Greg Walton: The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary Psychological Shifts

Guy Kawasaki:
It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast and we're on a quest to make you remarkable. Today, we have the remarkable Greg Walton. He's a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He's renowned for his pioneering work about wise interventions. These are brief, evidence-based strategies that's designed to address psychological barriers and promote positive outcomes in education and really in life.
Walton's research focuses on how individuals' perceptions of themselves and their social environments influence motivation, achievement and well-being. He's the author of a really interesting book I just read called Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts. This explores the profound impact of subtle psychological shifts on personal and social transformation. How's that for an intro, Greg?

Greg Walton:
That's amazing. Thank you, Guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
I have to start off with an observation that I have that on the Remarkable People Podcast, we have had Philip Zimbardo, Carol Dweck, Mary Murphy, and now you. Can any other podcaster in the world say that they've had so many Stanford social psychology professors?

Greg Walton:
I haven't done the empiricism, but I'd say no.

Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe Madisun and I should rename this the Remarkable Stanford Social Psychologist Podcast. My first question for you, because I'm a big fan of Carol Dweck and she's been on this podcast twice and I've been to her house and she's just such a lovely person. Her book, Mindset, really changed my life when I read it in 2020 or whenever that was. My first question for you is what do you have against the word mindset, because you made a point that you're not going to use the word too much in your book.

Greg Walton:
Carol and I are very close, and her husband, David, in fact, married my wife and myself. We have a joint lab at Stanford and I've done lots and lots of research with Carol, maybe more than with anybody else. The issue is that people misinterpret the word as she articulated it and defined it. All the time, I have undergraduates come to Stanford and say they were told in high school that they should have a growth mindset, that if they didn't have a growth mindset, it might be their fault.
That was never what Carol intended about the word. That was never how she intended its meaning, and it leads to this overly individualistic representation of the word itself. Instead, in Ordinary Magic, what I came to feel is that the best way to understand this stuff, this psychological space, is as a dialogue of questions and answers.
You walk into a world in which there's lots of person praise for intelligence. Some kids are smart. There's a gifted and talented program. You take a standardized test. You're told your percentile score, and that's a world that implies that there's this thing: smartness and you either have it or you don't.
Then when you face a problem, like you don't do well at something at first, you don't understand something at first, you get a score on a standardized test that is disappointing to you, then it raises the question, do I have what it takes to do this? That's where wise interventions come in. Wise interventions are a way to think about those situations, to think about those questions, to think about answers that will serve you well.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that by using the word mindset and saying you have to have a growth mindset, in fact, you're saying that you have a fixed mindset?

Greg Walton:
I think it just is taking all responsibility off of the context. The really fundamental point is that the psychology that we all experience is coming from the world that we're in. The question, can I do this, is coming from a world that has reinforced a fixed mindset. That world has said there's smart people, there's less smart people. You have to be smart to succeed.
Then if you don't do very well at first, it raises the question in exactly the same way that, for example, a first-generation college student comes to college and they ask, “Can someone like me belong here?” Their family literally has not belonged in college before. That's a question that is coming to them from the context they're in. When you just say something like, "Oh, you should have a growth mindset," anybody who's an architect of a context is decrying any responsibility for making that better.

Guy Kawasaki:
When we interviewed Mary Murphy, I thought it was a very interesting observation that, if I may paraphrase what I think I learned from Mary, which is that Carol was talking about this growth versus fixed mindset, but it also matters what environment you're in because if you have a growth mindset in a fixed mindset environment, you're not going to do well.

Greg Walton:
Right. Yeah. You might have a growth mindset and then you walk into math class and the math professor's giving out short-timed tests and talking about who's brilliant at math and who by implication isn't. It's hard to retain that growth mindset in that fixed mindset world. We have direct empirical evidence that shows that from the National Study of Learning Mindsets.

Guy Kawasaki:
What kind of wise interventions can foster, I don't know how to say it right now, I'm afraid of using the M word. What kind of wise interventions can foster this growth mentality?

Greg Walton:
You can call them growth mindset. In the context of growth mindset of intelligence, that's a term that exists and there's a whole body of research on growth mindset of intelligence interventions, but I think that what you should understand in those interventions and many others is that these are essentially creating structured spaces for people to think about something that's important and that matters to them, but that they often don't have time or don't have space to really focus on in that way.
If you're a student in a class and you're getting hit by the professor who's saying there's some smart people and there's some not smart people, and here's a timed test and you got the fortieth percentile, you're not getting space in that context to actually think about what intelligence means, how it can be built, what good strategies are to do that, how you can get help from others.
Growth mindset interventions create that space to do that. Similarly, when we do belonging interventions with students in the transition to college, we surface things like how normal it is to worry about whether you belong at first in college, and we create space for people to think about why that's normal and what kinds of trajectories of growth they can achieve and how they can pursue those.

Guy Kawasaki:
Two of the topics that you address immediately in your book are spiraling up and spiraling down. What causes a person to spiral up?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, wise interventions can do that in the scientific literature, but this is also something that we can do with each other in the course of normal supportive, empathic, what I would call wise conversations. In the book, for example, I tell a story about a young woman I met when I was teaching at Stanford's program in Berlin. I was the faculty member in residence there.
It was the welcome event for a new group of Stanford undergraduates to come to the program in Berlin. I sat next to her, so I was just asking her about her life and she said that she was a very competitive gymnast in high school. Then I blew my knee out and then COVID happened and I couldn't see any of my friends. She was just very direct and honest. She wasn't complaining. She was just laying out the facts of the situation to me.
Because she was so clear, I could be clear in my own thinking and then clear back to her. I said, "Did that make you depressed?" She said, "For sure. I was already seeing a therapist, but absolutely." In that conversation, we ratcheted each other up. She put her situation on the table. I was able to see that situation and reflect back to her what might be the consequence of being a person in that situation.
In that ratcheting, she was very clear that she knew that I wasn't judging her and in fact, I wasn't judging her. We were just seeing the situation that was on the table for a person. You're eighteen years old, you can't do what you love, you can't see your friends.
Would that make a person depressed? It might well. There's nothing wrong with her. She knew that I thought there was nothing wrong with her. She knew that she thought there was nothing wrong with her. We were just clear about the situation. Then when you're clear about the situation, you can start to make progress. You can start to think about that.

Guy Kawasaki:
In a way, I have found that to be true with my life, too. In the first ten seconds of when I meet most people, I tell them I am deaf, and I have a cochlear implant. Even with a cochlear implant, it takes you from being deaf to just having really lousy hearing. I find that when I tell people that, it allows us to spiral up because they understand where I'm coming from.

Greg Walton:
Yeah. Can I tell you a funny story? When I was a first year professor at Stanford, one day I was coming home late at night on my bike. I was going too fast through Menlo Park and I had a helmet on, but I didn't have lights. Suddenly, this car appears right in front of me parked on the side of the road. I have no idea how it got there. It had these spears sticking out to me, also known as a bike rack.
I rear ended this thing. I don't know if you can see. Can you see this scar on my cheek? I sliced open my face. I got home. I found a neighbor. The neighbor took me to the Stanford ER, and the Stanford ER sewed me up. It was a doctor from the class after mine at Stanford who was sewing me up.
There's a very long, funny story about this. I walk in and the ER attendant, a towel on my chin, says, "What's wrong?" I go like this, and she gasps. I'm like, "You're the ER attendant. You don't get to gasp at me," but anyway, then eventually, I had this big bandage on my face. I'm walking around with this big bandage on my face. Then I go to this talk at this social psychology conference and there's this guy. The very first talk is about the stigma of having a scar on your face.
I'm sitting there with this big bandage and I'm in the front row and I'm like, "I have so many questions." My hand is up the whole time. He does this fascinating study. The study is, he's looking at a job interview situation. There's a candidate who either does or doesn't have a scar on the face, and he shows that people evaluate the candidate less positively when they have the scar on their face.
Then he also has this other really interesting data. He has this interesting data on eye tracking and memory. The eye tracking data shows that the people who are watching this job interview, their eyes are going back and forth between the eyes of the candidate and the scar. Then they have the memory data. Every time their eyes are looking at the scar, they don't remember what the guy said. Then the researcher had this hypothesis that maybe it's not a kind of animus, a stereotype in a sense.
Maybe it's that the people are actually just distracted. Then what they do is they do this brilliant study where they have the same guy with a scar on the face, but he acknowledges it at the very beginning of the conversation. He says, "I've got this scar on my face," and he tells a one sentence story about how he got that scar.
It's a not interesting story. Then all the effects go away. People pay attention. The eyes aren't going back and forth. They remember and they evaluate him just as highly as when he doesn't have this scar on the face. That's a wise intervention. You understand what's happening in somebody's mind. Actually, what's happening is that they're distracted. What is that? I'm trying to understand that.
What's going on here? You acknowledge it. You say, "Yeah, there's that." Then it becomes a non-issue. For years, I used that when I taught Psych One. In the early course in Psych One, I would point this out and I would tell that story. Then I would tell about the research.

Guy Kawasaki:
Applying that lesson, I would say because I tell people that I am deaf in the first ten seconds, they're not wondering if I am stupid.

Greg Walton:
For example, right. If you don't hear something, they might have been thinking, "Oh, he's slow in the mind," but actually, you just didn't hear them.

Guy Kawasaki:
If people think I'm slow in the mind, they're making a very big mistake, but anyway.

Greg Walton:
I appreciate that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Then a related thing would be accents. How do you think people react to accents?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, I do think you could have something similar happen where somebody you're talking to is like, "What is that accent? I'm trying to place that accent. I'm a little confused about that." Then obviously, this speaker has the choice of whether they want to acknowledge that or allay that. This gets into a lot of identity issues.
There's such a long history of, where are you from? No, where are you really from? No, really, where are you from? I don't care about you're a third generation American family, but where are you from in the fourth generation? That's offensive to people because it questions their Americanness. We do have the opportunity to answer that question and set it aside if you choose to do that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, today at two-thirty in the afternoon, I'm making a speech and I'm going to start off by saying, "I am deaf. I have a cochlear implant. That means I have really lousy hearing as opposed to being deaf completely, and I am from Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm third generation Japanese American, but I have a pidgin accent, so that's my accent." I don't have any scars to talk about. I'm going to be spiraling up the rest of my life from now on. Now how do you spiral down? What causes people to spiral down?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, I think a lot of downward spirals start with these miscommunications. If you think about that job interview study just as a microcosm, if the scar doesn't get identified and then the person thinks that the candidate doesn't have a lot of interesting things to say because they can't remember anything they said and then they don't give them the job, they suddenly don't have the job.
That's the start of a downward spiral. Sometimes I think it can happen in these cycles of miscommunication and self-doubts. If the job candidate in that case, for example, could think, "I didn't get the job. Maybe there's something wrong with me. Is there something wrong with me that led me not to get the job?" That could feed the kind of self-doubt that makes it harder, then, to succeed. All of that is circumvented if you have that wise understanding.
One of the things that I had the pleasure to really think deeply about in writing Ordinary Magic was about identity and in particular identities that are commonly represented as sources of weakness or stigma or disadvantage. I was deeply influenced by this book here.
This is Jacqueline Woodson's book; The Day You Begin. In The Day You Begin; Woodson is talking about a girl in an elementary school classroom who feels different and deficient. Then The Day You Begin in Woodson's book is the day you begin to share your own stories.
In Ordinary Magic, there's a long section where I'm thinking about all of these different identities that are commonly represented as sources of negativity like being a refugee, having a disability, being from a lower socioeconomic background, having experienced mental illness like depression. In all of these cases, there's ways to ask people. Even if this experience has been challenging and difficult in some ways, there might also be ways it's been sources of goodness and strength.
You can share stories with people, for example, about the goodness and strength that they've developed from contending with these identities themselves. In the depression case, for example, people with depression will say stories like, "I really learned to understand myself better. I really learned what negative experiences are and that's helped me relate better to other people."
Then you can invite people to tell their own stories. What are the good things and the strengths and the sources of power maybe that you've gotten from contending with that challenge, and how do you apply that to things that are important in your life? Guy, I am curious if you would like to answer that question about being hard of hearing. What are the sources of goodness and strength that you've developed from contending with that and how do you apply that to things that matter to you?

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow, I could go on a long time about that. First of all, I have developed an attitude of thankfulness, believe it or not, because yes, being deaf is a bitch and a pain in the ass, but nobody ever died of deafness. If you gave me a choice and said, "Guy, you can either be deaf or have pancreatic cancer," guess which one I would pick, right? That's one thing.
It has helped me appreciate that. It has helped me appreciate the work of medical science because a cochlear implant is a miracle. The fact that sixteen or twenty electrodes can go directly to my auditory nerve and help me here, it's hard for me to wrap my mind around, how does the surgeon find the nerve to connect to my cochlear implant? I do not understand that.
Also there are certain really tactical advantages that some people have to use Air Pods and headphones and all that. I don't need to; I have Bluetooth to my phone directly into my head. It's like I have a direct line to God in my head. I don't need a headphone. I'm superior to you.
Then I surf a lot. In surfing, there is a lot of controversy where people yell at you for dropping on them or taking their wave or whatever, but I am deaf, so I don't ever hear that negativity. I just keep surfing. Madisun can attest to the fact that you can yell at me all that you want in the water. I don't give a shit. I cannot hear you, so there are some advantages. Here's an extreme example about this.
Let's say that in your youth, you were in a gang. You got tattooed on your neck and your hands and all that. Are you saying that when you meet people for a job interview or maybe you're a contractor or maybe you're a waiter or something, you say, "Listen, when I was young, I made mistakes. I got all tatted up. I had to serve some prison time. That's my story, so if you're wondering about all these tattoos, that's it," or is there such a point as oversharing?

Greg Walton:
There's definitely a point of oversharing, right? That's not impossible, but I think that all the time, especially in worlds that are structured by power hierarchies, people who are on the top have the power to speak, but they don't listen very well. People who are on the bottom often don't have power to speak at all, and the people who would matter aren't listening.
In The Day You Begin, the teacher creates the space in the classroom for students, including the student who feels deficient and less than, to tell their own story. I think often, we don't create that space. We tell stories for other people and particularly powerful people tell stories for less powerful people.
We don't create that space where people can tell their own story in the way that's right for them, their story of who they are, maybe who they've been, but most importantly, who they want to become, where they want to go in a way that can elicit the kinds of relationships and help and admiration and respect and trust from the people who would matter in that becoming. I've felt this very deeply in our work with justice-involved students.
These are kids who are almost all students of color, almost all boys coming back to school from a period of time in juvenile detention. They face a kind of intersection of stereotypes in American society that is almost physical: race, ethnicity and gender, incarceration status and age. In the very long design process in Oakland, we could feel. You would ask them about their experiences in school and their experiences interacting with teachers.
Often, they would just clam up and they would put their head down or they would pretend they wouldn't hear you or they would mumble, and you wouldn't be able to hear. What we ultimately created in partnership with them was a space essentially, about a forty-five minute session in which students first think about the values that are really important to them, genuine deep values like being a good role model for a younger brother or sister, making your parents proud.
We then shared stories with students about how reflecting on those values and building relationships with adults in school could help them make progress towards those goals to help realize those goals. We asked them for their advice for future students who might be in that situation. Imagine an eight year-old in Oakland today. Maybe in a few years, they might be in a situation like this.
Then at the end, we gave them that platform that Ms. Woodson gives to the young person in The Day You Begin. We say, "Who's an adult in school who isn't yet but could be an important source of support for you? What would you like that person to know about who you are as a person, your values, the goals that you have and the challenges you face that they might be able to help you with?" In that context, kids write, it's just the most beautiful and meaningful things that I've ever seen.
They start very simple. They say, "I want Ms. Johnson, my math teacher, to know that I'm a good kid and I'm trying hard and I want to be able to go to college, but I'm really confused. I haven't been in school that much. I'm really confused. I'm behind on the math and sometimes I have trouble paying attention." Then we take that content, and we give it as a platform to that teacher.
The teacher receives a physical piece of paper, a letter, hand delivered. They're told, "All kids need strong relationships with adults, and that's particularly true when kids face difficulties. This child has chosen you to be that person for them. Here's what this child would like you to know about who they are as a person. Please help them in their experience.
There will be good days, there will be bad days. Help them in their relationships with others." Then we just say, "Thank you very much for your work. You're on the front lines for all of our kids." That opens up space. It creates space between the two people, between the learner and the person responsible for the learning, the teacher.

Guy Kawasaki:
Would you advise a kid who had tattoos on his face and neck and hands to put that out there and explain how that came to be?

Greg Walton:
You would want to be able to choose how to do that. You'd want to be able to have a structured space to think about how do I want to present myself and how do I want to introduce myself here? If you're the employer, you would want to be able to hear that. You'd want to be able to offer that space, to create that space.
Whatever the particular story is in the background is, I would want that agency in the person who's interviewing for the job, and I also would want the emphasis to be on the future, not the past. Who is it who you are now and who are you trying to become and how does that fit with whatever our organization is, or doesn't fit? That's informed by an understanding of the past and the history, but we don't need to stay in the past. The past is in the past. We're going forward.

Guy Kawasaki:
Can you give us tips about the process to make sure that your interventions are wise? How do you go through the formation of wise interventions?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of listening here. I can't guess what your experience has been like as a person with deafness. I can ask you and you can tell me and I can start to learn a little bit, but I can't guess that, so I think there's a lot of value in real conversations, real questions, honest, sincere questions. Tell me what that is like. That's part of the space.
In the Lifting the Bar intervention with justice-involved youth, it's space for a young person to have voice and then for a teacher to be able to hear that young person's voice. It's space to start that conversation. Sometimes it's easier than others. Another picture book that I love is Robert McCloskey's One Morning in Maine. One Morning in Maine is a story that begins with young Sal who says, "Mama, mama, I lost my tooth. I'm not going to be able to go to Buck's Harbor with Daddy."
For Sal, who's four years old, losing the tooth as a calamity. She's not going to be able to have the good day that she wants, so she's very explicit to her mother about what her thoughts and feelings are. She puts it right on the table. Then her mother is able to address that to say, "When you lose a tooth, that's when you become a big girl."
The whole first two thirds of the book is Sal trying out that idea, thinking about that idea, playing with that idea. That's the mother hearing Sal's articulation and then providing a different way to understand that experience that's going to be helpful for Sal, that's going to let Sal actually have that great day, but sometimes we're not that frank.
Sometimes we're not as frank, even with ourselves. We don't understand ourselves very well and we certainly don't put it out there on the table for somebody else, either. We have to create these spaces where we can see what the psychological situation that we're in is and then understand that with other people, like the Berlin story, for example.

Guy Kawasaki:
Are there ways to make large scale wise intervention? For example, what happens if somebody says to you, "How do we encourage people to get out and vote?" What wise interventions could you make on a society to get them to vote?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, that's a great question. There's definitely lots of opportunities for scaling here. The opportunity comes because the psychology arises from the situation. Whatever worry or doubt or feeling that you're experiencing, there's nothing wrong with you, there's no irrationality in you. You're not abnormal. You're experiencing the situation as it is presented to you.
When you can understand that and you can understand systematically how people are put into situations, what the situations are doing, then you can start to act at institutional levels and at policy levels, not just in a one-on-one clinical therapy level. For example, with voting, Chris Bryan, who is a collaborator.
He's at UT Austin, ran a series of studies a number of years ago in which he theorized that sometimes we default to this view of voting as just a hassle. I have to go get the oil changed in the car and I have to go pick up the kids and then I have to go vote. Then I have to go get the grocery store and then I have to go deal with this annoying coworker I have to deal with and whatever it might be.
He thought, what if you offer people a representation of voting as something at a higher level? He handed out a survey. The survey had ten items and it had exactly the same questions in two versions of the survey, except that in one, it was in a verb form and the other it was in a noun form. The verb questions were questions like, how important is it to you to vote in tomorrow's election?
The noun form survey had questions like, how important is it to you to be a voter in tomorrow's election? The idea is that if you use the noun form, you're casting this as a kind of identity, a person that you could become if only you were to vote. That's like getting an oil change. That's a wonderful kind of person for many people, I think, in a democracy. That produced one of the largest gains in voter turnout ever observed in randomized controlled trials.

Guy Kawasaki:
Really? Wow, that is fascinating, but how do you come to an insight like that? How do you think about these wise interventions?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, I'm a social psychologist. Social psychology is a field that began in the early and mid-twentieth century, particularly in the context of the horrors of World War II. A lot of the early research was trying to understand how things like the Holocaust could have happened. There was lots of research in field settings and group dynamics and productivity in factories, for example.
Then social psychology went into a very long cognitive revolution where researchers did often very small scale laboratory experiments just looking at how a particular change in a situation would change how people think and feel and then act in some way. That is ultimately the foundation of knowledge and understanding that allows researchers today to do work like this.
For example, in the voting case, when I was in grad school, I entered grad school in 2000. A senior faculty member at my grad program named Mahzarin Banaji pointed me towards a 1999 study by a woman named Susan Gelman, who's a wonderful researcher at the University of Michigan.
What Susan Gelman had done was she was interested in nouns and verbs, but she was also thinking about kids. She gave kids a description of one kid who was a carrot eater and another kid who ate carrots a lot. Gelman observed that even young children inferred that the carrot eater had a stronger preference for carrots, that the child would like carrots more, that they would be more likely to keep eating carrots even if their parents said, "Stop eating carrots."
Mahzarin Banaji and I, when I was in grad school, thought, "That's really interesting. I wonder if people do that for themselves. I wonder if you see yourself in that light, in the light of the identity, would that also lead to stronger inferences?"
We did these studies where we had people say what their preferences were and then write answers. I would ask a question like, what's a dessert you like a lot? Somebody might say chocolate. Then I would ask them to write either the sentence, "I'm a chocolate eater," or "I eat chocolate a lot" three times.
After that, I'd ask them, "Okay, now tell me how much do you like chocolate? How likely is your preference for chocolate to stay the same over the next five years? If all your friends liked something else, would you continue to like chocolate?" People reported that those preferences that they had described in noun form, they found them stronger, more stable and more resilient.
They were using, just as people were using the noun form to infer the qualities of another person in Susan Gelman's work, children were, we found that adults were using that noun form to infer their own preferences. That's what led Chris Bryan to think about voting and being a voter.
He read that work that we had done, which seems to have nothing to do with voting and thought, "Oh, this is about identity." He thought, "What if it was a future identity, not just a preference that you have right now? What if it was a future identity?" Suddenly he produces the Be a Voter studies. It comes out of this well of basic research in social psychology.

Guy Kawasaki:
If I told you that I am a writer as opposed to I write, that's a stronger identity for me?

Greg Walton:
Yes. There's complexities here. I don't know if you've ever run through growth mindset work into Marjorie Rhodes. She's a developmental psychologist at NYU. Chris, he didn't just do the voter studies. He also did, for example, a helper study with preschool aged children. He exposed children to the language of being a helper versus helping. He showed that preschoolers are more likely to help after they've been exposed to the be a helper language.
In voting, there's not a capacity issue. It's not like people can try to vote and fail, apart from systems that make it difficult for them. It's not a skill, but with helping and then certainly with something like being a math student, it can get into that.
Then if you start to use that language, Marjorie Rhodes has a critique of the helper studies where she thinks that even if it might increase the odds that a child helps, it could also represent helping as a skill that you either have or you don't have, reintroducing in the back door a fixed mindset, so that gets complex.

Guy Kawasaki:
How would you apply this knowledge of noun versus verb for something like vaccination? What would be the noun for a vaccinated person?

Greg Walton:
I am a vaxxer? It feels like in the public discourse, the noun form has been endorsed by the anti-vaxxers, right? That's the phrase. It's anti-vaxxer. It's a noun phrase. It's a minority identity. Most people still get vaccinated, and most people still endorse vaccination. There's this minority of people who are resisting that majority, and they have used a noun phrase to define their movement and identity, anti-vaxxer.

Guy Kawasaki:
What if you are in El Paso, Texas and you are not the majority, the anti-vax, the unvaccinated people are the majority?

Greg Walton:
I still think in places like El Paso, Texas, I think the problem is, I am not an expert in the measles epidemic, of course, but my understanding is still that even though in places in west Texas where the measles epidemic is a problem and you have lower relative rates of school-age vaccinations, those rates are still well over 50 percent.
I think they're more like 85 percent. It's still a strong majority. It's just the part of the problem, I think, particularly with measles is how contagious it is, and therefore, how susceptible a population can be when the rates are not exceptionally high, near 100 percent.

Guy Kawasaki:
How about the noun? I'm not a spreader. I'm vaccinated.

Greg Walton:
I'm not a spreader. That's interesting. I'd like to think about that. My colleague, Hazel Markus and Jeanne Tsai have written about the way that Americans, the way that cultural defaults affected responses to COVID. One of the things that's characteristic of Americans is how individualistic we are. We have a strong sense of individual self. We say, "I'm like this. I'm not like that."
We have a strong boundary between self and others as compared to interdependent cultures like a lot of East Asian cultures where there's more of a sense of, what is the community that you're a part of? You have your qualities, but you're overlapping and sharing with others.
That kind of representation of the social world makes it easier for people to endorse identities like not being a spreader. They talk about that in their work, about some of the advantages and disadvantages of that cultural default in contending with the pandemic.

Guy Kawasaki:
We've been skirting this topic, but let's just dive right into it for a second. The topic is belonging. What makes people feel like they don't belong?

Greg Walton:
When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I went to a University of Michigan baseball camp. I remember one of the coaches, one of the current Michigan players, he said, "There's a lot of ways to lose a baseball game. There's only one way to win. You have to do everything right, but there's a lot of ways to lose."
I feel a little bit like that with belonging, but at the end of the day, when you feel like you're not valued and respected in that space, you can't contribute to that. Maybe you don't have the skills to contribute, or maybe you do have the skills, but nobody's listening and responding to you.
Sometimes it happens because you look at a world and you see just people who look really different from you, people who seem like they're from really different backgrounds than you. Maybe they have a different social identity characteristics or maybe they're just different kinds of people, different personalities that you don't fit well into.
I think one of the things that's really deeply true about people is how much we value working with each other towards goals, to be part of something, to be part of a community, to be part of a school or a company or a society or a neighborhood where you're working together to accomplish something that matters. If you feel like you can't do that for whatever reason, then it feels like you don't belong within that space.

Guy Kawasaki:
In your book, you discuss Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama and how they did not feel like they belonged in their colleges.

Greg Walton:
Yeah, exactly. Those were both first generation college students going to Princeton and both of whom were people of color. There's a remarkable story that Michelle Obama tells, that she told. The first I heard of it was in a telling when she was the First Lady where she says, "When I first came to college, I didn't realize the sheets were so long."
She'd gotten regular sized sheets and Princeton beds were long. Then she says, "I felt a little alienated. I felt a little discouraged. I felt a little off." It's really a remarkable story because here she is, the First Lady of the United States, I think probably the most prominent woman in America, widely admired and respected. She's been professionally successful for decades, right, going back to her leadership in Chicago and nonprofit work?
The incident that she's recalling when she came to college is a non-incident, it would seem. There's no racist person in this scenario. In fact, there's not even another person in this situation.
It's just that she didn't know the sheets, but as a first generation student, as a kid from the south side of Chicago, as a woman whose ancestors were enslaved peoples, going to an institution like Princeton that was built on the back of slave labor in many ways, whose first presidents all owned slaves, would a person like her wonder whether she might be able to belong in that space? It's exactly like the story of the woman in Berlin. Yes, that's a worry you would have if you were a person in that situation.
Then when something bad happens, even something as stupid as that, as trivial as that, it feels like maybe this is evidence. Maybe this is proof that I don't belong. When she's having that reaction to not having the right size sheets, she's not really reacting to the fact that she might have to go do an errand and go get the right size sheets.
She's having a reaction to that history and that context and this worry that maybe people like me won't belong in this space that I value, that she wants to belong in, that could be so important for her.

Guy Kawasaki:
If you are having a Michelle Obama moment like that, this is the imposter syndrome, so what do you do if you don't have the right sheets, or you didn't know what the In-N-Out burger was?

Greg Walton:
Right. Yeah. I think the first thing to try to do is to understand. If you have a big reaction to something that seems small, you want to try to see what it is that you're actually reacting to. What is the meaning that's beneath the surface?
Often, you can do some of that work yourself, but often it's helpful to talk to other people about that, to think that through, to use your prefrontal cortexes together and to decide then how you really want to understand this space or this question, how you really want to contend with it.

Guy Kawasaki:
In this day and age in 2025, what if you encounter a situation where people intentionally are trying to make you feel that? Then what do you do?

Greg Walton:
Just like earlier at the beginning when we were talking about the word mindset, I was describing the situation of going into a classroom where people like the teacher, for example, is spouting a fixed mindset. It's hard to hold onto your growth mindset, at least in that space. It's hard to feel like it applies.
I think similarly, you can offer people generally good and adaptive ideas like, "It's normal to worry at first about whether you belong, and it can get better with time," but if you're walking into spaces that are not offering those opportunities, where people from your background actually don't have that opportunity to belong, then that becomes a lot less useful. The challenge at that point is to intervene upon the context, to change the context.
That's one of the things that the Lifting the Bar intervention does. In Lifting the Bar, in the original evaluation in Oakland, we had a control condition where kids just thought about study skills and then we had the full experience for kids where they thought about the transition, they heard stories from older students, they thought about their values and relationships.
As compared to the control condition, that produced no observable improvement in young people's experience as they came back into school. We got the improvement. In particular, we got a 40 percentage point reduction in recidivism for justice-involved youth when we actually delivered the letter to the adult. Lifting the Bar, ultimately its power is as an intervention on an adult in the school system who is receiving the kid, to open up their hearts and their minds to the young person coming back in.
When you have situations where people are not being kind, where people are being discriminatory, where people are biased, I think just as we need to have grace, and I say this recognizing how difficult this can be, but just as we need to have grace for ourselves when, for example, we might be in a situation that's provoking an experience like depression, we also need to have grace for people who are behaving in these ways and understand why they're doing that and then help them to better, more pro-social ways of interacting.
That's really what Lifting the Bar is doing. It's recognizing that for a teacher, if you're teaching tenth grade English and suddenly the principal's, "Hey, this kid's coming back from juvie. He's going to be in your class," you're like, "Oh, my God, I'm already overwhelmed. I'm already behind. This kid's going to not care.
They're going to distract other people. They're just going to cause me problems." You're a person in the world and the world is giving you those stereotypes, right? That's what it is. There it is. There's no sense. You can't suppress that. It doesn't help to just say, "I'm not going to think that. I'm going to push away that thought."
That's not contending with it, that's not working with it, that's not addressing it, but if you get the letter then and the letter says, "Here's this kid, he's coming back in. Here's what he's struggling with. Here's what he's trying for. He's asking you for your support," all of that stuff goes away.
You don't have to have those negative thoughts anymore. You're not burdened by them. You're not trapped by them. You're now free to be the kind of educator that you went into education to be, to make a difference for a kid in need.

Guy Kawasaki:
Can I ask you a more tactical question? Let's say that you are of Hispanic background. Let's take the best case. You're Hispanic, you are in America, you are actually a citizen, best case, but you feel like there's a large component of American political leadership that do not want you in this country, and they're not going to be sending you letters or anything, welcome you. If you're Hispanic and you're thinking this, what do you do to feel like you belong in America?

Greg Walton:
There's a researcher named Tiffany Brannon at UCLA who has a model of belonging she calls Pride-and-Prejudice. It's basically, on the one hand, tamp down the prejudice wherever you can. On the other hand, up the pride wherever you can.
She shows in her data, for example, that focusing on African American students who belong to Black student organizations, to African American organizations in the theater and in arts and in music and in general, Black experience, Black culture organizations, that seems to much better outcomes for them in university spaces.
If there's a world out there that is particularly hostile, that's sending negative messages, that's saying you're less than, you're not worthy, here's all these stereotypes about you, it's particularly important then for people to have in-group spaces that say, "No, here's who we really are. Here's our values, here's our strength, here's our agency."
Sometimes that goes under terms like positive racial ethnic identity development. It can be particularly important for young people, for adolescents to have those intentional spaces that build up that sense of, here's who we are, here's who I am as a member of this community, here's who we are, and that can protect you some from at least the negative narratives that may be coming from the external world.
That may not protect you from something like an unjust deportation order. That's another matter. That's a legal matter, and it's a matter of political power, but it can protect you from a narrative perspective.
Earlier, I asked you about the strengths that you might have acquired from experiencing deafness, but you could also do that in a community of deaf people. Imagine you were twelve years old, and you had just become deaf through some situation and you might be having to have a cochlear implant.
What if you were interacting with that twelve year-old along with a larger community of deaf people? You could tell stories with that twelve year-old about your experiences with deafness, the challenges of it, but also the strengths of it, the community of it. There's a reason why gay pride matters, for example, and gay pride parades matter and movements like Black Lives Matter or Me Too matter.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'll tell you a silly little story that makes me relate to this, which is, I actually surf a lot. I surf with a cover that enables me to have a cochlear implant while I surf in the water. One day, as I was getting ready to go into the water with my cochlear implant, this father comes up with this little kid and he says, "My kid has two cochlear implants and I see that you can surf."
He was so happy that here's some old guy with a cochlear implant and he's surfing, so my son, who's, I don't know, two years old with two cochlear implants, he can surf someday. I never felt happier to have a cochlear implant.

Greg Walton:
Absolutely. It's the McCloskey story a little bit, but on such a deeper level. You having the loose tooth doesn't mean that you can't have the good day. You having the deafness doesn't mean that you can't surf. You can surf, too, and you have the opportunity to share that with that child. It's beautiful.

Guy Kawasaki:
You know what? After that happened and I was paddling out and I'm figuring, "Oh, that father, and probably he went and saw his wife and pointed me out, I know they're watching me, so I really better surf well today."

Greg Walton:
You'd better hit it.

Guy Kawasaki:
The pressure was on.

Greg Walton:
You'd better not flop that wave.

Guy Kawasaki:
What is the significance that I can tell you with total certainty that my SAT, which I took in my sophomore or junior year of high school, which is probably 1969, which is a long time ago, I had a 610 in English and a 680 in math. I know exactly what I had on my SATs. What is the significance of me knowing my SATs?

Greg Walton:
You're a product of the world, right? Lewis Terman came in the early part of the twentieth century, Stanford psychologist who you should not have on your show even if he were alive. He told the world that there is this mysterious quality called intelligence and it was determinative of life outcomes. It varied widely between people and between groups and you could assess it with short tests.
The SAT is a descendant of those tests, and it proclaims to you and to the world who you are and what your abilities are and where you stack up, so that's why it sticks with you. I've spoken to educators who are as old as you are, not that you're particularly old. I asked them, "Do you remember your SAT scores?" They're like, "Yes, I do." After decades of experience, it's Michelle Obama's sheets. It feels like this determinative thing, and it was taught to us by people like Terman.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I've got to bring in one more little story before I come to the big story I want to ask. You used the term tifbit, T-I-F-B-I-T. What is a tifbit?

Greg Walton:
Yeah, your SAT score is a tifbit. Michelle Obama's sheets were a tifbit, my In-N-Out experience. Tifbit is a tiny fact, big theory, a little thing that happens that seems so big and important that you build a big theory around it, around who you are and what you can do and what you can become and maybe who somebody else is.

Guy Kawasaki:
I just want to ask you one last topical question, which is, because there may be many married people who need this, please explain the concept of this seven-minute writing exercise to help couples actually remain couples.

Greg Walton:
You're in a marriage. I don't know if you're married. I'm married, though. You have some, all couples do, some long-standing conflicts.

Guy Kawasaki:
No, that's not me.

Greg Walton:
You know how you think about it, right? Because that's how you think about it. You also know how your spouse thinks about it, because that's how they think about it. Of course, they're insane because that's why this conflict is persisting. You're both in that mindset and you're locked against each other. This particular Twenty-One Minutes to Save a Marriage intervention led by Eli Finkel at Northwestern asks couples to think of a third party.
Think about a third party who wants the best for all. How would they understand this conflict? Then the second question is, what barriers would prevent you from taking that perspective in future conversations with your spouse? The third question is, how can you overcome those barriers to take that perspective?
The idea is to break couples out of this loggerheads to find each member of the couple does this. They do it separately, but they both do it, and to think about what would be a third way to see this situation? That stabilizes marriages. No longer does the marriage decline in closeness and satisfaction and intimacy and commitment. It stabilizes in a two-year longitudinal study.

Guy Kawasaki:
Are you married?

Greg Walton:
Yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
Can we interview your spouse?

Greg Walton:
She's not available at the moment. She's hanging out with the dog because I yelled at her earlier.

Guy Kawasaki:
We can come back another time.

Greg Walton:
All right.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, Greg Walton, this has been most entertaining and informative and I'm proud to be deaf. I'm proud to have my pidgin accent and maybe I'll go get some tattoos now, too.

Greg Walton:
Go for it. Maybe you can get a fake scar.

Guy Kawasaki:
I want to thank you for being our guest. There's a lot to learn from you and your book. I hope people check out your book and we'll let you go back to creating wise interventions. Obviously, this is Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. I want to thank Greg for being on our podcast and also, we were recommended to him by Dave Nussbaum.
Without Dave's intervention, wise as it was, we might not have had Greg on our podcast. Wow, what a shame that would be. Thank you Dave, and thank you, Tessa Nuismer and our sound design team, which is actually Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. We are the Remarkable People team, Greg, and we're trying to make everybody remarkable. Thank you very much.