Arthur Brooks: Starting when I was eight or nine years old, I literally wanted to be the greatest French horn player in the world. That was what I always wanted to do. That was my whole life dream.
Adam Grant: What was behind that?
AB: I was ambitious. I wanted to play for a lot of people. And I guess that was just simply expressed in the only thing that I really knew how to do, the only thing I really cared about, which was music.
(Music)
AG: Arthur Brooks was a natural. He could read music before he could actually read. He played in youth orchestras as a kid, prestigious ones. Eventually he dropped out of college to go on tour.
AB: I went on the road playing classical music. I did that for six years. I saw all 50 states from the back of a van.
AG: Arthur recorded an album that played on classical radio stations across the country. But then something started to change.
AB: I realized, about age 21, that things were starting to go south, and I couldn't explain it. Ordinarily, classical musicians, they will see their skills increase through their 20s, and sometimes even their 30s. So whereas if I were a baseball pitcher, it would be totally normal that I would be losing heat off my fastball by my early 20s. As a French horn player, I shouldn't have been seeing that, but I was.
AG: To turn things around he practiced his heart out. Finally, he got his big break, his debut at Carnegie Hall.
AB: So I got ready for this concert, and the first half of the concert, I have to say, was phenomenal. It was really one of the best concerts I'd ever given. And in the second half, I had this experience where I had to actually talk to the audience and I walked toward the front of the stage to address the crowd, and I wasn't watching my feet and I slipped, or something collapsed, I still don't know, and I fell five feet into the audience.
AG: You literally fell off the stage?
AB: I literally fell off the stage. It was just ridiculous. It was ... I wrecked my instrument, I fell on my instrument, I hurt my arm. And, of course, I did what you would do when you're 22 years old. I jumped up and said, "I'm okay, folks." And I obviously was not okay.
AG: (Laughs) Oh, no.
AB: (Laughs) It was just so terrible, Adam. It was so terrible.
AG: Arthur tried to shake off the feeling that falling off the stage was a bad omen. He spent the next decade practicing. He studied with the best tutors in Europe. He got a job at a symphony in Barcelona, but --
AB: It was a wreck. It was a slow-moving wreck in my career itself. I was in decline. Finally had to pack it in. I had to admit it to myself that I wasn't the horn player I had always dreamed of being. And right now, I'm talking about it with you and, you know, we're laughing and all that, but I've got to tell you, it kills me, I still hate it.
AG: Arthur didn't plan to quit music so early. He simply stopped being great at his job. And in the years since, it's made him wonder, does career decline happened to all of us eventually? And is there anything we can do about it?
(Music)
I'm Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I'm inviting myself inside the minds of some truly unusual people, because they mastered something I wish everyone knew about work. Today, career staying power. It's more about the choices you make than the age you reach. Thanks to Accenture for sponsoring this episode.
(Music)
(Music)
Let's be honest, we all have peaks and valleys in our careers, times when we hit our stride and do our best work, and times when we're in a slump. Most of us are worried that as we age, our physical and mental skills will decline and we might enter into a permanent slump. And that fear is compounded by the fact that age is seldom seen as an asset in the modern workplace. Far too often, our older colleagues don't get the respect they deserve. Arthur's slump happened at a particularly early age, so he changed careers and became a public policy expert.
AB: Basically I'm just an old fashioned, number-crunching, quantitative social scientist.
AG: Given what he's gone through, it's not entirely surprising that his big area of focus now is career decline.
AB: Career decline is a very personal and personalized phenomenon in which your skills are not what they once were. So you might be making as much, or more, money than you ever have before, but you know that you are not at the same level of technical adeptness that you had once attained, and/or you're not on the trajectory to attain what you had hoped.
AG: Maybe you felt your stomach lurch when someone younger than you has a smashing success in your field or your workplace. Or maybe you've been humming along feeling good about your work, until one day you noticed your skills don't seem quite as sharp as they used to.
In 2019, Arthur wrote a major story about this phenomenon in "The Atlantic." The headline was "Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think." As in, long before you even start to see retirement on the horizon.
AB: I mean the number one myth is that, you know, particularly in certain professions, like, let's just say yours and mine, which is coming up with big ideas and sharing them, that that'll never go into decline. Why? Because it doesn't require, you know, strong biceps, and yet there's overwhelming evidence that in idea professions people experience decline as well. They just don't expect it.
AG: What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age is not straightforward. It actually depends on what kind of mental skills we're talking about. Psychologists have long distinguished between two kinds of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. Fluid intelligence is your raw processing power. It's basically your IQ, your innate capacity for learning and problem solving.
AB: That's a big part of the modern idea economy. I'm going to come in here, I'm going to be a whizzbang person who comes up with brand new ideas. That's actually what's rewarded for young people because young people have high levels of fluid intelligence. It increases through your teens and 20s, and maybe through your 30s, although it tends to start declining for most people in their 30s and 40s, and it makes this original idea generation harder. Now that doesn't mean that you're going to be unsuccessful, but it means if you're relying entirely on this fluid intelligence, you're going to struggle.
AG: A common refrain in Silicon Valley is that young people are just smarter. When it comes to fluid intelligence, that's generally true. But the story changes with crystallized intelligence, your acquired ability to solve problems by applying your knowledge and experience.
AB: Your ability to synthesize things that you didn't necessarily invent, that's crystallized intelligence and that tends to happen later.
(Music)
AG: Think about how crystallized intelligence comes in handy in your job. If you're in sales, you've used it to tailor your pitches to different clients based on what you've learned about them in the past. If you're in government, you've relied on it to get around red tape. If you're in finance, maybe you've applied it to predict how markets are affected by crises. Crystallized intelligence peaks much later than fluid intelligence, in large part because our body of knowledge keeps growing.
AB: Think of it like a library. Think of the brain as basically filling up with a lot of volumes. And that means you have a lot of crystallized intelligence.
AG: Depth and breadth of knowledge aren't the only benefits of aging. Evidence suggests that self-control and socio-emotional skills often keep climbing, too. Many of us continue gaining willpower and emotional intelligence well into our 40s and 50s. We're still getting better at delaying gratification, reading other people's emotions and regulating our own moods. Even into our 70s and 80s, we're still improving at ignoring sunk costs, all of which can enhance our job performance. But Arthur doesn't think that's enough to keep us from declining.
AB: Everybody falls in their game at some particular point.
AG: At what age do you think the average person is going to start to face significant career decline?
AB: I've got to give you the social scientist answer -- it depends but if I were to guess, I've got to say that in your mid-40s is when you're likely to see the peak of your originality and creativity, and you should be making plans in your 40s to how you can be the best creator with your crystallized intelligence, how you can be the best instructor, the best synthesizer, you can possibly be.
AG: OK, so this is where I want to start disagreeing with you. So my read of the evidence is that people don't inherently become less creative. One of the things that happens as people's careers advance is they tend to produce less, just, you know, in terms of overall volume. I think it's not ability. I think it's motivation that's dropping. I think, you know, a lot of people become complacent and they feel like they've achieved enough success, and so they may scale back a little bit. It may be that priorities outside of work become more important to them. And if we can maintain that motivation, there's no inherent reason why the quality of creative output would decline. What do you think?
AB: Hmm, I'm willing to entertain your hypothesis.
AG: OK, cool. So there's a study I really like of scientists, filmmakers and artists, showing that as they advance from their 20s and 30s toward their 50s and 60s, they do less work. The scientists run fewer experiments, the filmmakers don't make as many movies and the artists produce fewer paintings. But those who stay productive, their hit rate was every bit as high in their 50s and 60s as it was in their 20s and 30s. So, you know, I think about Frank Lloyd Wright designing Fallingwater at 68 years old, his crowning architectural achievement. Or I'm sure you've come across Raymond Davis Jr, the scientists who measured neutrinos from the sun. He didn't build the key detector until he was 51 and kept running his experiments until he was 88, the year he won the Nobel Prize. I'd be willing to bet that we would either uncover, or even create more Frank Lloyd Wrights and more Raymond Davises if we had ways of keeping more people motivated to produce into and past mid career. Agree or disagree?
AB: I think that if there is a natural cadence to the average person's life, and you're saying it doesn't have to be this way, then the societal goal will be one in which everybody is above average. And you know, that becomes an exercise in frustration.
AG: In other words, that's a nice theory about encouraging everyone to keep producing at maximum capacity for decades, but it might not be realistic if you're not a superstar in your field. The rest of us are going to do what people naturally do. And Arthur wants there to be space for that path, too. He wants people to be excellent in their own way, which made me wonder if he thinks career decline is more inevitable for people who achieve excellence.
AB: What goes up must come down ultimately, and the higher up you go, the more obvious it is that you're not there anymore. That's what I call the Law of Psychoprofessional Gravitation. You notice a lot when you were great and you're not as great as you once were. And if you can do something to get on your crystallized intelligence curve, you get a different kind of productivity, and you can be successful in a different way. That's the knowledge I want to get across.
AG: He's arguing that regardless of what field you're in, as your fluid intelligence declines, you should make a change. Stop trying to innovate. Take what you've learned and accomplished and shift into a mode where you can transmit your knowledge and skills to other people. Become a teacher or a mentor.
AB: And frankly, the world needs those people. And we don't have enough of them. When I'm at a certain point in my career, and I see that I'm not on the top of my game, I need to start thinking, is what got me here, whether it's the insight or the innovation or whatever it happens to be that got me here, is it something that I can sustain? If it's not, start looking for something else. Specifically, start looking for a way that you can move into instruction mode.
AG: In Arthur's case, after giving up on music, he spent years running a conservative think tank. And then having learned the lessons of his fall at Carnegie Hall, he took his own advice.
AB: And I had somebody I really respect, and he said, "You know, when you are a chief executive and you have to be on the razor's edge every single day, you have two choices on how to step out of your chief executive job." And I said, "Well, good, two choices. I like two choices. You know, it's like the Monty Hall game. You know, door number one and door number two. So what's behind door number one?" And he said, "Leave before you're ready." And I said, "Oh, I don't like that. What's behind door number two?" And he says, "Leave on someone else's terms." I said, "Ooh, I really hate that one."
AG: What did Arthur decide to do then? Exactly what he's suggesting you do. He went into teaching.
AB: The bottom line is, when the stakes are high, it's worth leaving things before you're ready.
AG: Arthur is content with how his career choices worked out. He wants you to walk off the stage before you fall off of it. I understand where he's coming from, but I'd rather see you find your balance, or get on a different stage altogether.
You do have choices beyond aging out and opting out. More on those after the break.
(Music)
OK, this is going to be a different kind of ad. I played a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast, because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Accenture.
(Music)
Gonzalo Adriazola: I'm from Arequipa, which is the second largest city in Peru. We have the coast, we have the Andes and we have a bit of jungle.
AG: This is Gonzalo Adriazola. When he was 19, he and his mother left Peru and moved to rural Ohio.
GA: I don't think I fully processed that I was leaving a whole life behind. I think I was just excited for the future.
AG: As a young immigrant to a new country, Gonzalo didn't know exactly what the future held, but his mother became a tremendous source of inspiration. From early on, she taught him about the importance of education.
GA: She would always tell me, "I might not leave you anything, but I'm going to leave you a good education."
AG: Gonzalo got a job at a local restaurant while he applied to colleges.
GA: When I got the acceptance letter, my mom and I were just, like, jumping and dancing and just so happy.
AG: He headed to the Ohio State University, and it didn't take him long to fit in. He was crowned homecoming king, started working full time at a bank and found a community within the Hispanic Business Student Association. They sponsored a trip to a conference in Washington.
GA: It's the largest gathering of professional Latinos in the US. I saw this one speaker and he was so good. He was so passionate, energetic. Besides being phenomenal, he looked like me, and this was the first time I had seen someone in person that looked like me that was a total boss.
AG: At the end of the talk, Gonzalo went up to the speaker and asked for advice.
GA: I asked him like, "I want to be a CEO one day. How do I get to be like you?" And he laughed and looked at me and told me that professional services firms, all they have is people. So they're going to do their best to make the best of you. And that's how I found out about consulting.
AG: Research shows that role models can elevate our aspirations. When we see someone similar to us do something inspiring, it builds our confidence that we can follow in their footsteps. When Gonzalo graduated from college, he followed his role model's advice and went to work as a consultant at Accenture.
GA: I was really happy to join the firm. And I mean, it has only been great experiences.
AG: Gonzalo had accomplished a big goal, and for four years, he helped companies grow and perform better. But he had a nagging feeling that something was missing from his life.
GA: As soon as I got to Accenture, I wanted to give back to Latin America. That was kind of, like, my life objective. I saw that we had worked with this microlending institution called Caja Arequipa, and I'm like, "What are the odds?"
AG: He reached out to the leadership team running the project.
GA: They told me about, like, everything we were doing in regards to financial inclusion in Latin America. I was really excited to know that I was from that same city. Very welcoming to my help.
AG: Alongside his consulting work, Gonzalo has been a leader in the Hispanic Employee Resource Group and volunteered his extra time to help the team in Latin America. His dedication paid off. Earlier this year, Accenture development partnerships moved him to Colombia where he joined the project team full time.
GA: It was a dream come true. I called my mom. We laughed, we smiled, we danced.
AG: This isn't the only way Gonzalo gives back. Every year he's gone back to the conference where he was first inspired by someone he felt he could relate to.
GA: It feels like I'm doing my mission. I was in their shoes one day and now I'm the person lifting up, just as others lift me up. And there's people lifting me up right now. There's going to be a brighter future for my community.
AG: Accenture is working to become one of the most truly human companies in the digital age. Learn more at Accenture.com/careers.
(Music)
(Music)
Lyn Slater: I'm not a Pollyanna about aging. There's certainly changes in my body. You know, I have my wrinkles, I have my white hair, but I think that I could generate content as much as someone who's younger than me. In fact, most of the peers who are at my level are all younger than me.
AG: Lyn Slater is 65. She recently quit her career as a professor to become a full-time social media influencer. Lots of people call themselves influencers, but Lyn's version is a real job.
LS: I'm also known as The Accidental Icon.
AG: The Accidental Icon has more than 700,000 followers on Instagram, and she gets paid to run ads on her account for brands like Kate Spade, Visa and Teva. Her feed is filled with stylized photos of herself posing around New York City in designer clothes and large sunglasses. She's been featured in magazines like "Cosmo" and "In Style." And she's walked the runway at New York Fashion Week. Actually, she's walked more than one runway.
LS: I have no background in the fashion industry, but I was in the runway show last spring with Kate Spade. I've worked with them quite a bit.
AG: Some people will tell you that most of us do our best work when we're younger, that when we approach retirement age, we should slow down, take up a hobby, play with the grandkids. But excellence later in your career is possible, and there are a few ways you can get there. Lyn is living proof that you don't have to avoid career decline by shifting from doing into teaching. You can actually reinvigorate your career by experimenting, by doing something new. In Lyn's case, she did something completely new. We saw her in action one Saturday near her home in Manhattan.
(Birds chirping)
LS: We're on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It's called Museum Mile because everywhere is a museum. I'm going to be shooting my outfit outside.
AG: She's with her partner who doubles as her photographer.
Calvin: Your bangs are good.
LS: Thank you.
AG: Lyn is petite with a short white bob and bangs that stop just above her huge sunglasses. She takes off a long velvet coat and scans the brick facades of the Museum of the City of New York for her next spot of inspiration.
LS: And right now, that little nook over there is really calling to me because it does look like a place ...
AG: Before becoming a social media influencer, she had an entirely different decades-long career in social work. She was an expert for New York City family courts on child abuse issues. She wrote a seminal book on social work and law, and she spent the last 20 years as a professor of social work at Fordham University. She was quite an authority in her field, but she told me she'd become frustrated with the glacial pace of academia. Like, how long it takes to write and publish journal articles.
LS: The whole process could take almost two years and maybe a handful of people would read it. And so, as I began to get more followers on Instagram and I began to do more things, you know, for example, I did a short film and within a couple of weeks, that was in front of, you know, millions of people.
AG: Lyn went about as far from her original field of work as she could go. So what leads to a spectacular pivot like that? A dose of novelty.
Research shows that curiosity is a key factor that can help you find creative peaks as you age, rather than decline. This is one way to stay productive and maintain motivation later in your career. Find something new to explore. For you, novelty might mean switching to a new team or a new market, getting certified in a fresh skill set, or mastering a hobby completely outside your experience. For Lyn, that hobby was fashion.
LS: I've always had, sort of, what I call a very performative relationship with my clothes. I resist like crazy social categories or constructions of who I should be.
AG: In this case, she was resisting the idea that a long time professor of social work wouldn't also be interested in high fashion. She'd been toying with the idea of starting a fashion blog. And one day, unexpectedly, the name came to her.
LS: It was the first week of school, and I always used to dress up for that. And I was meeting a friend for lunch and I had on a Yohji Yamamoto suit, and a couple of photographers started taking my picture and then a bunch of other photographers saw them do it so they came over, and my friend was making a joke like, "You're an accidental icon."
AG: If you're going to experiment with something new, it helps to fully immerse yourself in that world. Lyn was creative in where she looked for her mentors.
LS: I found out that I could get a press pass to what is called the market shows, and I would spend hours talking with these young designers. They taught me a great deal about how clothing is made, what the processes are. That's how I really began to understand fashion.
AG: Instead of being intimidated by new technology and seeing it as something only young people can master, she went straight to the experts she knew.
LS: My students helped me to figure out Instagram and Snapchat, and I started to take classes in social media and fashion and just random things, like, how to start your own vintage store.
AG: In a study in the fashion industry, the more time designers and directors spend abroad, the more creative they became over their careers, but it wasn't traveling or even living abroad that mattered. It was the amount of time they spent working abroad. They couldn't just observe it from the sidelines. They had to be in the arena. That's how they really internalize the novel elements of a foreign culture. For Lyn, seeking out new perspectives included small steps, too.
LS: I do things that I don't normally do. And so that could be very simple things, like taking a different route to work. It's really, put yourself into different experiences that are creative and see where that takes you.
AG: You may not aspire to quit your job and become an Instagram star, or to switch fields at all. And you don't have to. There are ways to reach new heights while staying within your career path. Think about whether you're a sprinter or a marathoner, not in terms of running, but how you go about generating creative ideas. Economists call the sprinters conceptual innovators. They typically start with a big idea and they tend to peak early, because they have eureka moments when they're relatively new to a domain. Like Einstein at 16 imagining himself chasing a beam of light, or Mary Shelley at 18 starting to write "Frankenstein." But as they accumulate knowledge, they're more likely to get stuck in their ways and stop gaining new perspectives. There's a term for that: cognitive entrenchment. The longer they stay in a field, the more likely they are to take for granted assumptions that need to be questioned.
Marathoners, on the other hand, are experimental innovators. They usually discover their ideas through trial and error. They often peak later because it takes time to test out different approaches, like Darwin, spending decades tracing the origins of species, or da Vinci experimenting for years with different ways of modeling light in his paintings. But those habits allow them to sustain their peaks longer and peak again later as they explore new areas. That kind of experimentation is familiar to Lynda Weinman.
Lynda Weinman: I'm an autodidactic person. I always love learning new things.
AG: She got her start in the 1980s as an animator at a film studio. She often compared herself to her higher achieving peers who were sprinting ahead.
LW: I remember when I was in my 20s watching some of my friends who were uber successful and I, you know, at my 30th birthday was in tears that I hadn't accomplished what I wanted to accomplish yet with my life.
AG: But she didn't rush it. Instead, for the next 10 years, she kept chugging along, testing out different ways to build and use her skills. Finally, the year of her next big birthday, she created a website. Lynda called her site Lynda.com.
LW: Well, when we started Lynda.com I was 40 and when we sold it I was 60.
AG: She sold it in 2015 to LinkedIn, for, oh, 1.5 billion dollars. Lynda.com was one of the first companies to offer professional learning online. Maybe you've heard of their courses in animation, design and software. Maybe you've even taken classes there that advanced your career. Many founders who are trying to grow a unicorn company, think they need to generate one brilliant idea and scale it rapidly. They think they need to be sprinters, but Lynda approached her career more like a marathoner. Her online learning company didn't look anything like a success early on. Instead, she was constantly trying out new ideas and innovating over time. In some ways, Lynda was primed for this kind of scrappy test-and-learn approach.
LW: I actually had a pretty troubled childhood. I moved in with my dad and my stepmom who weren't expecting to raise me and my siblings. And, you know, it was just this feeling of having to find my way because all the adults in my life were, you know, having their own problems. And I think what I probably am is a very resourceful person who realized at an early age that it was on me to figure out my life.
AG: During her early days as an animator, Lynda encountered her first computer. She was unimpressed, at first.
LW: It was a Apple II Plus clone that my boyfriend brought home, and so to please him, I turned it on and I started pecking at the keys and I caught the bug that so many people since have caught. And he eventually called himself a computer widow, because I liked the computer more than him.
AG: (Laughs)
LW: I mean, I was just amazed at what it could do.
AG: What it could do was draw. So Lynda got her own Macintosh and brought it into work. People started asking her to do projects for them.
LW: Somehow they thought I knew more than they did, which was, you know, basically I'd had five minutes longer with something than they had.
AG: Lynda was onto something. By experimenting with new tools and following her curiosities to uncharted places, she could carve out a niche and continue iterating instead of stagnating.
LW: Oh, do I want to do what everybody else is doing, or I'm being asked to do something that only I know how to do, and maybe that's more fun.
AG: Lynda ran two more experiments. First, she started teaching in-person college classes in web design. Then when she saw a lack of good manuals for students, she wrote one herself.
LW: Then it became a huge success, way bigger than any of us could have imagined.
AG: Well, you're being very modest, but can I get you to describe a little bit just how successful the book was?
LW: I'm not sure how many millions it sold, but it was translated into many, many languages and it was the de facto web-design book for all colleges. It was the "it" book.
AG: From there, Lynda continued to test out new methods of teaching. She started selling instructional videos on VHS tapes. Then, as technology changed, she switched to CDs, then DVDs. Then she launched the website Lynda.com. In the late '90s, she and her business partner and husband tried launching memberships on Lynda.com. They weren't exactly an instant hit.
LW: In the beginning it was just an abject failure. It was cannibalizing some of our other work.
AG: But they didn't give up. Not every experiment succeeds, and they don't all succeed right away. Memberships weren't growing like crazy, but there was steady growth. Lynda paid attention to that.
Eventually they hit an inflection point. While Lynda.com was quietly adding hours of material to their catalog, more people were using the internet for online learning. Their online audience doubled each year. And in time that grew into a big number. By 2012, they had over a million paying users and over a hundred million dollars in revenue.
LW: It was literally a very organic growth process.
AG: Lynda could've simply continued to develop her skills as an expert animator and would have had a nice career. She could've kept teaching, too, but her greatest success came when her experimentation led her into entrepreneurship, turning her various projects into a business. She didn't listen to the narrative that as you get older, you should pull over into the slow lane. She saw some benefits of building something later in her career.
LW: By the time you're 40, you believe in yourself more. You're a more seasoned human being that has better judgment and better experience and better confidence.
AG: This might be one of the reasons why older founders are actually more successful than younger ones. In a study of several million entrepreneurs, 40-year-olds were more than twice as likely as 25-year-olds to launch a successful start-up. And they were also nearly a third more likely to be in the top 0.1 percent of fastest-growing tech start-ups. Yes, sprinters sometimes get lucky right out of the gate, but marathoners know how to persevere.
LW: I think everybody would probably like to be instantly successful and be revered and acknowledged and acclaimed and all those things, but when it happens to you too young, it actually can be very damaging. At least the people that I've seen, who, you know, they burned bright and they burned all the way out. They didn't understand that it wasn't going to last forever and that they had to keep reinventing and they had to earn it again.
AG: If you're worried that your career will decline, don't let your output decline, and don't let your curiosity stagnate either. It's never too late to invent or to reinvent yourself.
LW: I think the older you are, the more valuable you can be.
AG: I love that because I don't ever want to retire.
(Music)
Next time on "WorkLife." Working remotely is full of challenges that have made our work lives harder. Lizet Ocampo: So we turn our cameras on and there I am as something else. At first, we didn't realize it was a potato. We're like, "What is going on?" I just essentially was a potato for the meeting.
AG: But some of the solutions might be easier than you think.
(Music)
"WorkLife" is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Angela Cheng and Anna Phelin. This episode was produced by Jessica Glazer. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton-Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Accenture, BetterUp, Hilton and SAP.
For their research thanks to Dean Simonton on creative productivity, Lu Liu and colleagues on career hot streaks, Ben Jones and colleagues on the success of older entrepreneurs, David Galenson on conceptual and experimental innovators, Erik Dane on cognitive entrenchment and Will Maddux, Adam Galinsky and colleagues on working abroad.
(Music)
In some ways, Lynda was primed for this kind of crap ... Excuse me. (Laughs) In some ways, Lynda was primed for this kind of crap ...
(Laughs) It's not crappy, it's scrappy.
In some ways, Lynda was primed for this kind of crappy ...
(Laughs)
Sorry.
(Laughs)
