the same at sixty as it is right now at sixteen? And I think the answer is no. In both the new research and in the old research.
Guy Kawasaki:
A couple of months ago, we interviewed someone named Halim Flowers, and at the age of sixteen, he was sentenced to about forty years for accessory to murder. And the law in Maryland changed so that if you were sentenced to something that severe as a minor, if you served a minimum of twenty-two years, you were let out. So he was let out, and now he's this really great artist. Many people believe he's the next Jean-Michel Basquiat. It's a very interesting case that we touched on this before talking to you.
David Yeager:
There's tremendous potential to change, even for people who've done negative actions. And that doesn't mean there shouldn't be accountability or responsibility, but as a society, we need to have ways for people to show us that they can change and contribute. And that's a good example of why we need that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you touched on this briefly, but can you go a little bit deeper about the mentor mindset, enforcer mindset, protector mindset and apathetic mindset? Because that kind of covers all the possible choices for a mindset, right?
David Yeager:
Yeah. So you can think of it as a two by two square where one dimension is the level of standards that you have. So you could have high or low standards. Another dimension is your level of support. So you could have high or low support. And support could be emotional or it could be logistical. If I'm your boss, giving you enough time or allowing you to go talk to other colleagues about your project before you present to senior management.
And for a long time I think people felt like there were only two options, either super high standards, but I'm going to make you cry at work every day. Or very low standards, but I'm your friend and it's clear that I care about you.
The very high standards, low support, that's the enforcer mindset. And I call it enforcer because the idea is my job is to just enforce rigorous standards and you can meet them or not. And if you don't, punishment will be coming. And if you do great, that means you're one of the top people.
And so you get a lot of emphasis on talent and finding the top 3 percent in the enforcer mindset, you get a lot of really harsh punishments. You sometimes get lavish rewards for the top performers in the enforcer mindset because you think those are the only ones who deserve to be rewarded. In the workplace, things like stack ranking where every six months, all the people in the company would be ranked compared to peers, and then you would fire the bottom 15 percent or so.
So it's not very supportive of growth mindset. But what Carol and I found is that you can have a growth mindset. People can grow but still end up in the enforcer category. If you think the way to make people grow is to make them afraid of failure or desiring the massive rewards. Basically, if you think people just lack discipline and concern, then enforcer mindset can be your way. In your mind, you can go to sleep saying, I helped people, I showed them the real standards.
The protector mindset is an alternative, and we see this a lot, especially with teachers and youth workers, maybe some parents. And there the goal is to basically protect the young person from distress. And the underlying theory is one of neurobiological incompetence, and it's the theory that if you're too stressed, then you're going to get discouraged and give up.
And I need to give you baby steps and little successes not expose you to the real standards because if you saw how far you were from the real standard, then you might give up, you might cry, you might lose it, you might get stressed out. So I'm going to shield you from reality as long as possible and then do everything for you and then convince you maybe that you succeeded. And if you failed, apologize to you for making it too hard. I shouldn't have challenged you that much.
But you can see how, again, a kindergarten teacher could have that mindset and they're a very nice friendly kindergarten teacher, but that's not a great way to build a rocket or to solve a new math equation or to address political division in our country. You need to meet the real standard of what's actually needed. But again, the protector can go to sleep at night and say, "I feel good about myself. I was caring and I was concerned."
And the reason I have this framework of mentor mindset is I want to say to the enforcer, you've got the standards. Great, that's good. You're preventing society from going to hell in a hand basket by all these lax standards. Great, but add the support so that everyone can meet them, not just the handful of people that you picked as the best.
To the protector, I want to say you care. Awesome, that's great. Keep doing that. But now let's add the standards so that your care is going somewhere. It's productive. It's moving people towards some real standard. The apathetic is your low standards and low support, but they're checked out, they don't care. And what we typically find is that once they start caring, they end up in either the enforcer or protector buckets.
Anyway, so I don't really talk about them very much. My summary of the three main mindsets comes from my daughter who is now fourteen, but she was twelve at the time. And she came into my office while I was working at the book not knowing when I was writing about, and she's like, "Daddy, what kind of teacher were you?" I used to be a middle school teacher. And I was like, "I don't know. What are the options?"
And she's like, "Were you that mean teacher that yells at everybody and makes them do all the work, but then no one listens to them and the minute they turn their back, then they goof off because no one respects them?"
And I was like, "No, what's the other option?" She's like, "Were you that really nice and friendly teacher where everyone just hung out and they didn't really do anything in class, but the teacher was nice and they thought everybody liked them, but really no one respected them because they had no standards?"
And I was like, "No. Well what's the other option?" And she was like, "Were you that teacher that was really hard and strict, but in a way that made you love the subject even if you didn't love it before? So everybody worked super hard and even if they left the room, they kept working and really wanted to do it because they wanted to impress the teacher."
I was like, "I tried to be that teacher every day, Scarlet." But those are the three mindsets. I was like, "Scarlet, did you hear this somewhere? Did you read a book?" She's like, "Nope, just came to me in my brain." And to me that kind of confirmed that these three mindsets are not just some social science nonsense we're making up. This is really how young people see the world. And most people can think back on examples, whether it's coaches or parents or teachers that fit in one of those three.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm almost afraid to ask this question, but Madisun, what kind of mindset do I have, Madisun?
Madisun Nuismer:
I've worked for you for about three years now, and I can confidently say you have the mentor mindset, you have extremely high standards, but I respect you. And so I want to meet those. But you also give me a lot of support along the way, logistically, emotionally. Guy, you have the mentor mindset.
Guy Kawasaki:
I didn't have to pay her to say that.
David Yeager:
Yeah, I was going to say there's no reason to doubt the word of the paid employee in the ear. I believe it. I read your book, sounds pretty good. Carol Dweck asked me, she was like, "David, started getting nervous. You keep talking about these mindsets." She's my collaborator on these projects. And she's like, "What was I?"
I think she worries about being the enforcer, just being the super tough person. And certainly Stanford graduate students these days are different than they were. I think they're worried about different stuff. And I was like, "Carol, you were the perfect mentor mindset to me." She's like, "But I didn't really do anything."
I was like, "Yeah, but you always made time to meet with me. You never blew smoke. You were always giving me the honest truth about the work. But then you problem solved." You're like, "Okay, this isn't good enough, but what are we going to do about it?" Rather than, "This isn't good enough. Get out of my office. You lose her."
Which is what I was worried about because when you talk to a famous professor, you're like, "Oh my god, they're going to think I'm an idiot." So I was like, "Carol, you were great." She's like, "Well, thank you." So now that's on record that you and Carol are both mentor mindset leaders.
Guy Kawasaki:
I bet Mary Murphy would say the same thing about Carol. I adore Carol.
David Yeager:
Yeah, Mary and I were graduate students together. We overlapped one year and then now we're collaborators.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, that's great. I love her idea that you have to have an organization and environment that has a growth mindset. It's not just what's between your temples.
David Yeager:
Yeah, it's super important. I think that Mary was the first to really articulate how you go from an individual mindset to a culture and what are the cues that signal that? And the reason Mary and I teamed up on basically the most important projects I've been doing for the last five years have been with Mary Murphy and Carol Dweck, Mary of course the author of Cultures of Growth.
And is the focus on, all right, once you know that you need a culture of growth, how do you change the behavior of, in our case, teachers who are creating that culture? And that's how we got to mentor, forcer, protector. It turns out that if you're an enforcer, you don't create a culture of growth, you create a culture of selecting and just choosing the top people or punishing the lower achieving people and the protector.
It's not a culture of growth either, but that's no one's held to high standards. So there's no push to grow. And the mentor though, you believe that your goal is to align your behavior with the long-term best interest of the young person that's working with you or that you're mentoring.
And in that case, you end up pushing young people to create a culture of growth. So these three ideas of growth mindset, cultures of growth and mentor mindset all come together both in literature and also in our minds as a path toward creating organizations and ideally a society in which young people can grow and flourish.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what if you're a mentor listening to this and you say, "David, I have the mentor's dilemma. I just don't know where to draw the line and how do I provide support but not too much, and how do I have a high standard but not so high as to make it a negative?" So how do you get around the mentor's dilemma?
David Yeager:
Yeah, I think it's a great question. What I've seen people do is to not compromise either the standards or the support. But when you don't get it right the first time, you still get a do-over. And I think people don't realize that. They think that conversation is over and done. I hope they forget about it. I'm moving on.
But a lot of times if you don't strike the right balance of standards and support, you can go talk to people afterwards. Lorena Seidel taught me this with parenting. We lose it, we yell at our kid, and we just hope they don't bring that up to their therapist in twenty years.
But in fact, you can go and you can be like, "Hey, spend five minutes. I just want you to know we have very high standards in the house. That's why I was upset. But I also am very much trying to support you and understand where you're coming from, and I didn't do that, so I didn't live up to the values of the family.
So can we please troubleshoot? How can we do X? But also I want to make sure that it matches with what you think." That kind of thing can be done in management too. You could have a performance review where you just harp on their flaws thinking they assume that you're coming from a good place and then they leave in tears and you're like, "Oh, I screwed that up."
First of all, be transparent. Look, I was really focusing on flaws because you have so many strengths that it's almost not worth focusing on in the performance review, but I want you to make sure that in writing, I'm going to emphasize your strengths and what you did well. And second of all, what I should have done as your manager was troubleshoot with you on how to prioritize addressing any potential weaknesses, which ones do you want to work on? How do you want to do it? How can I support you?
So you don't back off your standards, you don't back off your feedback, but you say, "Look, I should have done a better job troubleshooting with you." And managers I interviewed for my book, like Stefani Okamoto, who was at Microsoft for a long time is now at ServiceNow. It's just a legend, amazing manager. She doesn't always get it right and when she gets it wrong, she has enough of a communication line to talk about it.
I think the main punchline for mentors is I'm not asking you to be Athena from Greek mythology like capital M mentor who spent twenty years guiding Telemachus while Odysseus was off fighting the Trojan War.
You can just have a philosophy and an approach of high standards and high support, and then spend a little time in conversation if you don't strike the right balance, and you end up saving a lot of time because then you end up having motivated, independent, willing, young people who want to work hard, who don't quit and cheat the minute you turn your back, who aren't trying to go hide in the break room and smoke weed so they don't have to do any work, right?
It's like, no, they take pride in their work because you took them seriously enough to hold them to a high standard. And so I think being a mentor doesn't mean getting it perfect every time. It doesn't mean it takes up all your time. It just means being a little bit wiser about these conversations and then saving yourself lots of time and frustration later.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. This is an off the wall question, and so I'm not sure we'll keep it in the interview, but I am so curious because our paths overlap. I went to Stanford, I know Carol Dweck, I've interviewed her twice. I've been to her house; she's written in a blurb for me.
I know Mary Murphy; I know Angela Duckworth and Katie Milkman. So we have commonality, and I know that you now teach at University of Texas in Austin. So this is the off the wall question, which is can you help me understand the Texas mindset? How do they think there?
David Yeager:
Yeah. So I'm from Houston and my parents went to UT, and the most important job of a Texan is to be the evangelist for Texas at all times. And we have that in common. We're both evangelists. And Texas is interesting because the number one thing is everyone's convinced it's the best state in the country. It's the best state in the best country of the world, therefore it's the best place in the world.
So that's the number one thing. And there's a deep distrust of outsiders trying to impose their logic and values on Texans. What you may not know is that for everyone, but people from Dallas, Texans think Dallas is not real Texas, basically New York, it's a big city. It's a bunch of fancy cars, and you can watch the Richard Linklater movie, Bernie with Jack Black.
And there's a great scene in that where this Texan at a diner walks through the stereotypes of the different regions of Texas, and you got your Dallas snobs with your Mercedes-Benz and goes on and on. And then real Texas is small towns and so on.
So that's the most important thing. And Texans are constantly comparing themselves to coastal elites who think they're better than Texans. And so anytime coastal elites plans blow up in their face, every Texan rejoices.
They're like, "See, that was dumb." So California taxes, they're like, "You idiots. You think you're being progressive, but all you're doing is making all the companies leave and come to Texas and you're losing all your jobs and your schools suck, by the way, and you can't even keep the homeless off the street in San Francisco."
And so they're like, "Why would I listen to any ideas you have about politics? You guys are idiots." That's the Texans approach. In New York, the stereotype is just, they're a bunch of money grabbing, self-serving, superficial people who are trying to destroy small town America and ruin their way of life with all their newfangled devices and inventions, and we don't trust them either.
So that's the attitude of Texans for the coastal elites. So really, you can't come in with any level of authority and think you're going to change the minds of regular Texans. And I've had to learn this because for our studies, we recruit random samples of schools.
So I need to be able to walk in any school district in Texas and be like, "I'd like you to share all of the data for all of the children in your school for our experiments." And so if they don't trust that we're coming from a good place, they're never going to do that. So I've had to spend a long time being like, "All right, what do they care about?"
A lot of people just care about getting back to a simple way of life and they think all these new innovations are just being imposed on them. And that's as simple as it is.
And so any progressive politics comes across like you're trying to mess with traditional Texas and you're trying to impose your stupid coastal ideas on us when they're blowing up in your face and no one wants to live in your dumb state anyway. So that's the attitude, which I'm not saying it's right, but you'd hear a version of that at any barbecue joint in Llano Texas or Cotulla.
Guy Kawasaki:
But what about if you're in Austin?
David Yeager:
Austin? First of all, the California's moved to Austin, and so people complain about them because they sold their California homes and then drove up home prices in Austin. They're like, "You jerks." But the other thing is, of course you move from California to Austin because Texas is better. So that's kind of the attitude, but the actual people who move are normal, think broadly. They're not as parochial, they're not as tribal. But you also got to keep in mind, Texas cities take two hours to drive across one city.
The first time I went from San Francisco to Palo Alto on the Cal-train, I was like, "You went through ten cities to go thirty minutes. It's ridiculous. How small are your wimpy little cities here? Millbrae? What is that? Never heard of it." And so to Texans, that's very weird. And you drive sixteen hours, you're still in Texas, so people don't leave. 98 percent of Texas high school graduates live in Texas the rest of their lives. They go on vacation to other places, but they stay in Texas. I crystallized the Texas mindset for you.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's another whole book there for you, pal. We just barely touched on it. I am just curious about what you know about the ten to twenty-five year-old brain and their path to status and respect, and how would you apply this to getting them to vote?
David Yeager:
Yeah, I think that voter turnout is a real hard problem. And I think that political scientists are divided over how much of it is driven by values/motivation/enthusiasm and how much is driven by logistical things? Let's just take logistical things. So not everyone gets off work. Some people do hourly work, young people are far more likely to do hourly work, even with college degree, far more likely to be underemployed in our society.
You have to own a car because most cities don't have good public transportation. So I think if they just moved it to a weekend, the youth voter turnout would move up dramatically. But the fact that it's not on a weekend is a huge deal. So a lot of people are like, "All right, let's work on planning."
And so for the people who think teenagers are just bad at planning, then their solution is, "All right, I'm going to text you beforehand and say, which polling station are you going to go to? What time are you going to go? Or maybe I'll offer you a free Lyft or a free Uber."
I do think logistics matter, but I don't think those solutions are likely to work. In fact, there's a new paper in Nature that Katie Milkman published. It's not voting, but it's getting vaccines. So among people who want to get vaccines, they offered them a free Lyft to go get one. This is a COVID booster, and it didn't do anything above and beyond just reminding you to go get the vaccine.
Even though I think the logistics are a huge part of the problem, I don't think that it is the main thing. And then you've got this other issue of not just getting to the poll on voting day, but you have to register in advance. And often to register a lot of people do it at the DMV, but they don't want to go stand in line at the DMV. They don't want to make those appointments. They'd rather just not have a driver's license.
And actually, you've seen a dramatic decline in driver's licenses among young people since 2008. It's huge. It's either decline or delay. And so having a stable address where again, if you're a student, you're changing addresses all the time. Where am I supposed to vote? How do I register? Registration stuff is a mess. And then in states, about half of states maybe more have active voter suppression efforts and they want to suppress the votes of young people and minorities, so it's not an accident.
So Houston, for example, will take away lots and lots of polling places just to make it super-duper inconvenient. So that way you have to go wait in a long line. So young people look at that and they're like, "Sounds like a bunch of old people gate-keeping power to keep us out. And it's a dumb system. And even when our candidates do win, they don't do anything or they're eighty years old."
So I think there's a lot of reasonable stuff going on just on logistics and feeling like the system's fair. Now it's like motivation and enthusiasm. What really matters in voting? There's so many representatives. So does your congressman matter? Maybe, but a freshman congressman, it's going to be twenty years before they're on a good committee. And even the committees can't do that much, but senators really matter.
But very few senate races are actually open each year. It's certainly the case that if young people mobilize, they could flip the Senate in one way or the other. But that is a very obscure and weird argument to an eighteen to twenty-five year-old who doesn't really understand American politics because the reason the Senate matters is the filibuster, and the filibuster is a made up rule from the Senate.
And so anyway, what I've found is that the real powerful things like appointing Supreme court justices and the filibuster in the Senate, those are the things that hugely matter. It's hard to get young people to wrap their minds around those. They feel arcane and they're not really enthusiastic. So I just think a lot of it is the messaging about what actually matters with respect to your vote.
And so they get involved in presidential politics, but we don't really have presidents that are appealing to young people. We're not trying to, not since really Obama, Bill Clinton, there just hasn't been an effort to appeal to the young people, and so they're jaded with the whole thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you gave me all the problems. What's the solution in the motivation part?
David Yeager:
What I've found that helps a lot is just simply hearing about lots of other people like you who are voting. Chris Bryan, who's my colleague at University of Texas McCombs, has a series of unpublished experiments that really reframe voting as you using your voice to stick it to powerful people. That kind of framing tends to work well, but it has to be authentic. You have to tailor it to the issues of the day, but that could be done.
So I think a combination of, especially in early voting states, having polling places that are really close to where young people are living, making it easy to register, and then having motivational points about using your vote to push back against powerful influences that are screwing up your life.
That combination, I think would move the needle. I don't know. It would solve all the problems. A lot of them are just structural. What really needs to happen is you have to prevent state legislatures from actively engaging in voter suppression because they're targeting young people on purpose.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that a motivation for these young people, for voting, is it more of, look at these positive results we can get with you, or it's negative and scary? No more abortion, no more birth control, no more no-fault divorce, no more LGBTQ plus rights for your friends. What's the motivation, the positive or the fear of the loss?
David Yeager:
Those are all big issues. I mean, what the economists argue is it's the fear of the loss, but that's not clear to me in this case because there's fatigue. When everything is a crisis at all times, then it's hard to know what's actually a crisis. I think that the motivation that's easier to sustain over time is the inspirational motivation.
The idea that your vote could free an LGBTQ friend or colleague from oppression, that's motivating for young people. So it's not these guys are going to take abortion away, although that's important, and that's an argument that needs to be made in a lot of places.
But another one is your vote could be the deciding vote to protect women. So there's even a gain frame of these issues. You don't have to just make the loss frame. And I think often the gain frame is one where you can keep hearing it and keep hearing inspired but once you hear the loss frame and then you don't act, you're like, "I must not be the kind of person who cares about that." I think it's very easy to let yourself off the hook after you've rejected an intense loss frame argument.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to give this opportunity to just summarize how to motivate young people and to plug your book.
David Yeager:
The reason why I'm excited about the book is that there's nothing out there that has both looked at the scientific experiments about small changes to messaging and framing that can influence young people, but that's also gone out and found stories about real people who have used them in their real lives to affect people.
And so when you read the book, you're not just getting a bullet list of tricks that you are left on your own to figure out how to work. It's real stories of great managers, excellent teachers, the NBA's best shooting coach, parenting coaches, the best creator of diversity in academic physics, the world's greatest freshman calculus professor.
So all these people are described in detail and humanized in a way where the reader can learn something. And then at the end of the book, we have a series of practical tips that I've developed with Rosalind Wiseman, who's the author of Queen Bees and Wannabees, which became Mean Girls. And so she's, in my opinion, the best at thinking about the complexities of young people.
And we joined forces to end the book with about eighty or sixty to eighty pages of practical tips for all of the different practices in the book. So what you're going to see is narrative nonfiction. If you like Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell, you're going to see that kind of writing, but you're also going to get real exercises that we've already tried in our real experiments and developed with great experts that you can put into practice.
Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, I'm a Malcolm Gladwell fan and I read all his books, but I think that your book is very different from his book because his books he takes one concept and he spends 250 pages on it. In your book, there's dozens of tactics and advice and stuff. I think it's very different kind of style of writing. And I favor your writing style.
David Yeager:
Yeah, I do too. As I was writing it, I woke up every morning and I reread Michael Lewis or Tracy Kidder and then sometimes Michael Gladwell because these guys are master storytellers and I'm a scientist. I had to learn how to write that way. And Gladwell, I disagree with a lot of the conclusions of the book, but he's an excellent storyteller, and so there's something about the way he structures information that appealed to me.
And so the reader's getting a narrative experience that hopefully is enjoyable, but also I'm introducing new ideas in chapter nine. That's rare and nonfiction. Usually it's like I got one idea and I'm beating you over the head with it the whole rest of the book.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I hope a lot of parents listen to this and I hope a lot of parents buy your book. Okay, I have one last question. I promise you.
David Yeager:
All right.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now let's say, is there some magic reason there's a cutoff point at twenty-five? It seems like this mentor's mindset is something you should continue with people forever.
David Yeager:
Yeah, there's nothing magic about twenty-five. It's just that if you look at demographics, you're far more likely to start having a stable career and an adult-like role after twenty-five. And just a lot of the examples I have, the problem areas are ten to twenty-five. You look at violent crime and that's all eighteen to twenty-five and then it goes down. If you look at when do young people stop taking their meds, when they get an organ transplant? It's the ten to twenty-five.
After twenty-five, they start taking it again. So a lot of the problems are in that space, but it's not a magical cutoff. In fact, I think everything in the book is relevant for any person who's starting a new job.
Guy Kawasaki:
I agree.
David Yeager:
It's what I call the adolescent predicament, that you can be an adolescent later in life anytime your status and respect is in jeopardy. And so everything in the book's relevant to you, no matter where you are, as long as you're in this precarious spot with your reputation.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed this episode with David Yeager. I'm going to go try out some of his tips on my family. I'll keep you posted. His message is very believable and very credible to me that it's not about nagging, it's about enabling your kids to achieve autonomy and social acceptance, not just get rid of your nagging. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People.
Thank you to my remarkable family who has been experiencing my maybe unremarkable parenting for their entire lives. And let's thank the rest of the Remarkable People team. Nuismer, you heard her say that I have a mentor mindset. Thank you for that positive feedback, Madisun.
And then there's Tessa Nuismer, our ace researcher and Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, remarkable sound design engineers. And finally, Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and Alexis Nishimura. We are the Remarkable People team, and we are on a mission to make you remarkable. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.