Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: How Science and Tech Help Make Better Career Decisions

Disrupt Your Career Podcast Transcript

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – How Science and Tech Help Make Better Career Decisions

 

July 2021

 

 

Claire Harbour

This time on the Disrupt Your Career webcast, we are welcoming Dr. Tomas Chamorro. Premuzic, who is an international authority in people analytics, talent management, leadership development, and the human AI interface, a very long list of wonderful things he does. He’s the chief talent scientist at manpower group co-founder of deeper signals and meta profiling, and Professor of business Psychology at both University College London and Columbia University. He’s previously held academic positions, and a long list of incredibly eminent institutions like NYU, LSE, and he’s lectured at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, London Business School, Johns Hopkins, IMD, add INSEAD, as well as being the CEO at Hogan assessment systems. One does wonder when he sleeps, but perhaps he’ll tell us about that. Dr. Thomas has published 10 books and over 200 scientific papers, making him one of the most prolific social scientists of his generation. He’s a frequent contributor to Fast Company, The Guardian, Forbes in the Harvard Business Review, and you can find him on twitter at Dr. TCP, which are his initials with Dr. or online at drthomas.com. It’s a great pleasure to have you here. Thomas, thank you so much for joining us.

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Thank you for having me.

 

Claire Harbour

Okay, let’s get started. So many different things to explore.

The first page of your personal website starts with the statement, I use science and tech to help organizations predict human performance. So what have science and tech told you about careers so far? Are there any sort of specific patterns that lead people to be fulfilled, or on the contrary, unhappy in their careers?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Perhaps the main learning has been that there are patterns to people’s choices. So if you look at the science part, in particular, for about five or six decades, a lot of organizational psychological research and research within vocational psychology have converged and highlighting the early kind of antecedents that make people gravitate towards certain jobs, and that make their natural dispositions, what do you might call personality or competencies or values, a better fit for certain careers. And my conclusion of this part of research and the science is that really person a talent, to some degree is personality in the right place, that if again, understand who you are, or who someone is, and then you understand the requirements of a job or a career, you match people’s natural predispositions to the area they’re in, those predispositions or attributes will manifest themselves as talent. That’s the science part. Technology is just a new level or a new dimension, to obtain the data that we need to verify, predict, or, you know, refute or disprove our hypotheses. If you think about data and AI in today’s world, it’s like, different level, a 10x level of magnitudes have a kind of telescope or a microscope that enables you to go to a system or organization and truly understand what is going on. And so far, we haven’t had to kind of revise all of the scientific theories of career choices and what people do, we’ve mostly confirmed them. And the big, big, big revolution from the technology side of things is our ability to then apply that science to streamline or automate things like career recommendations or recruitment.

 

Claire Harbour

Indeed, and I guess, it’s fascinating to hear that latter part of the conclusion because what I was thinking, as you were talking about that is that all of this depends on the ability either of the individual to know him or herself well enough to go forward for the right kind of places where they will fit or for the organization to have the intelligence and the courage to be looking out for the right kind of fit and/or tech that allows that to happen almost magically, or in a godlike way whereby something magic happens beyond the individual and the organization and I guess that’s where it gets messy and far from perfect so far, right?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Yeah, I think this is a cliché but the complexity of today is much higher than before. And, I think they’re probably relevant parallels between the world of careers and the world of relationships if you like, because in the old days, you just married someone in your local village, because there was no one else, or your parents told you, Hey, you know, the son or daughter of your neighbor, sounds decent, why don’t you go? And often, actually was a pretty good recipe for longevity. But then, if you fast forward, two or 300 years, and you’re in a world where there’s endless possibilities, with more alternatives and more choices. As Facebook would say, things are complicated, or it’s complicated. So we need a science. And it’s the same in the world of careers. And for most of our modern history, we made career decisions, much like, as if we were, you know, people making relationship decisions, based on a drunken night out at the bar that was serendipitous, and said, Go, go be a doctor, a lawyer, like your aunt, or like your cousin who’s making good money. And we actually listen to people. And that’s okay, if there are only five choices. But when you have 500,000 choices, it helps to understand what goes on. And fundamentally, it helps to understand yourself.

 

Claire Harbour

Absolutely. And of course, the other big factor in there is that that sort of 25 years plus ago, when we were told to be obedient children and go off and do medicine, or engineering, or whatever, we also went into that, assuming we’d be doing it for life. Whereas not only now there are 500,000 choices, but you can make that choice again and again, as often as every year, if not more so. So as you say, it’s complicated.

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

It’s complicated. And it’s always easier to make choices for other people, I can tell you what we can meet, we can meet at an airport or in a bar, and I can say, Oh, you should do that. And then I don’t care anymore, if you’re stuck with that for it. But if you really want to take ownership of your future and your career, you have to think and you have to leverage all the tools and resources that are available.

 

Claire Harbour

Absolutely. So let’s let’s get into this a little bit, let’s think about the ways that artificial intelligence and psychometrics in general can help individuals to manage their careers better, or indeed, to make better career decisions if you want to make that distinction.

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So historically, psychometric tools such as psychological assessments, they have a very interesting trajectory, where they started as abnormal tools, because they were used in clinical settings first, to see if we had problems, then they migrated on to education, still to see if we had learning difficulties and problems. But then also more focus on strengths you would say now or what you could and should do. And then they ended up kind of in the world of work and careers, which makes sense, because there isn’t, you’re not a completely different person when you finish high school and enter university or when you finish college and enter the world of mature kind of employment or work. So you are you. And the same tools and methods can be used from a very early age to trace what changes and also what stabilizes around your interests, your abilities, your skills, your knowledge and expertise. However, the minute that these tools got kind of co-opted by HR, if you like, they became quite, quite exclusive and elitist, you know, they started, I think, you know, right after especially McKinsey 27 years ago or so invented this idea of the war for talent, the tools were deployed with the elite, with the vital few with hi-pos, with individuals that were predicted to be the future stars of the future leaders of the company. And that explains the unfortunate gap that there is between the people who should actually be assessed to understand themselves and to be matched to a certain career or job that is relevant to them, and the people who actually do. And, historically, psychometrics ended up being something very complex, quite expensive, very high touch as well. We transitioned from actually focusing on the data and the prediction side to focusing on the story part. And so most tools today are used by coaches who want to give an interesting story to people about themselves, but they tend to be leaders. And here’s where AI kind of creates a big opportunity to actually scale this and make it more inclusive. Because where you needed 300 questions, today, you need maybe three questions, you know, through data mining and a lot of data are available, these kind of machine learning algorithms can tell you what are the, in a way, it’s the question that everyone who studied psychology always wanted to understand the know, what is the single question I can ask you, maybe even one where the dinner party or meet that, you know, again, in a random place, that will give me the maximum amount of information about you? And if you think about it, from a common sense perspective, when you meet someone you never ask them, what are you like? Or who are you? You would ask them: what did you study? What type of music do you like? Where do you live? Are you married? And we have, we have this common sensical kind of decision making tree that tries to zoom or zero in on people so that we understand who they are? Well, you can do that with a few people sometimes. And you’re still going to be biased by things like class, gender, ages, ethnicity, culture. And as you know, it’s not the same to apply this model to one country than another. This is where AI creates really interesting opportunities to replicate this on a grand scale. And really try to translate the things that we do, and say and choose into a working model of a reputation and a personality. And that’s super exciting, I think,

 

Claire Harbour

Wow. And share with us a little bit about the degree to which you with your deeper signals platform have sort of reached Nirvana in terms of this, this aim this this great big goal and admission, which is extraordinarily exciting, but presumably not yet, quite there?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Well, it’s a great question. And so, we definitely haven’t reached Nirvana. And we’re very much still going. And when I co-founded this venture a couple of years ago with two former PhD students, so it was exciting that we kind of spun off a research program into a tech startup, our goal was to democratize self-awareness, to ensure that the majority of people in the world ended up with insights that create an aha experience and actually improve the quality of their career and professional choices. And, of course, this is a very, very ambitious undertaking, because we estimated that maybe 1% of the world population have historically been assessed with a traditional tool. So we want to cater to the remaining 99%. Or if you just limit it to the working population, you know, there’s probably 40 million people who complete assessments each year, but 4 billion people working in the world, you know, so still 99% of the world is, of the working world, still doesn’t get self awareness and doesn’t get feedback on their actual skills. Of course, they might complete the BuzzFeed quiz or assessments that aren’t very good, or they might still get feedback from their manager or boss. But that’s very, very imprecise. So what we are is we tried to create super streamlined and very, very, very short tools that are still ethical, and that are still transparent. And that basically enable you to have 20x or 30x predictive accuracy with one question, vis à vis the traditional assessments. So where in the past, I needed to ask you 20 questions. Now we’re down to one. And the amazing thing is to track and trace how people react to the feedback. So we have a product that is a digital coach that actually stays sticky and stays with you, and employs some nudges and also learns from you to actually revise the profile and increase the self awareness. So basically, a big kind of innovation is to move from more static assessment to more dynamic real time assessment and feedback. So what’s possible is still much more what the big challenge for anyone in the AI assessment space today is that concerns around ethics and anonymity, and sort of Orwellian dystopians and the creepiness factor is strong, rightly so, by the way. I think there should be regulation and a lot of companies especially in the big tech space are getting away with murder right now. But the the repercussions and the reactions are such that it’s actually slowing down some potential innovations that could be actually quite ethical. For example, if I told you that I can translate your Spotify playlist and your Netflix viewing preferences, and your WhatsApp exchanges and your Facebook communications into a profile of your career potential, you probably say, Oh my god, this is creepy. But if I told you that I’m only going to give you but this information and you can decide to keep it private, and learn or share it that surely addresses the ethical concerns and the legal concerns. But you’re that you’re at a point that you can’t even go there. Because people freak out. And you know, it’s a little bit like another area that we’ve been researching for the past years, which is video and voice scraping via interview. Before we all ended up defaulting to zoom. For every meeting, there was already a lot of research that showed that you can translate people’s body language and people’s voice and people’s languages into a relatively accurate profile of who they are. But today, if you tell people that you’re using face scraping or face scanning algorithms, they freak out. And no company wants to do that. Even though they’re perfectly comfortable with humans scraping your face and applying all of their biases and prejudices throughout the recruitment process.

 

Claire Harbour

There’s massive hypocrisy in this and

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Double standards, double standards very much so

 

Claire Harbour

Very much so, fascinating. Right, let’s get back to some more real life and, and sort of messy stuff. Like you, we’ve observed that many people, perhaps even most people are not very good at choosing the right job for themselves. You wrote an article about this in HBR, a couple of years ago. The surprising thing is that even when people are clear about what they want and need from their work, they many of them still make the wrong decision. Why is that? And what patterns have you seen that lead to this? And what advice do you have for our listeners?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So typically, and if we’re focused, I think on the area, or even the regions or the social contexts that make this question more relevant, right? Because if you’re somewhere where, you know, if you live in a, in a failed state, or you’re somewhere where there’s 50%, unemployment, there’s that, you simply have no choice. And these problems we’re discussing are really first world problems, right. Having said that, a lot of people are privileged to live in the first world, and they still suffer and end up alienated and burnt out and stressed in an age where a lot of these problems are avoidable. So first, there’s still a very traditional focus on what you should study and what your hard skills are as determined by University and credentials. And that kind of leads to people boxing themselves in to a niche or category that might not even be accurate, and certainly not have a long lifespan, right. So for example, I studied psychology. And when I started my career, I started as a clinical psychologist, and I only studied that because I thought, I’ll have patients, and I’ll treat people, you know, with neurosis or schizophrenia is, and I did that. And luckily, I decided to look outside and see whether I could make a contribution. I started then in advertising, and then I got to HR, etc. And that’s because I actually had the curiosity and at least the impatience to go and try to go outside. And a lot of people have that luxury, but they don’t actually use it or make use of it. So I think number one would be de-emphasize the importance of credentials and educations. And understand that your talents and skills might actually be more valued outside the traditional environments that you in principle had chosen. The second one, I think, is a combination of lack of mentorship, good management, and feedback in general. You know, most people, this is probably the number one finding in social psychology, most people have a very distorted view of their own talents. And there’s a lot of people who think they’re amazing just because their parents told them and actually, they create a delusional self-concept and inhabit it and don’t go outside until they get a reality check. And then they get angry or depressed. And then there’s a lot of people that actually are on the other side of the spectrum and are overly self-critical and overly harsh with themselves about their talents. And we know that women are more likely to fit in the second category and men in the first. So I think getting good feedback, finding someone with good expertise, who is able and willing to tell you what you need to hear early on is really important because you can then recalibrate. And I think the third reason I will mention is just simply fear of change, people are much more likely to put up with a bad career and a bad job for a long time than a bad relationship. If you’re in a relationship and things aren’t worked out, at some point, you burn out, you lose your patience, and then you can find someone else. But with careers and jobs, you’re afraid to change, and then you put up with things, even though you shouldn’t. And I think ultimately, this explains why engagement levels are so low, even in good jobs and within the knowledge economy. And this also explains why actually, a lot of people underperform in their jobs. So there’s a big, big, big productivity gap from not matching people, people’s actual talent and potential to the relevant jobs and careers.

 

Claire Harbour

Absolutely. Let’s dig into this change and fear thing a little bit more. I mean, both of us, Antoine and I have observed constantly that many people stay unhappily in their jobs and don’t see the need to be proactive in looking for something else. We know that we’re prewired to avoid change and to have fear. So you’ve mentioned some of the some of the sort of problems that emerged with engagement and that kind of thing. What about if we turn it around, and we look at the individual who may be unaware or who may be just trying to plan or dream of a career? And think about how can you and do you help people decide whether it might be time for a career change? What are the critical signs or indications from an individual point of view that a person would probably benefit from a career switch?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So I think this is one of the areas that, conversely, are contrary to kind of self-assessments or self-evaluations of talent, people can and do accurately self-assess boredom, or engagement or enthusiasm, right. So if you are if you live in the industrialized world, and are a relatively qualified, and educated worker, as I’m sure your listeners are, and you shouldn’t wake up most mornings, feeling that it’s just a drag and a hassle to have to go to work. And you shouldn’t just kind of gravitate from one pointless or meaningless meeting to another. And you shouldn’t be looking at your watch or clock all the time to see when it’s time to wind down, relax or do your hobby. So I think in general, any activity or task, whether it’s a paid job, or an unpaid hobby, it can, it can range from being tediously boring, meaningless and alienating and totally irrelevant to that mythical state of flow, where you lose yourself in the task. And you find that, you almost have this psychotic level of identification, nothing else matters. By the way, this is probably not very healthy either. Because then your relationships, your health, and everything else will suffer, right. But I think you have to be closer to the, to the kind of flow or immersion end of the spectrum. And ultimately, you need to believe that it’s always possible to improve and get closer to that, you know, so I think that’s probably the main indicator that I would say. Again, you shouldn’t focus so much on money on titles on perceptions is how you feel. And in the world of careers, the fundamental change in the last 30 or 40 years has been that today, we expect to find meaning from work. This didn’t happen historically, you know, your factory workers assembly line, and it’s industrial or kind of agrarian workers or hunter gatherers, they didn’t find themselves when they had a good day at work. It was just work. And then they look forward to eating, sleeping, or relationships, right? But today, I think partly because we’re becoming less religious, less nationalistic, in principle, of course, you know, there are rises of all of these things, less, less spiritual, as well. We expect for jobs and careers, to provide us with the sense of purpose and a sense of identity. And so if your work and your career doesn’t help you define yourself in a way that makes you proud, you should probably consider a change.

 

Claire Harbour

That’s a really nice, simple way to put it actually – the idea of pride. It’s beautiful to hear you expressing some of these ideas about meaning. I think I’m trying to remember the timeline, but we just recently interviewed Gianpiero Petriglieri, who was, you know, focuses a lot on meaning and had a career start not dissimilar to yours. And it was a beautiful interview and and we’ve actually turned it into an article in which we explore a little bit more about how people find or fall into meaning in their careers. So…

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Well, I’m obviously a big fan of his and my personal career aspiration is to one day be a diluted and washed down version of him because, of course, a lot deeper and more profound. And I’m a huge fan of everything he does. Well, I suspect the feeling is mutual. And we could all say beautiful things about each other. And it would be lovely, and we should, but yes, it’s wonderful to have also concording and contrasting sort of things to say about it. So thank you.

 

Tomas

And you know, if I may, it may add to that, because one of the things that he is quite persistent about, which I don’t also hear enough people doing or almost anyone else do is that our obsession for optimizing for efficiency and extracting evermore value and productive kind of yield from workers is unfortunately, leading us to dehumanized work. In an age that should be the opposite, so I think that’s fine. And obviously, for-profit corporations in a capitalist environment, need to optimize for that. But I think that there has to be something else. And if we forget that we humans should still be in the driving seat. And at the end of the day, it’s not about what you produce, but what effects that has on your own psychological kind of well-being. It’s really important to remind people that there needs to be a balance and balance is possible as well,

 

Claire Harbour

You’re absolutely right to point that out. And we did discuss that with him, we, we admire that point of view. And we know very well that in any individual, there is a point of no return beyond which the productivity and the value creation just isn’t going to happen. So squeezing beyond the end of the tube of toothpaste doesn’t make any sense at all.

 

And we all need to know what size our tube of toothpaste is, I guess just to carry on that rather pathetic metaphor. Let’s shift and talk about women particularly, there’s been a trend over the years, which I’ve probably espoused a lot with my coaching clients to women to be less humble, somehow incentivizing them to emulate the much more common variant of hubris that we find in men. And your point of view is that while this seems a reasonable tactic for advancing women’s careers, it may actually not work. So why is it that self-promotion isn’t working as a strategy? And what alternatives do we women have?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Well, I would say that, before we think about why it’s not working, which we need to acknowledge that it might be even worse when it does work, right. Because when and if it works, all you’re doing is to perpetuate a system that is broken. And that focuses more on how good people say they are, and less on how good they actually are. You know, I grew up in Argentina, and where there is a term that you will appreciate, that we call viveza criolla, which is basically something along the lines of being streetwise. But it also emphasizes breaking the rules, and playing outside the formal or official rules of the game, right? So imagine, you know, you’re in your car, and you need to fill the tank, and you get to a petrol station or gas station. And you can choose you go here or here. But you just basically block both to see which one frees up first, creating a massive, that’s, that’s institutionalized security. So if you have a culture that ferments and nurtures cheating, or deceiving or breaking the rules, and then you’re focused on helping the people that are playing within the rules to do that, you’re not gonna improve the system, right? So I don’t care if the advice is focused on women or men, but I don’t think that it’s very moral or very advantageous for any organizations, system or group to ensure that those who say they are good and who expressed confidence, whether real or not, are promoted and given and rewarded, instead of us actually focusing on what people can actually do and their competence rather than confidence. So that’s the first part that I needed to get out of my system.

 

And the second part, actually, it doesn’t work for women. Because, you know, the main, the main technical term for this is this double bind, right? So women are damned if they don’t self promote, because we immediately assume because they don’t resemble men, or they’re not showing masculine assertive, oh, you know, maybe they’re just happy staying at home and being housewives and washing the dishes or looking after kids. Clearly, they don’t want to be executives, well paid executives in corporations. I mean, why would you want to do that when you can stay at home and do the dishes? And if they do self promote, they’re also done because they’re no longer women. They don’t seem feminine enough, were put off. And you know, they look like Margaret Thatcher or out-male males and masculinity. So we basically demand that women maintain traditional feminine traits and archetypes, while also assuming that those traits exclude them, or make them unfit for leadership roles. And  there’s such a powerful paradox here.

 

And, and actually, a lot of the times traditional feminists or people that I would describe as traditional feminists, don’t like my argument, because, you know, at least the traditional feminist argument gravitated towards androgyny. And to say that no, no women and men are the same; stop saying that women are more kind and caring, that they have more empathy, that they’re more prosocial, that they have more integrity, that they have more self control, and that they’re more humble and coachable. They don’t want me to say that, but this is true. And not only is it true, this is also what actually makes them better leaders. So I think we’re basically rewarding a group of people for their faults, and we’re punishing a group of people for their strengths. This is such a such an illogical state of affairs, especially in an age that pretends to be meritocratic, evidence based and data driven. So, you know, it’s something I’ve been passionate for some time now, because in my mind thinks needs to be more logical than they are. And when I see total illogic, it’s just, it’s just hard to relax.

 

Claire Harbour

Yeah, now, I mean, you’re describing something which many of us have known intuitively, others have known more explicitly, but you know, let’s get past the analysis and think about how to fix it, you wrote a book with a subtitle, that was how to fix this particular problem. So in a very brief nutshell, what’s your advice to both organizations and individual leaders about what we can do about this problem?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Yeah, so I think, and I have three solutions in the book, but I think we can narrow it down to two. One is really follow the science, which means both focusing on the right traits, let’s stop, let’s stop with this confusion, or mythological notion of leadership potential that focuses on confidence on charisma, and even on narcissism and start focusing on competence, humility and integrity. And, by following the science, I also mean, use proper tools and methods to detect these attributes, because our instincts, and they’re more often wrong than right. And they also come with the added kind of problem that they make, they convince us that we’re right as well, even when they’re wrong, you know, so this is the main problem with intuition. I found people in certain areas are very intuitive, because they have great expertise. And for each and, you know, for each and one of these individuals, there are 100 who feel that they are experts or they’re not.

 

And then the second one was what were discussing before and the kind of problematic advice that we give to people and, and I think a well-intended industry trying to promote women to the top but not really understanding the implications of its advice and that there are better parts is basically to not lower the bar for women, but to raise it for men. Because actually, if you want to help, more competent women get to the top, you should start by making it harder for incompetent men to get to the top. By the way, there are also many competent men who are not getting to the top, because the flawed archetypes that we believe in or we maintain actually make their strengths a perceived weakness, right. So there are many men, of course, who display high levels of empathy, who are kind and caring, who are altruistic. And you know, who are humble, self aware, coachable, and emotional intelligent. But actually, when they’re displaying these archetypically, feminine qualities, we think that they’re a pushover, and they’re not strong enough to lead. You know, and I think that has been one of the lessons learned the hard way, in the last year and a half, with COVID. You know, it’s, and it had wonderful, but unfortunate effects on the sales of my book, and the articles that I had written before. Because once again, we see the consequences of having leaders or people in charge, who are not as good as they think, and who are charismatic and narcissistic, but neither of them are honest, when you have a big, big, real problem, like a global pandemic, you can see the stakes are very, very high, and we can all see the consequences.

 

Claire Harbour

Absolutely. That brings us very neatly to that the last question I wanted to tackle today, which was about, some of the opportunities that you’re arguing, might be coming out of out of this pandemic. So it’s a somewhat counter intuitive argument, which says that in, in this uncertain, fragile and weaker environment, staying put in a job is not necessarily the best possible strategy. Can you help us to understand what the alternative forces are that you see that open up these opportunities, and make this environment more suitable for changes than we might imagine?

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So I think people don’t like to change, unless they’re forced to. And I do think in general, when everything becomes disrupted, and our basic assumptions are thrown away, and completely debunked, and you are outside of your comfort zone, and you’re probably more willing to look at places even seen, you know, and I think there’s still a window of opportunity to realize that that’s where we are, when things normalize. I mean, you can see it, whether it’s executives or companies who are itching now to go to the usual or old ways of going, because I think they feel they’re recovering some normalcy. And I do think that if the average employee or professional human, has now seen the worst behind them, and they are sort of trying to regain or recover their own stability, there is a missed opportunity, thinking outside the box and looking at something that could be better, you know, so this is like a little bit again, as you can see, I like the relationships, analogies a little bit like you thought you were in a good relationship, and everything was fine. But suddenly, your partner can see you and ditches you. And you start again, well, maybe you’re gonna end up in a better relationship now. So I think, given that you are forced to reconsider and reframe certain things, and that there is no back to normal or back to business as usual, maybe that’s the push we needed to actually consider what else is out there. And of course, you’re seeing now in places that have at least stabilize or regain some of the economic our or trajectory that had had pre COVID. Like in the US, you’re seeing a lot of mobility, a lot of movement, you know, people are now seeing because these same individuals were reimagining their careers and their futures during the year and a half that they were in lockdown and stress, etc. But they were afraid to let go because in a crisis, you cling to what you have, you know, but right now, there’s still that window of opportunity that things are certainly better, but they’re also not going back to what they were. So I think, you know, this is what it’s, again, another not so nice analogy would be, you know, you thought everything was fine, but you have a heart attack and then you’re taken to hospital and then you realize actually, you have an opportunity to change your life and health habits and then you become, and you would have never done it unless you’re put in this extreme situation. I think in extreme situations, we find out who we really are, and what really matters to us. And we realize that actually, most of our neuroses and our issues were really first world problems that are okay, if everything else is taken care of. But now we’re going kind of back to basics. And I think I fundamentally, I believe that the number one human skill, or power is our constant ability to reinvent ourselves, that’s what makes us probably the most adaptable species in the world. And I think it’s a pity if we don’t use this power more often. And we don’t look inside us to see what else we can bring out and what else we can express. I think that’s basically what makes life fun. And what makes humans unique.

 

Claire Harbour

It absolutely is. And it completely aligns with the thinking that we have in our work and in our book, which is about constant reinvention, constant career disruption, and personal disruption. So I love the fact that we’ve ended up in sort of perfect alignment, perfect harmony. And I feel we could go on for another couple of hours. But we know that the podcast listeners like to stop at around 45 minutes, max, so we’d better bring it to an end there. It’s been an absolute pleasure to having you here, and we are so grateful to you for having taken the time.

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure

 

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