John Green Wants You to Pay Attention to Your Attention (Transcript)

Adam Grant:
Hey WorkLifers, it’s Adam Grant. Welcome back to Taken for Granted, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. My job is to think again about how we work, lead, and live. Today, I’m talking to one of my favorite authors...

John Green:
I'm John Green and I am here in my basement in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Adam Grant:
John is best known for his heart-stopping novel The Fault in Our Stars. He’s also a longtime YouTuber and podcast host. Last month, he released his first nonfiction book: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet. It’s based on his podcast by the same name.

The anthropocene is the geological period of time also known as now, when humans are dominating the Earth. John’s book is a brilliant analysis of some of the most monumentally important-- and some of the most charmingly trivial-- touchstones of our time. He covers topics ranging from the human capacity for wonder and the plague to office air conditioning and Googling strangers to Monopoly and Penguins of Madagascar. He reviews them all on a five-star scale. So I couldn’t wait to get him to review a few things with me.

Adam Grant:
Is the correct pronunciation The Anthropocene Reviewed?

John Green:
That's how I say it, but I'm not, I'm not sure that it's standardized yet. So if you want to kind of stake out new ground, feel free to pronounce it a different way.

Adam Grant:
Part of me that wants to call it the Anthropocene.

John Green:
Yeah. Or some people say the Anthropocene but that's just, that feels a little pretentious to me. I mean, it's a little bit of a pretentious word to start with, so I try to pronounce it in the most like flat, normal way possible.

Adam Grant:
That's perfect. Well, congratulations. I would love to start with how you decided to turn what was originally podcast work into a book and how you got the idea to, to write a book of reviews effectively.

Well, it started out for me with this long period of being really sick. I had this disease called a Labyrinth Titus. And um, as a result of that, I couldn't open my eyes really for, for two or three weeks. And I was just in bed alone with my thoughts, unable to read or play with my kids or do anything else.

And I was thinking back to other projects I'd worked on over the years, and this was also in a weird transitional time in my life and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life after that. Uh, you know, I didn't know what I really wanted to do for work really for the first time, since I was 22.

And then as I started to get better, I re-read the work of my friend named Amy Cross Rosenthal, who had died a few months earlier. And I read this moment where she says “Pay attention to what you pay attention to if you want to know what to do with your life.”

And I realized that I had not been paying attention to what I was paying attention to. I just, I was kind of letting the information flow happen very passively in my life. And I wasn't paying that kind of careful sustained attention, that really for me, is the way toward hope and wonder and joy. And for me, that meant writing a series of extremely in-depth Yelp reviews about plague and penguins of Madagascar.

Adam Grant:
And diet Dr. Pepper.

John Green:
Diet Dr. Pepper. Absolutely. Which I have right here, actually.

Adam Grant:
I thought it was such a clever way to write a book and the format of a review. And in doing that, maybe even embracing the very style of communication, you've come to loath in the systems we use.

John Green:
Okay. Yeah, there is something really weird to me about the way that the five-star scale has kind of taken over a qualitative analysis because it isn't for people. It's for data aggregation systems. And so I wanted to play with that because while I think the five star scale is somewhat ludicrous, it's also become indispensable. We all use it. Is this book good? But like, should I go to this doctor? Should I take this medication? All of those things have huge amounts of five star scale reviews and I do think that they can tell us something, that they just can't tell us everything.

Adam Grant:
You won me over on that because originally when you said you didn't like the five-star system, I thought, well, first of all, I'm a social scientist. I love anything that can be quantified. And, and secondly, and maybe even more importantly, it, I guess it takes me back to my, you know, my wannabe athlete days when I was a diver.

And there, there were moments when I'd come out of the water and my coach would tell me, you know, two or three corrections and I'd get a little defensive, but if he said four and a half, like, whoa, that's a long way from a 10, tell me what I can do better. And there was something about the rating that took all of the subjectivity and the uncertainty about do I need to listen to this feedback out of the equation and made me realize this is not good enough.

And ever since then, I have loved a quantitative rating. Every time I write a draft of a book, uh, when my students will read it, I asked them to rate the chapter on a scale from zero to 10. And like the it's the same thing, a four and a half. I remember a student saying four and a half months. And I asked why, and she said, not a page Turner. I was like, okay, now I didn't want to rewrite it, but now I know I have to.

John Green:
Yeah, no, that's interesting. I don't think that I'd ever thought of the kind of quantitative/quantitative analysis of qualitative experiences that way as a way of almost taking out the subjectivity of it. I guess for me, I feel like I can't take out the subjectivity of it. Because a book that is a page turner for me is not going to be a page turner for everyone. And that was one of the really essential things I learned in making this book very early on. I sent a couple of the early essays to my wife who generously, but frankly was like, you're acting as if you're an objective expert in the field of Canadaian geese, rather than acknowledging that you have a particular perspective on Canadaian geese that is informed by your moment in history, you living in Indianapolis and a million other things.

And you've got to acknowledge that in the Anthropocene, there aren't any, like, outside observers—there are only participants. And that was a really essential thing to understand for me because I, then, once I put myself into the reviews, I think it becomes okay to say Canadian geese are a two-star bird because that's clearly like, utterly subjective analysis.

Adam Grant:
Yeah, I thought, I mean, there are so many things that I loved about this book, but that was my favorite scene setting moment was Sarah telling you to write yourself into the book? Because it sorta hit me all of a sudden that I don't care about the things you're reviewing, most of them.

John Green:
Yeah.

Adam Grant:
I care, well, to be clear, I care deeply about Mario Kart. And we're going to talk about that too, but I don't, I don't care about Canadian geese. I don't care about Dr. Pepper, but you have such an interesting mind and an interesting way of describing and noticing and experiencing things that I care about your experience of the things you chose to review. And once you wrote yourself into the story, it actually became a story.

John Green:
Yeah. And every room, every good review, I think is that on some level, it's a little bit of a memoir because it's not really, “this is a good restaurant” or “this is a bad restaurant.” It's “this restaurant on this night meant this for me.” And understanding that what connects people to the subject matter is not necessarily the subject matter itself, but the approach finding a way to make it personal.

Adam Grant:
I think I've only written one or two book reviews in my life and they have, I've, I've tried way too hard to make them objective because that's what I was trained to do as a social scientist.

John Green:
When you are in a field that everyone thinks of as subjective and everybody thinks there is no evidence-based anything in, in any social science, you have to constantly defend the reality of data.

And so I understand why, why you would feel like, “Hey now, there are facts. There is evidence-based something in, in social science fields.”

Adam Grant:
That cuts right to the heart of my soul.

I already want to pick up on several things that you've commented on. Let me start with your dear departed mentor and friend Amy Krouse, Rosenthal. I was stunned when I read her observation that you just mentioned that you can figure out what motivates you by paying attention to your attention.

And I was stunned in part because I had tweeted a couple of years ago, sort of a random thought that we reveal our goals through our actions, but our values through our attention and that if you want to figure out what's really important to you, you should just scan what you pay attention to. And then found that I could, I could figure out what I wanted to write my next book about by looking at the themes in my social media posts and noticing the patterns in them.

And I'm guessing you're a little bit more, you're probably less systematic and nerdy about it than I am, but how have you gone about paying attention to your attention and what did it reveal to you?

John Green:
The thing that I had to initially understand is that on some level, attention is my main resource. It's my central resource. Most of what I do in the world is pay attention and respond attentively or not. And understanding that made me start to think, well, if I paid a certain kind of attention to anything, could it be rewarding?

Like what if I, instead of like, kind of in the background, watching this movie with my kids while on my phone and not really engaging with it, what if I tried to take this 2014 animated film penguins of Madagascar really quite seriously. Is there anything there for me? And it turns out there is and so one of the takeaways of writing the book for me was that in the end, what you pay attention to matters, but maybe what matters most is the kind of attention you pay. And if you pay that kind of careful sustained attention, almost everything becomes a potential site of real intellectual and emotional reward.

Adam Grant:
It does, which I guess leads me to my first quibble with one of your reviews.

John Green:
Great. I'm excited because one of my favorite things in WorkLife is how generously you disagree with your guests.

Adam Grant:
I've never—I've never been told I disagree generously before.

John Green:
Well, they're just like, it's so hard to disagree with people in a way that makes space for them and is empathetic toward them. That's one of the big problems we have on the internet, but also I think in larger public discourse, so I'm excited. I'm ready.

Adam Grant:
Well, thank you. Our capacity for wonder as human beings, you gave us three and a half stars.

John Green:
Yeah, that was a, that was a mistake...

Adam Grant:
What happened? What? I mean the whole, the whole book is it's almost an ode to our capacity for wonder. You even challenged Fitzgerald’s claim in the Great Gatsby that we’ve reached the limits of our capacity for wonder.

John Green:
I'll tell you what happened. I got stuck between two ideas, which was that the way that Fitzgerald writes about our capacity for wonder in the great Gatsby, I think is three and a half stars. But our capacity for wonder itself is one of the only unambiguously five star things about people. So really, I should have found a way to articulate that a little more carefully.

Adam Grant:
I had a hunch it was something like that because I mean, the book is dripping with wonder and it's, I think it's one of the things that's so magnetic about your work is how you take things that other people ruminate about or avoid and you make them invitations to curiosity.

John Green:
That's a lovely way of thinking about it.

Adam Grant:
Yeah, and I think one of the things that I guess it left me thinking about it a little bit is as you start to pay this kind of sustained attention that you're talking about to your own attention, you do see patterns, you notice that you wonder about certain kinds of things more than others. What did that teach you about intrinsic motivation, and how to find that and sustain it?

John Green:
Well, if I don't have a sense of purpose and orientation in the world, I find it extremely difficult even to get out of bed, let alone to do anything. I really, for me, it's not like a philosophical matter. It's a mission critical part of being alive. And sometimes the motivation can be something as straightforward as, you know, my kids need stuff and I need to help them get it.

And that's a good, that can be a good motivator sometimes. Especially when it comes to my work, I need to find the kind of motivation that can like carry me through the difficult parts of writing and writing is by no stretch of the imagination the hardest job I've ever had.

And so I need to have a kind of motivation so that I can have the discipline to work because I'm not somebody who's going to be able to just wake up in the morning and say, like, discipline alone is going to sit me down at this desk and it's going to make me write. I have to have another motivation.

And for me, this motivation, especially with this book was trying to reach out, trying to find points of connection with other people. And so that really, that desire for connection, especially starting around March 13th, 2020 became so profound for me that it was a great source of motivation.

Adam Grant:
How is that different from the intrinsic motivation you've found in writing your other books? I wonder if you could look back on what propelled you to write the fault in our stars and turtles all the way down, what was similar and different there?

John Green:
I think what was different was that with this book I was writing on some level for myself, but, but from myself, of myself, about myself. I never know which prepositions to use, but I was writing very directly about my own experience and I, I haven't done that in my novels.
Those books were motivated, I think on some level, by a desire to go back and speak to the person I was when I was 16 or 17 years old, but they were also motivated by a desire to write the kinds of books for young people that I had when I was a young person that made such a difference in my life. And I found that a really clear motivator.

Adam Grant:
Well that's, I guess that's almost perfectly segwaying to the next thing I was wondering about, which is we met, I don't know, maybe five, six years ago, very briefly—

John Green:
I remember.

Adam Grant:
—And it was also just a very nerve wracking experience sitting down with somebody whose writing I admired so much, amplified by knowing that you were often nervous to meet new people. And I'm like, oh no, I'm nervous and I'm supposed to be the guy who makes John Green comfortable.

John Green:
I don't do a great job of concealing the fact that I'm nervous around new people either.

Adam Grant:
Well, neither do I. So me as the anti-anxiety force in an interaction is probably not a good bet, but one of the things you said that was so profound was that you, you really don't like it when people say, “write for yourself.” And you think about your books as a gift to other people. And I wondered if you could talk more about that.

John Green:
Yeah. I mean, I, I think there is a time and a place to write for yourself, but for me, it's in my journal. And when I'm writing to share work, I'm writing to connect to other people. I have to think about it as a gift I'm trying to make for someone that's given, given freely.
And I have to be able to let it go too, because part of making a gift is when the time comes, it's not yours anymore. And that can be a really hard part of writing. Sometimes I really want to hold on to the stuff that I'm working on and not let it go and not let it become someone else's.

Adam Grant:
I know that feeling and, you know, it's, it's interesting because I obviously, as somebody who studies generosity, I'm drawn to the idea of thinking about your work not just as an act of self-expression, but as a contribution to others. And I think that's, that's so much of the fuel behind a lot of human creativity.

I worked on a paper once, uh, it was called the necessity of others is the mother of invention.

John Green:
Yes.

Adam Grant:
I think that's such an underrepresented theme in creativity that we're capable of having lots of novel ideas when we're just drawn in by interest, but finding the most meaningful and the most useful ones really requires taking somebody else's perspective.

John Green:
Yeah, and that's one thing I really love about writing novels is that it is an attempt to imagine both someone else's perspective when you're writing, because you're writing a fictional story, you're making something up, but it's also an attempt to imagine the needs of the reader and what what would benefit the reader?

Adam Grant:
Does that make you the world's biggest advocate for bibliotherapy?

John Green:
Okay. I kind of am. I mean, I think there are limits to what books can do and sometimes whatever field you're in, you always think it's super important. Like that's just a side effect of spending all your time inside of that pond. Like you think the fish in that pond are the most interesting fish in the world and you think your pond is the largest and most important pond on earth, but like, I really do think the book's pond is pretty important.

Adam Grant:
I do too. And I wonder if it's not, if it's not just a side effect, but you were drawn to that pond because of the way that you experienced it.

John Green:
Yeah, for sure. Books made me feel less alone in the loneliest times of my life. , but also they can be accompanied as in joyful days they can be guides to wonder and joy and, and allowing these things to kind of co-exist is one of the things I love most about books.
Like I love books that are funny and sad. I love books that contain all of these big human experiences because in real life, that stuff is always living alongside everything else.

Adam Grant:
And I think that's part of the gift of a great book, is it gives people a little bit of extra permission to feel that full spectrum of human

John Green:
Yeah, no, that's a great way of saying it.

Adam Grant:
There is one thing that gives me pause though, about thinking about a book as a gift. When I compare it to other kinds of creative products, I'm much more comfortable giving those. If I could, if I could paint, I would say John, here's the painting and I wouldn't feel guilty about it, but handing you a book here's a bunch of work to do, and you're going to be better for this, even though it's going to take you a lot of time and might bore you in certain parts.

John Green:
Yes. And maybe that is what is really deeply weird and particular for me anyway, about books is that I am trying to give a gift to the reader, but I am very conscious of the fact that the reader is also giving a gift to me, the gift of hours and hours of their attention, and so it requires a mutual journey generosity. The reader has to open themselves to the book and the writer does as well,

Adam Grant:
I will say one of the gifts that you are legendary for in the writing community is signing just an almost unfathomable number of books. I remember struggling to get through 5,000 and you signed 150,000 of The Fault in our Stars. Is that, is that a correct number?

John Green:
That is correct. And then I signed 250,000 for The Anthropocene Reviewed. So in a way, the folding, their stars was just like practice for the real work that came over the last six months.

Adam Grant:
Wow. I love though that you, here you are, you know, personalizing hundreds of thousands of copies of your books to make it, to make it into a true gift for the reader, right? Because no one else will have that exact signature. And you tried to convince me as the reader that you were doing it for selfish reasons that you just enjoy getting engrossed in a state of flow.

John Green:
I do enjoy it. I mean, I. Uh, I, I will say this time around, I did not enjoy the last a hundred thousand or so signatures that much, but there are parts of it that I enjoy. I, and I, it's so hard for me to find a way to express what it means to me that anyone would read my book, it's a little way of also trying to take this highly mechanized, somewhat distant process and say, well, there is one page that we both actually touched and, and we really, you know, this, this is a physical, a small, but still physical connection between the two of us.

Adam Grant:
I think that's, it's a wonderful thing that you do it, and it raises some questions for me about the flow experience, which I think anybody who's ever been in a creative job or played sports, or, um, just enjoyed getting lost in a moment can describe as a peak experience, when one of the things that's always bothered me about flow dating back to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work coining the term and studying is he describes it as, as where challenged meets skill where you have an, almost a difficult task at the very edge of your capability that's stretching you. But signing your books doesn't stretch your skills at all. So why is that a flow experience?

John Green:
For the same reason that like level seven Tetris is a flow experience? For me on the original NES Tetris from 30 years ago, which is that maybe my capabilities just aren't that high. I don't know, but like, people ask me what I think about and I'm like, I don't know. I don't really think about anything. I'm just, I think a lot about the signatures, I think about whether that one was good. I think about, you know, like whether this one is good, I think about how to do it, even though I, you know, basically know how to make the motion with my hand. Those are the things I'm thinking about in the same way that when I play Tetris, I'm thinking about how to fit the blocks together. But for me, if there can be something that occupies enough of my consciousness, there's something on the other side of that that is really, really lovely and calming and mindful and present. I think in the book, I talk about a present tense that actually feels present, and that's how it feels for me.

Adam Grant:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess it, it also aligns with one of the most common flow experiences in the Csikszentmihalyi data, which is driving also, also not at the very edge of most people's capabilities, but to your point requires enough attention that you probably shouldn't be doing anything else.

John Green:
Right. Yeah, you should, you should not be on your phone at the same time. And it's the same thing with signing. Like, you know, it requires enough attention for me that I am just there. That feeling that you have when you're driving where long stretches of time pass, but it doesn't feel like they passed or like many miles past, but you don't know how they passed is so lovely and weird and particular.

AND WE ARE BACK WITH JOHN GREEN...

Adam Grant:
One of the things I thought might be fun is to ask you to review some things that didn't make it into the book.

John Green:
I'm in, I’ll do my best.

Adam Grant:
So one of the things that's obviously been defining for a lot of people's past year of their Anthropocene has been remote work.
How would you review remote work?

John Green:
Oh, I'm so conflicted about it because in a lot of ways it's great. And you know, my brother and I, because he lives in Montana and I live in Indiana, we've been working remotely since 2007 and finding ways to collaborate together. And so I think the transition was probably easier for me than it was for a lot of people.it's always been for me a place of calm and contemplation where I can really get into that flow state of work. Whereas an office environment often for me, is full of interruptions and conversations, which has its own kind of productive, but not the kind that I most treasure

I miss being with people though. I think even though I'm quite introverted and don't love a meeting, I miss. I miss being present with people in the little collaboration's that just emerge naturally from being together. That said, like, if I had my druthers, I'd probably still spend three or four days a week working from home. So I'll give work from home, like, three and a half stars.

Adam Grant:
I'm with you there. I was going to give it four only because I needed a lot of other people to do it in order to get away with doing a lot of it myself.

John Green:
Yeah. I feel like your rating of it is much more evidence-based than my rating. So we'll say you brought me around.

Adam Grant:
I didn't want you to rethink it so quickly,

John Green:
No, it's good. It's important for me to be able to change my mind immediately.

Adam Grant:
I will say there was a meta-analysis, even long pre-pandemic, that said as long as we're in the office half the week that we get more productivity and satisfaction and there's not a real cost to relationships. I like this idea that it's emerging in a lot of workplaces now that we're going to go to the office to collaborate, but we can stay home to work.

John Green:
Yes. And I hope that will be the future for lots of organizations.

Adam Grant:
Same. Okay. Next thing I want to ask you to review is therapy.

John Green:
Oh, I mean, for me, therapy is a five-star experience. It's hard for me to imagine what my life would be like without therapy. I have fairly severe obsessive compulsive disorder and have had periods of major depression in my life. And the tools and techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy have made as big a difference for me probably as medication and between the two of them, they're the reason why I'm able to have a healthy and productive life while living with mental illness.

Adam Grant:
On that note, how would you review OCD itself?

John Green:
Sarah and I were talking about this recently and she was like, I wouldn't want you to be anyone other than you. And I wouldn't want you to not have OCD. And I was like, I would like to not. I am also just really suspicious of attempts to find the superpower in mental illness or find the upside in it.

For me, it's just a chronic health problem that I have to live with and try to manage and treat as I would any other health problem. So, I mean, it's a one-star thing for me. I don't really see a lot of upside to it. Yeah. One-star unfortunately, yeah. It's a one-star thing.

Adam Grant:
That's fair. I obviously can't object to that. I think one of the things you have done though with your work is you've helped a lot of people understand what that experience is like. And I guess that goes to one of the other things I wanted to ask you to review, which is, uh, adults reading young adult novels.

John Green:
(laughs) Four stars. I think it's great. I mean, I'm biased obviously, I think one of the reasons we tend, even as adults to be drawn to stories of adolescence is because so many things that are still happening to us now happened to us for the first time as teenagers. And so whether that's dealing with falling in love or dealing with grappling with grief or asking big questions about meaning and suffering. Adolescence can be an interesting kind of time of life to approach those questions through, because there's such an intensity to that first experience of it.

Adam Grant:
I've never understood until you just explained that why I'm so drawn to young adult novels, even as an adult, because you're right there. It's a portal for understanding experiences we're still having that were much more that we imprinted on that were, were so much more formative when we had them at that age.

John Green:
Yeah. And you know, the second time you fall in love is great. And in some ways it's better because you have a little bit of context, but the first time you fall in love, you really do feel like nobody has ever experienced anything like this in all of human history. And that makes it fun to write about. I think it also makes it fun to read about it.

Adam Grant:
And then since you've listened to WorkLife, I have to ask you to review my podcast.

John Green:
Oh, I think it's a five-star podcast. I find this podcast super helpful for understanding my own work-life, but also for understanding the work-life of the teams of people we work with.

Adam Grant:
That is a huge honor.

John Green:
Your episode on burnout came at a very fortuitous time in my life when I was experiencing a lot of burnout, but also didn't understand (1) That I was experiencing burnout and, (2) why I was experiencing it—and understanding that isn't just about how much work you're doing was really important for me, understanding that if I have a sense of daily progress and a sense of small wins work becomes much easier and more fun.

And then when I have a sense of orientation and purpose, work doesn't feel so overwhelming to me. And so that was probably the biggest thing that I use all the time when I start to feel that way, I can tell myself, okay, well, what are some small wins or are you venturing away from a feeling of purpose in your work?

And maybe that's why you're feeling burnt out. I think of course there are lots of other causes of burnout and lots of other treatments for it that were discussed in that episode. But that's what resonated really deeply with me. And it was kind of like a magic pill to overstate everything.

Adam Grant:
Well, as a native Midwesterner, I have to say, I like the Indianapolis flavor of this review. Uh it's it's, it's very kind and warm, but I also imagine there are some ideas you've disagreed with or wanted to challenge a little bit. Is there anything that, that jumped out at you where you said, no, you got this wrong or I have a different take on this

John Green:
One of the things I really like about the podcast is that you make room for uncertainty and celebrate the wisdom of being able to change your mind.

But I think I haven't even ran a more radical approach to uncertainty than you do,

Adam Grant:
Oh, definitely.

John Green:
Be uncertain about everything all the time, no matter what.

Adam Grant:
I would not be able to function

John Green:
There are little moments, there are little moments where you have a measure of certainty that I, feel like I'm not sure. I'm not totally sure that I'm not sure.

Adam Grant:
I am a hundred percent sure that's true as I would be, but yeah, I, you have, you have much higher tolerance for ambiguity than I do. Yeah.

John Green:
Oh, that's an interesting way of thinking about it, but yeah, I mean, I feel like I have to, because that's all I got and ambiguity is my whole jam.

Adam Grant:
It's so funny. Cause I have the exact opposite experience,

John Green:
Yeah. You've got a jam.

Adam Grant:
I need to find clarity and certainty within all of the ambiguity.

John Green:
Maybe clarity is a better word than certainty. Like you're looking for and expressing the places where this, the murky deep down stuff that we often don't know how to give language or form to becomes clear through language and form. And I think that's good and important work. I just like sometimes like it to stay murky and, and formless.

Adam Grant:
I guess a different way to maybe describe this, this tension between our styles is I think that I'm always looking for the simplicity on the far side of complexity and you're very comfortable hanging out in the middle of that complexity.

John Green:
That's great.

Adam Grant:
Oh, well then we're going to have to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes. I think, I think it's the source. I can't believe neither of us has quoted anyone to this

John Green:
Oh yeah, that's impressive.

Adam Grant:
I've been resisting the temptation multiple times. I'm sure you've also suppressed that instinct.

John Green:
I do love a quote. That's something I really like about your work. You also love a quote! I have been collecting quotes since I was a little kid. And, um, it's weird because I don't know how you feel about it, but I'm at once really ravenous for quotes that can help crystallize different parts of experience for me. But at the same time, a little bit suspicious of them, because a lot of times my favorite passages in literature are deeply contextual.

Like they depend so much on the sentence that came before and the sentence that comes after, but I still, I do love a good pull quote.

Adam Grant:
Absolutely. Uh, well, when you, when you're talking about this being a practice, dating back to your childhood, it makes me think about something you wrote about that at first, tripped me up and then got me thinking for a good two days. The quote that just jumped out at me was you wrote about, I think it's intense longing for the you to whom you can never return. And my first reaction was, well, why do you want to go back to a former version of yourself? Aren't you a better version of yourself now?

John Green:
I think I am in most ways. I hope so anyway, but I also think that there are times when I look back on them, when I felt a kind of like safety or security, a sense of a deep sense of home. That I maybe don't feel now because circumstances have changed. I'm in a different place in my life.

And that's what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how there's always a, there's always a past that you can't get back to that part, at least part of you wants to return to, right? Like, I would love to have a conversation with people I love who've, who've died, or I would love to be able to, I would love to be able to go back and spend one day in the apartment that Sarah and I shared in New York when we were in our twenties.

Now I am happier in almost every way now than I was then, but I still do sometimes feel a longing for an old self

Adam Grant:
So that speaks to what I found so interesting about it. After I stopped rejecting the idea, it, it seemed like you were defining a new type of nostalgia or at least one that I never thought about before, because normally when I thought about nostalgia, it was longing for an experience or a moment that was past it's a person I've lost or it's, you know, a place I was in or a group that I was part of that's moved on and you wanted to go back.

It sounded like identity nostalgia. Like you wanted to recover a version of you. And as I thought about it more, I realized, yeah, there are parts of my past selves that I miss. I miss the, just the, the sheer wonder of like being curious about what career I might pursue a little bit, even though that was mostly an anxiety provoking experience.

John Green:
Yeah, but I think there is a weird phenomenon where once we've gone through something, it feels different. So everything, everything feels survivable after you survive it. And I think that's a lot of why I allow myself sometimes to think about those. Those past versions of myself fondly,

Adam Grant:
Well, my favorite, my favorite review that you did, and the whole book was a Mario Kart

John Green:
Oh, thanks.

Adam Grant:
I loved it. I loved it in part because you're, I think you're four years older than me and Mario kart was a defining experience, I guess, of middle school for me, the way it was high school for you. Um, in part though, because during the pandemic, I was able to play with extended family members and reconnect with them over Switch, right?

Because they were, they were able to get into our online games. Uh, my best friend from college was in Germany and we played games against each other and his kids were racing us.

John Green:
Oh, that's great.

Adam Grant:
It's just such an incredible experience. And I wanted to hear you talk a little bit more about the life lessons from Mario kart.
And then I might add in a little bit of psychology and see what your reaction is.

John Green:
Great. Well, for me, the first life lesson of Mario kart is that games are more fun when they're played with friends and Mario kart was one of the first games in the old days, in the Super Nintendo days where you really could play with friends, it was one of the first split screen games. it was an excuse for us all to be crowded together on a couch for us to be talking about everything else, except for Mario Kart.

But then also there's the game mechanics of Mario Kart itself, which really interests me, because if you're in last place, you get better power ups than if you're in first place. Like I remember playing Mario Kart with my kid, my son who's now 11, but at the time was probably seven and he got bullet build this incredible power up on the last lap. And he, he didn't just beat me. He also like smashed my cart as he passed me moments before the finish line. So I ended up finishing fourth in one way. It's not fair because I was better at Mario kart than the seven year old. But in another way, it's very fair because the power ups you get when you're further behind should be better than the power ups you get when you're ahead.

Whereas in real life, the power-ups that you get when you're ahead are almost always much better than the power-ups you get when you're further behind. And so that, for me, it was also a way of trying to write about.

Adam Grant:
I find that so compelling and, you know, I feel like there there's, there's no better way for me to express a parent's love than the joy I felt when our seven year old beat my sister, my brother-in-law and me in a race

John Green:
Yeah, well, now I can't compete with Henry. I mean, I, now I'm the one who's hoping to get bullet on the last lap.

Adam Grant:
Well that. Okay. So that, that goes to an interesting paradox in, um, in the luck scale debate. I don't know if you've ever read Michael Mauboussin’s work. Does that ring a bell? So he, he wrote a book where one of the chapters basically analyzed, uh, how, how important luck is as a function of the skill level in a field.

And what he showed was the exact opposite of what I had assumed, which is the higher the skill level goes, the more important luck becomes,

John Green:
Wow.

Adam Grant:
Which is really weird, right? It's counterintuitive at first

John Green:
But it, but it makes no, it makes

Adam Grant:
Does it make sense to you? Go ahead.

John Green:
Well, the reason it makes a kind of sense and I'm sure that this is wrong and I look forward to being corrected, but the reason it makes a kind of sense to me is that there are a lot of really skilled writers.

And when I think about what differentiates it's mostly luck. So like just on a personal level, That's my experience of it, um, is that once you get to a really high skill level, there's so much luck involved precisely because everyone is really skilled.

Adam Grant:
Exactly. That's, that's exactly how Michael explains it. He, I think his, his data among other places came from baseball and he said, look, if everybody is bad, then the few people who are good are going to stand out a lot. But if everybody's good, it's almost impossible to know whether the pitcher or the batter is going to win on that given exchange. And it sounds like you see writing as a similarly high talent endeavor right now.

John Green:
Yeah, I think I do.

Adam Grant:
Okay. Another related topic that I wanted to ask you about in two different sections of the book, you said things that surprised me at one point you said you need a vice. You feel like you need to have a vice in your life. I think that might be diet Dr.Pepper.

John Green:
Yeah.

Adam Grant:
And then the other is, you said you, you always wished for a nemesis. And with both of these, I thought why most people don't go looking for vices and nemeses. They're stuck with them and they're trying to escape them.

John Green:
Well, I think with, with the vice, I think it, I don't know where it comes from, but when I was in my teens and twenties, I smoked cigarettes compulsively. And for me, like the pleasure of cigarettes was in the kind of compulsive cycle of it, the buildup of the need And the desire, and then like the pleasure of giving in to that need and desire became a really kind of vicious cycle for me.

And so I, I've, I've managed to pull mostly out of that, but I do still drink diet Dr. Pepper, which feels a little bit like a vice to me.
As far as the nemesis, you don't, you don't want a nemesis. I mean, I feel like every, I feel like everybody, everybody wants a nemesis. I remember when I was younger, my writing career, a few of my writing friends would have writers that they felt like a real deep kind of, uh, rivalry with.

And I would always think that was kind of cool and sort of wish that I, I had a writer who I felt this weird mix of admiration and jealousy toward, uh, but I never really did. And I never really felt like I had an MSS until relatively recently when I began gardening and I developed a deep, deep nemesis uncle to coin a term relationship with this Groundhog that lives underneath my hose shed.

In fact, Adam, just this morning, I was in the garden. And the ground hog, it's just starting to like wake up and stretch itself. And it, I was in the garden and it ambled into the garden and I was like, you have to respect when I'm here. You can't, you can't be eating. You can't be eating seeds while I'm here.
You have to wait until I leave.

Adam Grant:
And therein lies the difference between a friendly, rival and a nemesis. I want the former, not the latter.

John Green:
Okay. Maybe that's maybe that's what I need. I need a friendly rival,

Adam Grant:
Well, let's talk about the opposite kind of relationship that you have with your community of readers and viewers and listeners. They're called" Nerdfighters", right? They're obviously, you know, beloved fans, but they also seem to inform your creative process. And I I'd love to hear more about how you interact with them and how they, they ended up influencing your work.

John Green:
They influenced my work in such profound ways. When I was writing the fault in our stars, I would do these live shows where I would read stuff that I was writing as I was writing it. And I'd never done anything like that before. This was over 10 years ago now. And initially, yeah, I thought, well, this is going to be terrible because people are going to be seeing stuff that isn't done and it's going to be embarrassing.

But instead what happened is that if I could make myself open in that moment to being like, I don't know if this is working, like I'm reading it out loud, partly to try to figure out if it's working and it was when I was writing the fault in our stars that I realized I didn't actually have to be alone with the story in quite the way that I'd always thought I did. And ever since then, I've, I've done that.

And it's, it's a deep, really important community for a lot of people. And I'm one of them like, I it's, it's impossible for me to imagine my professional or my personal life without that community, but also without their pushback, without their, you know, helping us to reframe and rethink things that we thought we knew and helping us to expand the way that we think about work and our set of obligations and responsibilities to each other. It's important to me in every way.

Adam Grant:
John on the subject of rethinking, uh, one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is this problem of escalation, of commitment, to a losing course of action, where you have something that's failing and you can't let go of it and you persist with it. Anyway, uh, you had an example of this that I had no idea You spent almost a year writing a novel about high schoolers stranded on a desert island.

John Green:
Oh, yeah, my desert island book. Um, man, I spent a year, I spent almost a year on it and I really, I really tried hard to make it work. And I just got to a point where I was like, I don't know, I don't know what's working or not working in this story. And. I have a strategy for that moment, which is that I put it away for two weeks and I just work on other stuff.

And then after two weeks I reread it and I've done that with a lot of different stories over the years. And when I re-read this desert island.

novel, I realized that there was just nothing in it. There was no heart. There was no, uh, there was nothing. Um, the only, the only sentence I ended up saving is this sentence.

It was kind of a beautiful day, which I did really like. And I put that in The Fault in our Stars and the rest of that book. Uh, I guess I wrote for those words,

Adam Grant:
Well, I, that, I guess I had a couple of reactions to it. The first one is your technique builds so perfectly on, on what we explored in our episode on rethinking bad decisions, uh, where we said, look, you need an outside view. You need an independent perspective to help you figure out if this is any good.

And by, by giving yourself that two-week window, you're essentially detaching yourself and, and internalizing the outside view.

John Green:
Yeah, exactly, and then you can see it as other people would see it. And that's when I was like, oh, this just isn't working. I've had that experience a lot in my, in my writing. And that's made it a little easier to have because the first few times I had it, it was devastating. Even that time really was devastating because I felt like, oh, I'd worked for a year on this book.

And I wasn't going to get anything out of that year, but I did get a lot out of that year. And, and so that's the thing that I needed to learn about failure is that I learned a lot from writing that stuff. It didn't get published and. In that sense, it was a failure, but I learned a lot and I was able to bring a lot of what I learned to_The Fault in our Stars,_ which is the book that I ended up writing instead.

Adam Grant:
I mean, I'm obviously so glad you did.

John Green:
Yeah, me too. I'm really glad that I didn't publish the desert island novel. And I'm glad that I wrote The Fault in our Stars, but The Fault in our Stars had also been a book that I tried to write many times starting in like 2000 or 2001 when I was only 20, 23 or 24. And I kept, I would do that same thing where I would write as much of the story as I could write.

And then I would take two weeks away from it and I would, I would look at it and I would think like, now it's just not working. It's just not working. It's just not working. And you know, that frustration built up over the years. And there were lots of times when I thought I was never going to be able to write that book. And then one day it started to work.

Adam Grant:
Well, the other thing I thought was amazing about this example is I've had a pet peeve, as long as I can remember. When, when editors tell me you have to kill your darlings. And I've always, my reaction has always been darlings are why you write, I'm not going to kill them. What I do is I save them and I find a home for them in a future book or article.

And that's exactly what you did.

John Green:
Yes, yes. That's exactly right. I think that you've got to find the right place for them because a lot of times when I write something that I'm really pleased with, it doesn't work in the context in which I wrote it. And it's super obvious that I'm really pleased with it, which is part of why it doesn't work.

It almost pulls the reader out of the story because the reader's like, oh God, I bet he liked writing that sentence. so you can't use that stuff a lot of the times in the original context, but maybe you can find a way to say something similar in a way that's a little less cute or a little less, uh, pleased with yourself.

Adam Grant:
Yeah, what's, what's the line from the great philosophers in South Park that, uh, you you'd get caught in a cloud of smug the perfect storm of self-satisfaction

John Green:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've really, you've... That's, that's I think what editors mean when they say kill your darlings is like, try to eliminate your smug.

Adam Grant:
That's exactly right. One of the things that you wrote about in the beginning of the book that, you know, just. Hit me like a ton of bricks, , is you observed that we're simultaneously too powerful and not powerful enough. And I thought that is the human condition in one sentence.
And I wonder, I wonder if you could talk about your personal experience of that, because on the one hand you have written books that millions and millions and millions of people have responded so powerfully to, and yet as you put it, you can't even get your kids to eat breakfast. Right?

John Green:
I can't, I mean, I couldn't get them deep breakfast this morning. It was, it was a significant source of tension this morning. Um, yeah, it it's, I, it is very, it's very strange to me that so many people have, have read my books. It's, it's very hard for me to put that in context or understand what it means or make any sense of it.

But I'm aware of the fact that, you know, I, I have, I have gotten to have a seat at the table in a lot of people's lives and that's, that's a huge privilege and a huge amount of responsibility as well. And, and at the same time, it is also true that on an individual level, I don't really feel that power.

And I often feel powerless to stop people I love from suffering. I often can't, you know, keep people that I love from suffering. I feel powerless before the big waves of, uh, obsessive-compulsive disorder that I have to live with. I feel powerless before single strands of RNA. And so this is the weird thing about being a person.

We are, you know, we are reshaping the climate. We are having a massive effect on the biodiversity of the planet, but at the same time we as individuals, you know, can't even save ourselves.

It's from a meaningless inert strand of RNA and living with that, uh, within wind, that paradox is. It's difficult for me at times. And I think that's why I wanted to write about it.

Adam Grant:
This has been such a delight. And talking to you is every bit as exciting and enjoyable and eye-opening as I hoped it would be.

John Green:
Well, thank you so much, Adam. It's really great to be with you and have a chance to talk with you. I'm a big fan of your work. So this is really cool.

Taken for Granted is part of the TED Audio Collective. The show is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and is produced by TED with Transmitter Media.

Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O’Donnell, JoAnn DeLuna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Constanza Gallardo. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.

Adam Grant:
I feel like about every third sentence you write. I think either I wish I wrote that or, oh my God. He's been living in my head. How does he know? I feel this way.

John Green:
That is my favorite thing about books actually, is those moments when it feels like the writer knows something about you, that you've never told anyone and you get to co-mingle these deep really abstract, hard to fathom experiences and feelings with a writer. That's what I love about reading. So if, if my book could be that for you, I'm super grateful.