201. The Science of Motivating Gen Z: Mentors, Purpose, and Politics feat. Dr. David Yeager

Sep 21

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Today's guest is David Yeager— a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who is considered “one of the world’s leading experts” on the psychology of young people, according to the New York Times Magazine. He has consulted for Google, Microsoft, Disney, the World Bank, and the White House and has recently published his book, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.

In this episode, we discuss:

+ How his teaching background motivated his research focus on adolescents

+ What's so unique about the 10-25 age range according to psychology

+ Why so many programs designed to reduce unhealthy behaviors in teens fail to work

+ Ways that the upcoming election is being marketed toward young people

+ Effective ways that adults can motivate the 10-25 age demographic

+ The importance of mentorship for younger people & how to find a mentor

+ Balancing being motivated to get into college & pushing yourself too hard

+ How to receive feedback well & avoid any blindspots when getting advice

+ Advice he wishes all 10-25 year-olds knew on finding purpose & more

+ so much more!

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People

+ Professor Yeager's LinkedIn

+ Professor Yeager's profile

+ Carol Dweck

+ Noelle Hurd

+ Dale Miller

+ Man's Search for Meaning

+ Mentorship Study

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About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

Sadie: Welcome to She Persisted. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a 19 year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the University of Penn. She Persisted is the Teen Mental Health Podcast made for teenagers by a teen. In each episode, I'll bring you authentic, accessible, and relatable conversations about every aspect of mental wellness.

You can expect evidence-based, teen approved resources, coping skills, including lots of D B T insights and education in. Each piece of content you consume, she persisted, Offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle, while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.

So let's dive in this week on She persisted.

Dr. Yeager: Is it a surprise? That we have told all young people, basically under 30, that they don't matter and they need to wait to be of significance and consequence.

And at the same time, young people have mental illnesses in which the primary symptom is questioning your worth. I don't think we can just blame everything on screens. I think as a society, we've decided to not ask young people to have a purpose. And then we're surprised with listlessness and purposelessness.

, but we can do different

Hello, hello, and welcome back to She Persisted. I hope you guys are liking this mini back to school series, trying to give you some really incredible conversations and advice and skills you can implement this year to really set yourself up for success. And this episode is an all time favorite and one that you will definitely be pulling wisdom from this year.

We have David Yeager on the podcast, he's a professor of psychology the University of Texas at Austin, who's considered one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of young people. He's consulted for Google, Microsoft, Disney, the World Bank, and the White House, and he just came out with a book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People.

This is such a phenomenal conversation. I loved reading this book, and I highlighted so many different takeaways and got to pick Dr. Yeager's brain about some of those in this episode. So I really hope you enjoy . And get a little snapshot of his research and ways that you can apply it in your life. So, just to give you an overview, we talk about what's really unique about being 10 to 25 years old and how that impacts your motivation, because you're motivated very differently than adults.

We talk about why so many programs designed to motivate teens, , like reducing obesity and bullying and drug use, why that doesn't work and why they've actually had negative outcomes despite so much funding, and wide applications. We talk about the marketing that's being used to motivate young people in the election this year, which is really fascinating and timely.

We talk about how you could actually motivate yourself, why mentorship is so, so, so important, balancing yourself in college and being able to stay motivated and pursue your goals, but also not push yourself too hard because that's the other really important half of that equation. We talk about Receiving feedback effectively blind spots that occur when we get advice, some little psychology hacks to keep in mind.

And then lastly, Dr. Yeager's advice for 10 to 25 year olds who want to find their purpose in life. So this is just, again, one of the best conversations that I think I've had on this podcast. It's phenomenal. I know everyone leaving this will away with so many takeaways, and it's just amazing. Like, a psychology goldmine when it comes to young adults and motivation and purpose and all the things.

So, I hope you loved this as much as I did. Make sure to share with a friend or family member. Enter the Starbucks giveaway. All the things. I hope you guys are having a great start to your school year. And with that, let's dive in!

Sadie: Well, thank you so much for joining me today on She Persisted. I loved reading your book

it was so interesting, and I can't wait to share it with our audience because it is the exact demographic you talk about in your book, which is this, like, 10 to 25 year old age range, where I think subjectively a lot of us struggle with Feeling motivated and feeling adequately supported, but putting that into words is really challenging and so much gets lost in communication, which you did a really good job of distilling why that is and how we can overcome that.

So I'm just really excited to have you on the podcast today.

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's , it's wonderful to meet someone who's read the book because it's been Just a PDF in Adobe InDesign until Tuesday. I got that.

Sadie: I got the advanced and I felt really special and cool I was really excited about it.

Dr. Yeager: Excellent. Good

Sadie: Well, for people that haven't read your studies before, or they haven't heard about your book, how did you get into this specific area of psychology and research? Because it is such, it's a very hot topic, but it's also a very small niche within the psychology world.

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, so I'm, I'm a developmental psychologist, which means I focus on, , The question of how anyone transitions from one phase of life for functioning to another, , and I, I focused on adolescence mainly because that's kind of where my interest always lied.

So I was a middle school teacher for a while and when I taught middle school I'd had so many different jobs. So I was the English teacher. I was the PE coach. I coached basketball. I, , ran the book club, the technology club, et cetera. And I would say that it's easy to get young people engaged and motivated when it's fun, like basketball or book club, but like, diagramming sentences or rewriting your essays or especially.

Dealing with critical feedback on the essays, that stuff was always kind of hard for me, and I felt like the advice I had been given wasn't very good. It was all very abstract, like have a mastery goal rather than a performance goal. It's like, well, I'm sorry I have to hand out grades, so I don't know what to tell you.

Science about what I'm supposed to do here, . And so I, I left the classroom eventually to go. Do the kinds of experiments that I wished people had done when I was a teacher, , and not just as a teacher. Before I was a teacher, I was summer camp counselor for middle school aged kids, and I lived and worked in the, in an orphanage in Chile for a while, did a lot of work in the housing projects and just in general cared about young people.

, and then I got to Stanford to do research and. I was lucky enough to work with Carol Dweck, whose experiments I think did a great job of giving the kind of clear explanations that people needed. She's of course famous for the concept of growth mindset, which many young people unfortunately are like bludgeoned with in their schools.

Sadie: Yes.

Dr. Yeager: , and it's turned into nonsense, but the science is awesome and it's very rigorous. And Carol is one of the greatest scientists in the world and very generous. And she got me interested and How to conduct the right experiments. And ultimately, we ended up with some big questions about where growth mindset wasn't working and why it wasn't working.

And that's what led me to do more of the work that I write about in the book.

Sadie: I think what's really interesting about how you set this up is you talk a lot about this specific age demographic, and it's not just Gen Z, it's like what is happening when everyone goes from 10 to 25 years old, and the things that worked when they were 5, 10 years younger aren't now working to motivate that same demographic.

Similarly, once they quote unquote age out, it is no longer as challenging to motivate this population per se. And so, I do explain to listeners, because they probably haven't gone through all the psychology classes in college and graduate school, what makes this specific age group so unique, especially when it comes to receiving feedback and challenges that aren't fun, , and trying to motivate not only themselves, but being motivated by other people.

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, so the 10 to 25 age range is super interesting. So, , why 10? We start with 10 because that's the onset of puberty. Now, of course, puberty has many different processes, but the one I tend to focus on is gonadarchy, which is the kind of gonadal hormones in both men and women, males and females that, , can contribute to, , really sexual maturity.

, but they have all kinds of interesting effects on the brain too. So testosterone, estradiol, , to some extent DHEA are changing a lot in that period and what they do to the brain. among other things, is to sensitize it to social experiences. So, , the feeling of pride never feels as good as it does when you're awash in those pubertal hormones.

And the pain of humiliation never feels as bad as it does in that period. And a lot of people who, even as adults, you can think back on a time when someone Just humiliated you or falsely accused you or made you feel like a nothing in front of others, whose opinions you care about. And a lot of people can remember the sights and sounds and smells from that moment.

It's called a spotlight memory, but also many people can remember a time of tremendous pride, a time when, like an adult, Who was impossible to please, started taking you seriously and thought you were capable of something, right? , or maybe a friend just complimented you in a way you were, weren't expecting.

So you can think of the adolescent brain as exquisitely attuned to social emotional experiences because it's trying to learn how to be successful in the social world. Now, the adolescent brain, it gets trashed all the time. I mean, you see it in cartoons, in the media, like a lot of these news stories, legal decisions.

They say teenagers don't have a prefrontal cortex, or they're just like hijacked by their emotions. And that's not true. The prefrontal cortex is good for goal directed behavior, and a lot of young people are excellent at goal directed behavior. It's just not always the goal directed behavior adults want them to be focusing on.

Like, one of the examples I often use is, you know, people say like, well, teenagers don't think about their future when they're deciding their schooling or their jobs or whatever. It's like, they are thinking about their future, but they're just not calculating a loss and gain on a ledger. They're thinking, what's going to be awesome?

Like, what am I going to be proud of? is this going to kick ass? And can I kick ass at it? You know, like there's those kinds of questions. They're thinking, how does this fit into my view of myself and my social future? Now, that's not always what adults want them to think about, but it's not crazy to think that way because your social standing in the group often really determines.

What happens to you later? And the reason why we talk about this age range all the way up to 25 is surprising to some people. They think, well, puberty is like 3 or 4 years and then it's over and then you're an adult. And in fact, we now know that the brain is still changing into the mid to late 20s. Now, some people look at that and say, well, that means the teenage brain is immature, , and the 20 something brain is immature and the, or even calls now to raise the voting age to 25 or older because these idiots don't know what they're doing is the implication, right?

But. Brains changing doesn't mean that the brain is incompetent. It means it's just sensitive to the environment. And the environment is changing so quickly, right? It used to be the world is different every 10 years, every 15 years, maybe every 30. Now it seems like it's every 2 or 3. And we actually need adolescent brains, all the way into their 20s, to still be responsive to what's happening in the environment.

You can think of the young person's brain as like the R and D department of human culture and society, that it has to be on the cutting edge and it needs to be ahead of what the more established people are doing. So I think that it's, There are unique opportunities in the 10 to 25 range to captivate young people so that way they're preparing their brains to make a difference and to change the world, but there are also unique risks that if society basically tells you, you have nothing of value to contribute from a young age, then I think young people will learn that they'll remember that pain of injustice and it won't make them want to be engaged with society.

Sadie: One thing that I thought was really cool that you outlined when you were kind of leading into your your new proposal for how we can actually motivate young adults and adolescents as a whole was you talked about different attempts to motivate this age demographic that really didn't work and you talked about like in school seminars on obesity or smoking or dare and how these really failed and when you looked at the data they increased And so could you speak a little bit to why those didn't work, having done all the research that you had, and, , like, what makes those interventions really ineffective for teens, even though they were designed for teens?

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, so, like, 10 years ago, I had this stunning realization. I looked at almost any kind of program grownups had designed. to supposedly positively influence young people and almost none of them worked, even in the short term, let alone the long term. And there were no examples in the literature of something where they created an intervention to change a behavior and then after the intervention stopped, The behavior continued to stay changed, and it was shocking.

Think about how many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on advertisements that are trying to reduce smoking or drug use or whatever it is. You know, risky driving, texting, etc. And it's like all a waste. And how in the world could our entire adult culture be so wrong? All the time. And nobody knows it.

They're like all those stuffs working. Let's just keep doing it. I mean, young people must be so flabbergasted. They're like, really you're trying the same thing. Like the definition of insanity is you try the same thing and get the same bad results and you expect different results. Right. And like, what kind of.

What are you thinking? And I think it fundamentally comes down to a societal belief that older adults have, which I call neurobiological incompetence beliefs, that basically young people's brains aren't smart, that young people are short sighted, selfish, frivolous, entitled wimps. And if that's what you believe, Then the main thing adults tend to do is something I call grown splaining.

They just say, if only I explained to you loudly enough, how differently you need to behave, then you'll come around and listen to me as though the young person can't think on their own. And what I have learned is that the grown splaining approach of things like just say no, right. Or, , think don't smoke.

is an anti smoking campaign. They don't work for two reasons. One is they're just super duper disrespectful because they imply the young person can't think. And if you start with an insult, you're just not going to get to change hearts and minds. And then the second is they don't invite the young person to be a problem solver.

. They, they leave all the thinking up to the grownups and what we actually need is for young people to be coming up with behaviors that work in their lives and the complexities of their lives, but also solutions to huge problems that the older generations, frankly, have failed to solve. And so. So, , I think that just to summarize that there's this wrong belief about young people that they're neurobiologically incompetent and their hormones make them idiots.

And because of that, the adults come up with the dumbest possible approaches for changing their behavior. And if you start with a different belief that young people are capable of amazing things if they're given the right support, then you can come up with much more effective approaches to try to influence them in ways that help their longterm health and wellbeing.

Sadie: Yeah, I can imagine that there's going to be a really interesting case study of this with the upcoming election, because I feel like we've seen a big shift in the marketing, especially towards young people, at least on the Democratic side, and as soon as Kamala was the nominee, there was a lot of embracing of TikTok trends, and like Kamala's brat and all these things that young people were really enmeshed in, But really, we're not seeing at all in campaigns prior to this.

And so it'll be really interesting to see if like that side of marketing and motivating has any difference on how Gen Z is showing up in polls a couple months from now.

Dr. Yeager: I think it's a very profound observation on your behalf and very Very smart thought. And I, I would say that my worry is that they're appealing to young people in a superficial way.

Sadie: They're thinking,

Dr. Yeager: Oh, let's go to Tik TOK. That's exactly like, if you put a bunch of lame millennials and, and Gen Xers in a room and it was like, come up with your young people marketing strategy, they'd be like, let's make a Tik TOK. That's what they would call it. A Tik TOK. Yeah. And it's like, No, like appeal to issues.

First of all, that matter during young people. Second of all, involve them in actually changing society. Right. Because that a lot of the platform right now is Senate reform or Supreme court reform, which of course are big structural issues, but like that's like a 10 year plan

Sadie: to

Dr. Yeager: change any social issue.

But young people are like, well, what are you going to do right now?

Sadie: And I

Dr. Yeager: think that's a good question. So, I think for me, the big question is, will the kind of frivolous kind of marketing to young people actually persist? , and if it doesn't, I think it's going to be because. The campaign missed an opportunity to both campaigns to involve young people in building a better future

Sadie: Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see you touched a little bit briefly on young people coming up with their own ideas and being more involved in this process Rather than just being told what to do by these teachers, parents, these authority figures.

Can you walk me through a little bit more, , of the process that you outline in your book of the effective way to motivate this age demographic, especially from the authority figure point of view, and then we'll get more into how adolescents can use this in their own lives, because I think that's super powerful as well.

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, so In the book, I write about this leadership approach that I call the mentor mindset, and the idea there is that if you're a parent, a coach, a teacher, a professor, etc, your job should be to align your resources, whether it's time or material or expertise, with the long term well being of the young person.

That's what it means to be a mentor. And if that's your mindset, then what you often end up doing is this. You combine two things. One is having very high standards, so expecting a lot from a young person. The second thing the leader does is they're very supportive. So they make it so that the young person can meet those high standards.

And it's very important to have both, because if someone was just all expectations, demanding everything it's impossible for you to live up to, Provides no support to help you, then they're just like an authoritarian dictator. Like they're not, it's \ disrespectful. It's harsh. It's unsupportive and young people.

It doesn't help them grow. But the other thing you see is very low standards. But very high support. That's what I call a protector mindset and with very low standards and very high support Adults are looking at young people and saying, you know, you've been through a lot like is a lot of stress here It's been tough on you.

We can't possibly expect you to matter or do anything, you know Just just wait and matter in your 30s. It's kind of a message and That's terrifying to young people because then they're like, wait, you don't trust me to do anything. And what am I ever, how am I going to get ready? It's like, I, if, if you've never faced the fear of trying to merge in a car, on a freeway,

Sadie: you're not going to

Dr. Yeager: magically be okay with that.

you have to experience that like between 16 and 20, because if you don't until you're 30, then you're going to drive like an old lady on the feeder, the rest of your life. And so that's just a metaphor for the broader idea that. In a mentor mindset, you have young people do legitimately hard things the, kind of educational and social equivalent of merging on the freeway with traffic coming at you.

And you have to face those fears that are legitimate because there are things that are actually hard, but then you're supportive enough that the young person has a success experience and then eventually comes to be confident in themselves.

And so that mentor mindset we find leads to the kind of independent, motivated, resilient young people that young people want to be and that leaders want to be in charge of.

And that frankly our world needs to fix the big problems we have.

Sadie: Yeah, there's so much research that has been done on the importance of mentorship, especially in young adults And I am forgetting exactly what study it is, but I can put it in the show notes where they looked at like well being and educational and work outcomes and how far people progressed in their careers and looking back on what was the most pivotal in that process from like college to Workforce and a lot of them pointed out that it was That they had a mentor.

They had someone to go through and help them kind of go through the ropes and understand what to expect. And so, especially having that teaching background, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on having that more like one on one personal relationship that people tend to find almost later in life. And then, When you are in a classroom with a lot of students and you still do want to structure that support, but also having high expectations, are there different benefits to each?

Is it possible to have the mentor mindset in a large group of people? , what are your thoughts there?

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Dr. Yeager: Yeah, it's a great question. what I found is that we call it a mentor mindset because it's just a personal philosophy of the leader. It's not a formal role. a lot of people think, Oh, mentor, that means I'm going to have coffee with you on Tuesdays to talk about your career goals or

Sadie: whatever,

Dr. Yeager: or mentor.

I'm like going to go help a wayward child to, you know, have fun for a moment on their otherwise terrible existence, and like, that's. Not what I'm talking about. , in fact, there's a lot of evidence that those are called unnatural mentors or formal mentors, that those have no long term impact on young people.

, Noelle Hurd, who's a professor at University of Virginia, has done some beautiful work on what she calls natural mentors. And these are just like the adults that are around. That you kind of bonk into like a, like, you know, Adam's just like bonk into each other. , that's what it's like. And then you have an interaction and for whatever reason, the adult spent the time to help you along your way in some way.

And sometimes it's just one time, but it can really change your life. And those natural mentors end up predicting academic success, going to college, not being incarcerated, having a job. more stable relationships, all these other things. So why is that the case? And I think there's something about someone who's older than you and has more status and power and resources.

Using those to benefit you and your quest for social success. And I write in the book about how even chimps do this. So there's amazing studies where these researchers just like hide in a tree every morning at four o'clock and, , watch chimps all day. And, , If there's a lot of interesting backstory about chimp research that I could tell you, , but they, turns out they have a whole like social hierarchy and the kind of nerdy skinny teenagers just starting puberty come into the big, , square where all the other chimps are.

And if they don't know the subtle social rules, they get like the crap kicked out of them. , if they try to mate, you know, or like Mac on, somebody, then they also get the crap kicked out of them and so on. Unless they have a mentor and a mentor is usually a former alpha who's now a little bit older.

They gave up the alpha status, but they're still respected by everybody. And the former alpha just lets the skinny dorky teenager follow them around and see all the status stuff up close.

Sadie: And

Dr. Yeager: when they do that, then they learn the social landmines. Like, who's the person I shouldn't mess with?

Who's the person I can rely on? How do I not say the goofy thing? And, and so much of human adolescence is you're looking at a group of friends, they're all laughing and you're like, I wish I knew how to be funny like that.

Sadie: Yeah.

Dr. Yeager: you see people in college and everyone's yucking it up at the, the lunchroom.

And you're like, I wish I had friends like that. And it's just so hard in human adolescence throughout this age range to feel known and cared about and accepted because a lot of it is these subtle social rules that you can't take a test on. And a lot of times mentors help you learn those things and that has a lasting impact even if you don't like hang out with them later because it gave you a sense of social validation.

Sadie: Yeah. I also think about like that spotlight memory that you talked about earlier and I think that at least anecdotally has been a big thing in these one off mentor conversations and. Yeah. When you do have that person that's in an authority position. And a lot of the times, I'm thinking like office hours, you're talking to a teacher or a parent or family friend, there's that vulnerability and there's all those emotions are really raw and you're still really sensitive to rejection, especially because you look up to and respect that person.

A lot of these Can you imagine,

Dr. Yeager: like if you were thinking about being a lawyer and then you're at Christmas. Dinner or something or Easter or whatever and there's an uncle or an aunt who's a lawyer and you're like, here's what I'm thinking about doing and then they were like, you know, way like you would never forget that.

But if instead they kind of took you aside and took you seriously and walked you through what it means to be a lawyer. You would totally remember that. And you, even if you never talked to them again, you would still feel like you have someone in your corner. And I would say one surprising thing I've learned about stress in adolescence is feeling like you can cope with stress isn't always because you materially Have or are accessing certain relationships or resources or whatever It's that you feel like you could access them if you needed them

Sadie: And

Dr. Yeager: I think a lot of great mentors You What they actually do for you is only a couple things, but you feel like you could have asked for more and you would if you were in a crisis.

And I think with enough of those people in your life, you can be confident enough to accomplish a lot of things that are beyond your comfort zone.

Sadie: Yeah, a hundred percent. I am curious, and I'm not sure how much, , from like a research perspective you can speak on this, but I think a lot of adolescents, especially as we get into the high school and college years, there's a lot of focus on how can we motivate and be more productive, and sometimes the like traditional things that we Read about for adults don't always translate because again the biology and social context are so different And so I'm wondering if there are different things that you came across like this hypersensitivity to rejection and our social relationships or the intensity of shame That kind of how you would structure a self motivating as an adolescent, and maybe it's structuring more of those mentor like relationships, having more authority figures looped in to your, your goals, , and the steps you're taking towards that.

But what would your advice be to people that want to try and self motivate and not just wait for these mentors to happen to bump into them and hope that works out?

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, well, first, you definitely can go pursue mentors. , , it's kind of awkward to be like, would you be my mentor? It's like asking someone to go with you in seventh grade or whatever.

but definitely, you know, you can just ask for advice and then be like, would you mind if I could come back to you for advice once I've thought this through?

Sadie: And

Dr. Yeager: after you talk to someone a few times, and you follow through on everything they suggested,

Sadie: And you come

Dr. Yeager: back, you're like, all right, I tried that.

And here's how it worked. Here's how it didn't. Then now they're invested in you and your success.

Sadie: And I

Dr. Yeager: would say that there is a skill of cultivating mentors. That, is phased

Sadie: and

Dr. Yeager: usually revolves around specific expertise, and I write about this in my book for astrophysics, PhDs, where it's like, so and so professor has the best laser magnet to study black holes or whatever, like actual astrophysicists would laugh at me for saying that, but some kind of technical thing that your advisor at your university doesn't have.

but you can't email some Yale physicist and be like, would you be my mentor? You know, it's like, just for the

Sadie: telescope,

Dr. Yeager: but you could say your laser magnet telescope. Super awesome. I I'd like to get some time on it. my advisors thought you might be able to. Is there a process? And then once they say yes, then it's like, all right, well, now I'm going to do it.

Would you mind looking over my plan before I did it? And then I look it over and then it's like, all right, well, here's what I found. I'm just curious if anything stands out to you. And then you have that conversation. And then usually you send them a note afterwards and say like, all right, well, here's all the things I did.

I could never have done them if not for your support. I learned so much. , just want to let you know how grateful I am and how generous you are.

Sadie: And at

Dr. Yeager: that point. If someone asked them, are you, were you that person's mentor? They'd say, yeah, cause you just wrote them a letter explaining all the ways that they mentored you.

Sadie: And

Dr. Yeager: I've done that kind of stuff for 20 years. And so if there's something I don't know how to do, I actually try to go create a mentor, but I spend a lot of time making them feel like their, time spent on me was a good use of time. So my first answer is like, yes, self motivation is important, but so many things that are hard that are beyond our current abilities.

You need a mentor to figure out, and the process of doing that is more like what I just said. It's not being paired with them in a program or asking them to be your pen pal.

Sadie: Yeah.

Dr. Yeager: So my other answer around self motivation is, I hear a lot from super stressed out young people who think they're on this race.

To get in the top college, get the top job, et cetera, et cetera. And I didn't think that's a lot of nonsense that like, , I mean, sure. if you go to Princeton, you have better outcomes, but guess who goes to Princeton, the people whose parents already have 40 houses, you're already fine from, for this is like 80 percent of people at Princeton are already.

Based on their parents can have lots of wealth. So yes, it's great, but there are so many other ways to be successful. And you know, I'm at the University of Texas at Austin. Our professors are better than half of the professors that a lot of these other elite places. So you can go to other great places.

And the way to get there doesn't require perfection. In fact, it's like really, This is from studies we've done of college admissions. It's like, way easier than people think. Basically, take the hardest possible math and science classes that you can, do at least one activity for four years, and, volunteer and be a good person.

And, like, you don't have to have every award or every accolade. if you just do those things and you show up and you show that you're committed, most good universities will take you. So that's like all I work on with my own kids. so part of my answer to the person who's like, I'm just not self motivated.

It's like, you're not self motivated at all, or just not self motivated to take your eighth AP class instead of just seven. And for, for the latter person, you know, if you love all those classes, great. but like, do you need that? Not always. what colleges are really going to look at is like your math and your science and your activities.

Sadie: And your credits probably won't transfer. You'll probably have to take it again. So you've got a pros and cons here. No, especially not

Dr. Yeager: if you, like, you don't want them to transfer. if you did go to Yale, your professor probably wrote the textbook. Do you really want a high school teacher's version of, you know, chemistry or physics, or do you want.

A world famous chemist version, usually what the, if you want to have a career in that field, you want to take the hardest version of it because that means you're going to be ahead and be an expert. So it's, it's now there is a version of credits where you save money and it's true. College is expensive.

, but it's not obvious to me that optimizing AP just for AP is the best, is the best idea. The bigger thing is, Are you showing that you want to do the hard things because the best way for them to be like, when you get to college, you'll do hard things is that you did them in previously in high school.

Sadie: Yeah. I want to ask you about the young adult blind spots because I think this is interesting and can also probably be really valuable for people to be aware of if they go out and seek out mentors and try and be more involved in this feedback loop because you've illustrated a lot of ways that Mentorship wasn't working when people gave really direct feedback or no feedback at all.

And we're just like, we really hope this goes well and neither one really worked. And so we talked about like the intense awareness of social rejection and how that can kind of block out any feedback that might actually be valuable. But are there any other blind spots or things that young adults can do to be a better recipient of feedback, , and kind of be better set up in this mentor mindset, kind of other half of the equation?

Dr. Yeager: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I would say just to have the. Basic. Belief that feedback is a gift

Sadie: and

Dr. Yeager: that a lot of people lie about what they thought. I mean, every time I finished a podcast interview, I'm like, how did that go? I was like, Oh, that's great. I don't know if they really thought that. Cause you know, what are the, what are they going to say?

You came on our thing for free, but we hated it. Like, no. So, like, if I want to do a better job, I actually do often once. So I would say that's an example of the broader idea that feedback is a gift and, for young people to try as best you can to, look for the most charitable possible interpretation of someone's feedback.

At the same time, I think a lot of mentors and adults. Don't think about the social side of the feedback. And therefore they come across as super insulting and then the young person's like, well, I'm not doing what you said. Because you're a jerk. And then they call the young person entitled and shortsighted, et cetera.

And so it creates this unproductive cycle of blame. , and so I think that adults need to clarify more what the meaning is behind their critical feedback, for instance, specifically saying, look, I'm going to give you feedback based on a very serious standard. Like if it's writing the standard of could this be published in a top journal and some of the comments are going to come across as harsh.

But I wouldn't be giving you these comments if I didn't think that when you fix these things, your work was capable of being published in those high level outlets, right? Just like you. I mean, you run a podcast. You don't want to have nonsense in there. And everyone's like, that's great.

Like you want the feedback, but you also, Like if a famous podcaster listened to yours and gave you notes, you'd want it to be clear that they weren't saying to you, I think your podcast is dumb. I'm not going to listen to it. It should be more like you got some great stuff here. Here's how you could make it even better.

And I'm only saying this to you because I do think you could have one of the best ones. So that's just an example of how there's a miscommunication on the feedback receiver side. But often, the onus, I think, is on the leader, and the leaders need to do a better job of clarifying where their comments are coming from.

Sadie: Yeah. The last question that I want to ask you is about just your, like, general takeaway, and if there is one thing that you wish all 10 to 25 year olds, whether it was the skill they were equipped with or an insight that they had, what would that be?

Dr. Yeager: Well, I would say that, , addition to the stuff I've said, the other kind of favorite area that we didn't cover yet is purpose.

And by purpose I mean the sense that your activities now are connected to some plausible route for influencing the world beyond yourself, now and in the future. And the psychologist at Stanford, Dale Miller. He writes about something he calls the norm of self interest, which is the idea that everybody acts really self interested.

Because they think that's how you're supposed to act, because if you were like a Mother Teresa or Gandhi walking around caring about others, that that'd be kind of weird, unless you're one of those exemplars. and so everyone pretends to be more selfish than they are, but because of that, then no one ever talks about the reasons why.

They care about something beyond themselves. And because no one talks about it, then everyone just assumes that everyone else is selfish. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And what, what I want to remind people of is that most people, most of the time are pursuing something meaningful. They just don't really talk about it.

And so we have done all these surveys where we ask high schoolers, for example, like, what's an issue that bothers you about the world? And they write amazing things like political instability and division, right? War, financial insecurity, global warming, like all these issues. And then we ask, What's one way that if you had a stronger brain and knew more, that you could take a step toward doing something about one or more of those issues?

And everyone can come up with something. Whether it's math teaches me logical reasoning, or science I could use that for climate science, or history I could understand political movements and then influence a new political movement, or whatever it is. , Literature. Cause now I have compassion for people who are different from me.

Like, if you just think of that stuff, then all of a sudden working hard in school or at your job, isn't just about getting a greater credential that you're going to exchange later for a wage so that you can have a mortgage in your thirties, right? It's instead about a step toward making a difference and your stronger brain is the engine of improvement in our culture.

And I think that that sense of purpose. Is there under the surface, but we hardly ever tap into it. In fact, when you hear politicians talk about education, they're like, we need STEM workers for the microchip workforce or whatever. what percent of kids are like, that's why I'm going to factor trinomials.

some politician wants to have more laborers for a chip manufacturer in his congressional district. Like that's not,

Sadie: that

Dr. Yeager: doesn't fire anybody up.

Sadie: They're like, we want to be tech talkers. I the

Dr. Yeager: sense of purpose. I mean, I think even Even the best TikTokers want to make people's lives better.

They want to share good stuff. Now there, obviously there are lots of people that are probably mostly just chasing money or whatever. , but does that mean that they couldn't be influenced to do something more meaningful? And like, look at the people who were influenced, like Bo Burnham was very influential and he's like, this is all hollow.

This isn't for me. And he's in search of meaning and purpose. So I would say just search for meeting and purpose now. Like, don't, don't say I'll do it later. Once I have my college admissions, like do it now. And I think a lot of other stuff is going to get better too.

Sadie: Yeah. And I also think I started the podcast in high school and told no one about it.

It was like, No one listened to it, and I did end up talking about it once I decided I wanted to do mental health related things in college. But if you're not just doing it for the college admissions, and you're doing it because, like you were saying, there's that actual sense of purpose and long term where you can follow through on it, you do get all those other benefits of feeling that sense of purpose and mastery, and feeling motivated to do that sort of thing, and feeling more connected and supported, versus, again, like you were saying, that short term goal of, like, Admissions or APS or whatever that status

Dr. Yeager: or whatever in the frivolous sense, there's the version of status in the deeper sense, which is that you are a person of value to a group whose opinions you care about.

That's, that's the deeper version of status and that's earned through action. It's not,

done passively. There's this great book that I read as a graduate student, , by Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. And it's about a guy He's one of my

Sadie: favorites.

Dr. Yeager: Yeah, is, you know, he's escaping concentration camp and the Holocaust.

And the, the line that I always stuck with me was, , he who knows the why for his existence can bear almost any how. And I think about that a lot as you coming back to mental health, like, is it a surprise? That we have told all young people, basically under 30, that they don't matter and they need to wait to be of significance and consequence.

, but we can do different. If we do, I think everyone would be better off.

Sadie: Absolutely. Well, if people want to get your book or check out your website or anything like that, where can they find you?

Dr. Yeager: My book's on Amazon, I guess. I don't really know. And I'm just, I'm just a professor. So I'm on LinkedIn.

you can learn some nerd stuff on LinkedIn. But like, I don't know, I got, I don't have Facebook and anything else. You can mail me a letter. How about that?

Sadie: Amazing. To my address at the University

Dr. Yeager: of Texas. And then I will have someone scan it

Sadie: and then I'll read it. Perfect. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much.

This is absolutely incredible. And I know everyone's going to really enjoy listening to this.

Dr. Yeager: Great. Thanks for having me.

Sadie: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of she persisted. If you enjoyed, make sure to share with a friend or family member, it really helps out the podcast. And if you haven't already leave a review on apple podcasts or Spotify, you can also make sure to follow along at actually persisted podcast on both Instagram and Tik TOK, and check out all the bonus resources, content and information on my website.

She persisted podcast.com. Thanks for supporting. Keep persisting and I'll see you next week.

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