🧠 Failure Is Your Head 🧠

“If you’re comfortable, you’re doing it wrong.” -Ted Lasso

Saul Rabin was a character.

That’s my paternal grandfather (who passed away in 2005.) He was a Hebrew School principal and then later a Hebrew School teacher. Specifically, he was my Hebrew School teacher.

(Gulp.)

Actually, it went pretty well for me, and I became a rabbi, so I think you could say it went really well, all things considered. However, it’s one of the reasons I hate when people call me “Mr. Rabin.”

My grandfather had a lot of shtick when he taught, some of which I never understood until I started diving into theories about what helps people learn.

One of these things was something he called his “right-hand man.”

At the beginning of the year, my grandfather selected one child in his classroom as his “right-hand man.” He would ask this student to bring things to Mrs. Glaser’s office, hand out dittos, and do various other tasks throughout the year.

Was the right-hand man a straight-A Hebrew school student like me?

Never!

Although he never said it explicitly, the right-hand man was always the child the previous teacher told him that he needed to worry about the most. By sending a message to this child that he expected more of them, the hope was that they would perform better.

Did this strategy always work? That’s impossible to know.

But it does bring us to this week’s big idea.

Pygmalion Effect

Mr. Rabin never met Michelle Pfeiffer.

(I think?)

But in Dangerous Minds, a great performance by Pfeiffer that has not aged well as a movie, Pfeiffer’s character employs one of my favorite educational tactics to this day: everyone starts with an “A”:

No matter how you feel about the movie, I love the strategy of telling every student that they start the semester with an “A.” It’s a simple way to employ what’s called the Pygmalion Effect.

(If you need a primer on Pygmalion, read the footnote below before continuing to the next paragraph.)

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson found in 1968 that “the children of whom greater intellectual growth is expected will show greater intellectual growth than the undesignated control-group children.” When educators start with high expectations for their students regardless of past performance, those students tend to perform better because the educator signals that they believe in them.

The Pygmalion Effect is not without controversy, but the theory attempts to demonstrate the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. Returning to Mr. Rabin’s classroom, the right-hand man was an attempt at the Pygmalion Effect; send the message to someone typically labeled a “bad kid” that they have a position of prestige in the classroom, and perhaps that student will perform better. Sometimes, to perform better, all a child needs is someone who believes in them more than they believe in themselves.

And the same applies to organizational systems.

Self-fulfilling prophecies are everywhere in Jewish life. In some cases, this is for good; certain people and organizations have a reputation for being effective and innovative, which is usually based on strong previous performance, also allowing those institutions to survive momentary setbacks.

But what about organizations stuck in a cycle of negative perception?

I love serving these kinds of organizations.

I’m not a glutton for punishment (I think.) But if you can help the people in that organization develop confidence in themselves, confidence that may fly in the face of previous abuse from without and within, you will make a faster, deeper impact than an organization where everyone assumes, at the outset, that you will succeed. Like people, sometimes all a struggling organization needs is someone sincere who believes in them when the Jewish world considers them a lost cause.

The alternative is what Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux call the “set-up to fail syndrome,” the reverse of the Pygmalion Effect, where low expectations cause people to perform worse. Manzoni and Barsoux argue that it is difficult for the employee to change the boss’s perception because even when this perceived low-performer does well, “bosses tend to attribute the good things happen…to external factors rather than to their efforts and ability.” Once a perception hardens, it is hard to break out of it, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

Since so much about Jewish life cannot be defined in purely objective terms, the reality is that achievement in organizations is more about atmosphere and attitude than we’d like to admit. How might our world be better if we started from the assumption that every Jewish institution is doing great work until proven otherwise?

I’m not sure, but I’d love to find out.

Hidden Potential

Reviewing a book by Adam Grant is a mild cliche.

I’m relatively confident that many, if not most of you, are familiar with Grant’s work, and some may have already read his latest book, Hidden Potential.

However, Hidden Potential is my favorite book by Grant since Give and Take primarily because Grant offers such a nuanced analysis of how people will never gain mastery if they don’t accept a stage of incredible awkwardness. Grant provides many anecdotes to support his argument, but my favorite is about a linguist and hyperpolyglot named Sara Maria Hasbun, a woman who speaks seven languages and is currently learning four more.

I speak some Hebrew and Spanish, but I’m far from fluent in spite of a 450+ day streak on Duolingo. If I had to select the main roadblock to fluency, it is that I get embarrassed when I don’t know how to say something. Rather than look silly, I try to avoid making mistakes by switching to English. But if I am not willing to keep trying, I’ll never learn to speak with any degree of mastery.

Grant argues that mastering a new language is a perfect case of the paradox of achieving mastery. On the one hand, Grant argues that people “can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it.” However, “practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it.” Instead, Sara Maria’s story of language mastery taught Grant that accelerating learning requires the courage to be “brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.”

To cultivate this bravery, Grant argues that “When we’re encouraged to make mistakes, we end up making fewer of them. Early mistakes help us remember the correct answer — and motivate us to keep learning.” As a result, the best way to learn a new language or anything that requires deliberate practice is to keep trying and see mistakes as steps toward progress rather than away from them.

Do the organizations stuck in a negative cycle make mistakes? Of course, they do. Even the best organizations do. However, the cost of assuming bad performance from any system often means that the organization stops trying to achieve excellence, and that is bad for them and the Jewish people.

Huberman Lab

No shortage of short podcasts with Adam Grant.

Here’s a long one.

3%

Total increase in global median wealth, according to UBS.

What I Read This Week

1. Why the Ivy League’s Turmoil Matters to All Nonprofits: I’m honestly unsure how I feel about the donor revolts taking place on campus these past few months. But I need to keep learning about it. Here is a thoughtful dialogue in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the subject.
2. Susan Cain’s Profile of Adam Grant: Amazing analysis of Grant’s work by the author of Quiet, one of the best books I have yet to review.
3. American Christianity is Due for a Revival: Personally, I think most issues facing non-Orthodox Judaism are merely reflections of issues facing mainline churches; things will not get better until America goes through another period of religious revival. Timothy Keller thinks we are due for one.
4. How Psychological Safety Hurts Employees: This is not a critique of psychological safety (PS) but shows how an invaluable concept can be manipulated. If you care about PS, you need to read this.
5. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?: I’m not a big crossword guy, but I suspect many of you are. Enjoy.