Why I live each day like it's my first with Suleika Jaouad | ReThinking with Adam Grant

1. 0:00 – 0:58

   Journaling as a flexible, centuries-old practice (from pillow books to morning pages)

   1. SJSuleika Jaouad0:00

      People use journaling in all kinds of ways. Um, it was used, you know, throughout history as log books. It was used by Japanese women as pillow books, where they would write gossip and secrets and hide them under their pillows. It was used as a space for private reflection with immense public implications. I think of people like Anne Frank, um, and her diary. And for me, sometimes my journal looks like a painting, sometimes it looks like one sentence or a grocery list, and sometimes it looks like morning pages, three longhand pages that I write first thing in the morning before I've had my coffee, before that inner critic and censor awakens and starts asking you why in the world you're going on and on about something that seems seemingly pointless. [upbeat music]

2. 0:58 – 4:13

   Rejecting “live like it’s your last” and choosing “live like it’s your first”

   1. AGAdam Grant0:58

      So I have to tell you, I think the starting point for me for this conversation is I've always hated the phrase, "Live each day like it's your last."

   2. SJSuleika Jaouad1:08

      Hmm.

   3. AGAdam Grant1:09

      Hate it. Every time I've heard it, as long as I can remember, my first thought is nothing meaningful would ever get accomplished. People would just live in the moment, and there'd be no planning or building or creating for the future. And I was so excited when I found out that you also hate this sentence.

   4. SJSuleika Jaouad1:25

      I'll take it a step further. Not only would nothing meaningful be accomplished, but I really believe in some ways it's the worst advice. That's advice I got a year ago when I learned that the leukemia I have been navigating since the age of 22 was back for a third time. And I kept saying to my oncologist, "I don't know how to cope with the overwhelming feeling of uncertainty." And I am a planner. I have my one-year plan, my five-year plan, my 10-year plans. I live, I live through the act of not only dreaming, but dreaming as ambitiously and as much of a forward-looking way as I can. And so I was struggling to make dinner plans one month out. I was struggling with all kinds of questions, including, uh, figuring out how to put, put a book out in the world, and I said, "I, I don't even think I can commit to a book tour because I don't know if I'm gonna be alive in six months." And so the advice was, "You have to live every day as if it's your last." So with great respect to my oncologist, who is absolutely wonderful, um, I finally came back in and said, "I think you need to stop telling your patients to live every day as if it's your last. I've come to believe that it's bad advice." And what I've had to shift to is a gentler mindset because when I'm living every day as if it's my last, it's so much pressure. I'm trying to make every dinner as meaningful as possible. I'm trying to s- you know, squeeze the juice out of every moment, and that is just a spiritually exhausting way, uh, to move through your life. And so instead, I'm trying to live every day as if it's my first, to wake up with the sense of curiosity and playfulness and wonder that a little kid might. And when I do that, it's not about crossing off these big bucket list items. It really grounds me in the present. It's the simple things. It's trying to channel that sense of awe that a toddler might when they see a caterpillar scuttling across the sidewalk for the first time. It's not that complicated.

   5. AGAdam Grant3:45

      I love this. I love this so much. And what I think is ingenious about your idea of living each day like it's your first is you would always do both on your first day. You would, I mean, you would be delighted by everything that you're experiencing for the first time. You would also be excited to think about what you might get to explore and experience and create tomorrow. And it seems like it would create an ideal combination of not just present focus, but also future focus. Talk to me about that.

3. 4:13 – 7:14

   Balancing ambition with presence: mortality as a course corrective

   1. SJSuleika Jaouad4:13

      Absolutely. And you know, I think I was someone who was too future focused before getting sick. I was a kid who felt this tremendous amount of self-imposed pressure to honor the sacrifices that my parents made for me. They were both immigrants. I was the first person in my family to go to college in the US. I spent my high school years just working myself down to a nub in order to get a scholarship to the best possible college I could, and everything was about becoming some future version of myself. And when I look back on my journal entries from college, I have no idea what I was actually experiencing because it was all angst about who I was going to become and angst about picking the exact right path and identifying my purpose and figuring out the steps between where I was then and where I hoped I would end up. And so the funny thing about getting that diagnosis at 22 is that it presented this important course corrective, which I think we all come up against at some point or another in our life. And it is the one certainty amidst all of the uncertainties we face, which is that we are not going to live forever. Um, there isn't infinite time to finally get to a place where you can enjoy your life now. You don't, like, check off boxes and then finally settle in. And I realized rather than living for my five-year plan, I also needed to be enjoying my life. In the moment. And maybe that sounds obvious to people, but I think when you are, I want to just say cursed with ambition, uh, sometimes it can feel like a curse. Um, it's so easy to focus on doing rather than being and to, you know, catapult into your days, um, without actually pausing to think, you know, beyond my to-do list, what really matters to me right now? Who do I wanna spend my day with? Um, what's actually important beyond, to borrow, you know, David Brooks' phrase, uh, the resume virtues? How can I start living for the eulogy virtues, the qualities that people are honored for, uh, usually long after they're gone. Were you brave? Were you kind? Were you a person on record who shows up for your loved ones?

   2. AGAdam Grant7:07

      I hear you talking about the way you're living your life differently, and I'm like, you are already the person [laughs] you say you've, you've turned into.

4. 7:14 – 8:45

   The spiral of relearning—and how illness can unlock creative freedom

   1. SJSuleika Jaouad7:14

      I think when you confront your mortality or when you have some experience in your life that really brings you to your knees and, and forces you to reassess your priorities, there's a clarity that you have in that moment. Uh, but it's hard to hold onto that clarity. I think most of us don't have an aha moment and then you're good. Uh, for me, I'm relearning the same lessons over and over and over again. The image of the spiral is what comes to mind. I'm, like, getting closer, but I often find myself in a familiar place where I'm like, really? I, I thought, I thought we learned this. And the other thing I'll say is that I think my approach to work has changed. I... You know, one thing that happened with each bout of illness, which is to say each massive interruption to my life and work, uh, was a kind of perverse sense of freedom and relief. Um, a sense of freedom to pursue things I was curious about, not because they made sense work-wise or life-wise, but just because I wanted to, because they made me feel good. And each time I've allowed myself to follow that thread of curiosity without having a plan or an outcome in mind, it's always ended up being

5. 8:45 – 11:22

   When writing isn’t possible: pivoting to a visual journal in the hospital

   1. SJSuleika Jaouad8:45

      a transformative shift. So I'll give you an example. Three years ago, I was reentering the hospital to have a second bone marrow transplant, and I packed a diaper caddy full of journals because that's what got me through my first transplant. And I was like, I've got this. I have my personal journal. I have my medical journal where I'm going to keep notes from doctors' rounds. I have my shared journal with Jon, which is something that we've done for years. Um, I had a reporter's pad titled Observations From the Nurse's Station where I just wanted to write, you know, little, little notes to myself. And I was like, this is how I coped with it the first time around. It's gonna be okay. I know how to do this. And within about a week of being admitted to the hospital, I had a series of complications that resulted in my vision being impaired for about two weeks and I could barely see, let alone write. And so a younger version of me would have felt deep defeat and frustration. Um, but having my life upturned in this way over and over again has taught me that you really have to surf the waves of uncertainty without trying to direct or control what's happening. And so I pivoted. I was having these really terrifying fever dreams, literal fever dreams, like weird hallucinations of giant 10-foot giraffes that doubled as IV poles and I was afraid to go to sleep at night. And I decided instead of writing I was going to keep a visual journal. Um, and I'm not a painter, haven't painted since I was a little kid making messy finger paintings. Um, but I did it because it intrigued me. And every single day I started making these watercolors of what was appearing in my dreams and suddenly instead of being afraid to go to sleep I was intrigued about whatever new apparition was going to appear. Um, and I've become obsessed with painting. It's all I wanna do. I'm not planning to make a career out of it. Um, but it's this incredible, unexpected passion that I wouldn't have had access to had I not allowed myself to be limber, to reimagine what and how a survival might look like a creative act.

6. 11:22 – 12:43

   The shared journal with Jon: daily letters as connection and depth

   1. AGAdam Grant11:22

      What is this shared journal with Jon that you mentioned?

   2. SJSuleika Jaouad11:25

      Oh. Uh, so this is actually Jon's idea and Jon is a perfect example of someone who journals in unconventional ways. He journals in voice memos. He journals on the piano. Um, he calls them his piano diaries and when we were early on in our relationship we were both spending a lot of time on the road and Jon had this idea that in order to stay connected, uh, we were going to write three longhand pages as we always did except that we were gonna direct them to each other in the form of a letter. And that's what we did. Every single morning we'd write our letters, snap a photo of them and text them to each other. And what was incredible about it is there's a way in which- When you're on the road, you, you know, you might check in on the phone and you say, "How was your day? How are you?" But you're not really getting to the deeper grist. And what would come up in these letters was not only surprising to each other, but I was often surprised by what would emerge in my own letter. And we had some of the richest, deepest conversations in those letters. Uh, and it's something we still do to this day.

7. 12:43 – 14:13

   Journaling as private thinking: intuition, idea generation, and self-honesty

   1. AGAdam Grant12:43

      It's such an interesting way of bringing back the, [laughs] like the time-honored tradition of letter-writing. Um, it, it reminds me a little bit of, I think it was E.M. Forster who wrote, "How can I know what I think until I see what I write?" And I think that so many people have underestimated how useful writing is, not just as a tool for communicating, but a tool for thinking, reflecting, sense-making, um, processing emotions.

   2. SJSuleika Jaouad13:09

      What I love about the journal is it's a private space. Um, this is not public writing. It's writing you do for yourself. It's not, "I'm penning a masterpiece" writing. It doesn't have to be grammatical. It doesn't even have to make sense. And for me, it's the most direct channel I have to my intuition and to my subconscious. And so I often will start an entry thinking to myself, "I have nothing to say today," and I'm always surprised by what emerges. All of my best ideas have, uh, have stemmed from my journal. All of my early drafts for books that in the moment didn't feel like early drafts happened in the journal. I credit my marriage to my journal. Um, it's where I get to show up for myself without expectation, without pressure to be anything other than my most unedited, unvarnished self and just see what happens.

8. 14:13 – 16:26

   Savoring through noticing: “10 images from the last 24 hours”

   1. AGAdam Grant14:13

      It's so fascinating on, I guess on a couple levels for me. So I guess one, one thing that, that puzzles me a little bit about this is I'm not sure my first thought if I'm living today as my first would be, "I'm gonna write a journal." [laughs] I'd, I'd wanna go out and experience life, not-

   2. SJSuleika Jaouad14:33

      Hmm

   3. AGAdam Grant14:33

      ... spend time reflecting on it. What am I missing?

   4. SJSuleika Jaouad14:36

      Okay. So I feel that in the act of writing in a journal, whatever I write down has a higher likelihood of ending up in my memory bank. So one of my very favorite prompts that's in The Book of Alchemy is by this young woman, Ash Person Story, and she writes about being a young mom with an adopted son who's in the NICU and having terrible m- medical issues and feeling completely overwhelmed and completely subsumed by worry. And she assigned herself this prompt, which was that she just had to write 10 images from the last 24 hours. And especially in this last year, in weeks where I'm not feeling well, where it's easy to feel overtaken by this sense of worry or fear, I find that it's an important way of not only fact-checking my narrative of how the week went or how the last 24 hours went, but it teaches me to notice the things I wouldn't otherwise notice. So I did it yesterday actually, and I wrote about our senior toothless dog, Lentil, taking a nap in a patch of sunlight and the sense of peacefulness that I felt watching her. I wrote about my friends Amber and Priya coming over. We were supposed to go out to dinner, and, uh, instead of canceling the dinner, I invited them to come over in their pajamas. [laughs] Uh, these are, you know, the silly everyday things, uh, that would otherwise go unnoticed, and what happens when I write them down is they train me to cultivate more of, to want to cultivate more of the things that nourish me and to identify what those things are.

9. 16:26 – 17:53

   Phones vs journals: capturing moments without leaving them

   1. AGAdam Grant16:26

      This is so compelling because I think what most people do when they wanna remember an experience is they take out their phone and they snap a photo, but what we know is [laughs] that that jolts you out of the experience and prevents you-

   2. SJSuleika Jaouad16:39

      Right

   3. AGAdam Grant16:39

      ... from living it, whereas [laughs] taking a separate moment to journal, it sounds like is both allowing you to savor it and also to get better at noticing the things you wanna savor in the future.

   4. SJSuleika Jaouad16:49

      Exactly.

   5. AGAdam Grant16:50

      That's, that-

   6. SJSuleika Jaouad16:51

      It's also-

   7. AGAdam Grant16:52

      ... that's powerful

   8. SJSuleika Jaouad16:52

      ... training the eye because when I end up writing about a moment that surprises me, I find myself seeking those details out in the world. I find myself paying closer attention when I'm walking through the park with my dog about what the weather feels like, how the breeze feels on my neck, what flowers were blooming, the funny sneeze of one of my dogs when it snuffed a sunflower, whatever it is. Um, and, you know, uh, [sighs] I'm paraphrasing here. Um, Mary Oliver says, "To pay attention is our endless work." Um, and it's so easy to move through your life in a blur, uh, without actually pausing to note the things that are happening around you, the really simple things.

10. 17:53 – 21:09

    “I credit my marriage to my journal”: externalizing fears and enabling hard talks

    1. AGAdam Grant17:53

       So I have to, I have to loop back to something that I should have asked you about earlier, which is I think you might have said that you credit your marriage to your journal.

    2. SJSuleika Jaouad18:04

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AGAdam Grant18:05

       What? [laughs]

    4. SJSuleika Jaouad18:06

       It's so funny. I found these journals from, like, seventh or eighth grade where- I wrote about how I never thought I was going to get married, or I never thought I was going to be a person who could sustain long-term marriages. And I think this is a byproduct of being a kid who moved around a lot. I was an expert at being the new kid, at making fast friends. But my upbringing taught me that relationships have a shelf life. And so in terms of my relationship with Jon, we both were interested in building a different kind of relationship. And so I had a lot of anxieties, I had a lot of fears, and, and, and many of them were honestly anchored in illness, in the sense of feeling that I knew I didn't have a bad prog- I, I, I knew I had a bad prognosis, and was it fair and was it responsible of me to make long-term commitments like marriage or to dream about having children when I knew that the probability was I wouldn't be able to do that? And so these were things that were about me. They were not about Jon as an individual. And what happened is that through the act of untangling these fears, of giving them ink, there was a sense of externalizing this swirl of indecipherable emotions I was having, and being able to parse them out on the page, to identify which ones were grounded in fact, which ones were grounded in fear, uh, which ones were complete fictions, and to deconstruct them one by one. It allowed me to not only name my fears, but then to be able to speak them out loud, and this is one of the most powerful shifts about journaling, I think. When I find that I'm able to be in conversation honestly with myself on the page, means that I have deeper conversations with the people around me. And so I think the act of, of writing those things down allowed us to have conversations off the page together in a way we wouldn't have been. And so when I named these fears, Jon was like, "First of all, nobody knows how long they're going to live. Um, this is a 'til death do us part contract. It's not a live forever, uh, pact. And, um, this is something we can talk about together. Um, we can explore this as a conversation between the two of us. You don't need to be having this conversation with yourself alone." And I find that I don't always know what I'm thinking or worrying about until I write it down.

11. 21:09 – 24:10

    Keeping journals private—while building community through “Journaling Club”

    1. AGAdam Grant21:09

       I, I'm not sure I would've believed you on this last year, but I, I think I've come around. I, I think [laughs] once upon a time when people would talk about reading their journals out loud, [laughs] I'd think, "But that defeats the purpose of a journal. [laughs] This is, this is a private conversation. You don't wanna make that visible to anybody, let alone public." And then two things happened. One is I went to an event earlier this year where we did journaling prompts and read them out loud, and the way that people opened up and bonded with each other was very different from the kinds of conversations that we have when we're just speaking off the cuff, right? It was... I, I think it, it allowed people to go deeper faster. And then I think the other thing that, that really shifted my thinking on this was, um, [laughs] was my wife Alison published I Am The Cage, which as a novel grew out of, you know, journals she'd been doing for decades. And talking about the experiences that inspired the fiction she wrote was completely different from just writing about it.

    2. SJSuleika Jaouad22:14

       Yeah.

    3. AGAdam Grant22:14

       So I'm, I'm, I'm a convert, I think.

    4. SJSuleika Jaouad22:16

       So to be clear, I do believe the journal to be private. All of my journals live in a locked suitcase with a combo code. I never read my journal entries out loud. Um, but what happens is when I'm grappling with something consciously in the journal, I end up wanting to grapple with it out loud with my most trusted advisors and loved ones. And so similarly, you know, I've started doing these living room gatherings that we're calling Journaling Club, where we invite people to journal privately in their notebooks and not to share what they wrote word for word, but to talk about what comes up. And it can be any aspect of it. It can be, "I really struggled with this prompt, and I felt this immense sense of resistance." It can be something tangentially related. It can be responding to someone else's share. And so I'm just interested in, in that shift from the personal dialogue with the self to how it, it powers and shifts the conversations we have with each other, without having to expose your deepest, darkest secrets in a Coldplay Jumbotron kind of way.

    5. AGAdam Grant23:35

       [laughs] It, it's not something I would've thought to do with other people. Like, the idea of a journaling club almost sounds like an oxymoron, and yet as, as I've learned from you about it, it's not that different from the way that I might go running with someone. Like, w- I, when I run, I run too hard to talk. [laughs] Otherwise it doesn't feel like a real workout. And so it's not like we're communicating. It's just you feel like you're not alone, and you also feel like you have an accountability buddy. And I, I guess I wonder if, if a journaling club is much the same.

12. 24:10 – 26:06

    Structuring Journaling Club: prompts that unlock unexpected identities

    1. SJSuleika Jaouad24:10

       I think so. You know, so much of our socializing is anchored around Consuming food or some kind of beverage and talking. And as someone who is very much an introvert, um, I welcome forms of gathering that make space for both, that make space for comfortable quiet and make space for conversation if you want to participate in the conversation. You know, the prompts in the book can be used as journaling prompts, they can be used as conversation prompts. But I'm interested in gatherings that aren't anchored around small talk and that make space for unusual conversations. And so I've done a number of these now, and some of them with people I've known for years or decades. And each time I'm astounded by the fact that I've learned things about people, including my own husband, who was in our last journaling club, that I never knew before. So the way I've been structuring these journaling clubs is that we do a drawing prompt, we do a writing prompt, and we end with a conversation prompt. And, and the last one that we did for the conversation prompt was borrowed from Estera Perel, and it was to name something that would be on your unofficial resume. And, um, he sh- rattled off a list of things on his unofficial resume, and I was like, "What?" An esteemed journalist shocked everyone in the group by, when it came to her turn, by saying, "I love drugs. I'm a mother of three children, I'm a professional woman, and I've been dabbling in psychedelics, and I love them." [laughs]

    2. AGAdam Grant25:49

       [laughs] Wow.

    3. SJSuleika Jaouad25:50

       And we all burst out laughing. A retired New York City police detective turned realtor shared that she's obsessed with making ceramic heads. Uh, you know, weird little details that then inevitably yield follow-up questions.

13. 26:06 – 28:43

    From prompt resistance to prompt freedom: consistency, momentum, and the kaleidoscope

    1. AGAdam Grant26:06

       I love this. Well, you've actually changed my mind about something when it comes to journaling. I-

    2. SJSuleika Jaouad26:11

       Okay. Tell me

    3. AGAdam Grant26:12

       ... I think I journaled sporadically as a kid. I remember doing it in, in middle school and high school on and off, and then doing it much more regularly in college and, and even having a class where we had to turn in a, a journal with our observations about psychology. And I hated the idea of a prompt. Hated it because it just felt constraining. I didn't wanna write about somebody else's topic. [laughs] I wanted to choose my own. And I have to tell you, you made me rethink that because-

    4. SJSuleika Jaouad26:38

       Hmm

    5. AGAdam Grant26:38

       ... as I tried out some of the prompts in the book, I realized that they actually gave me f- they gave me freedom to write about things that I wouldn't have thought to write about. And they challenged me to, to take on topics that I wouldn't normally have navigated. But I still had plenty of flexibility to figure out exactly where I wanted to take them. Why did I [laughs] get that wrong? Why was I so resistant?

    6. SJSuleika Jaouad27:00

       Well, I get it. I, I felt the same way. I'm someone who, if you had told me to write to a prompt 10 years ago, I would've said, "Absolutely not. That sounds too prescriptive, uh, and it sounds like homework, and that's not why I do this." But there's a reason why people start a practice like morning pages and do it for a couple of months and drop off. There's a reason why many of us have bought a beautiful brand-new journal with the intention of filling it out and written a couple of pages, then stopped, then bought another journal because that journal is ruined. Um, and it's hard, it's, it, it, it's hard to find that momentum. It's, it's easy to get stuck in your journaling when you're feeling stuck in your life or when you aren't given an invitation to kind of twist your mind out of its usual ruts. And so there are many times when I read a prompt and I'm like, "I don't like that prompt. I don't feel like writing to that prompt." And sometimes I write into that. I write about my resistance to the prompt, and that in and of itself yields something interesting. And so the way I think of it is like a kaleidoscope. You- a prompt allows you to twist the chamber ever so slightly so the light falls differently. Um, and so I've come to enjoy being prompted in this way. I've come to welcome the shift in direction and, and the interesting thing that shift yields. Um, I want to be challenged in my pages. It's what allows me to keep coming back. It's what allows me to stay consistent.

14. 28:43 – 32:46

    Journaling as dialogue with thinkers—and shifting from gratitude to contribution

    1. AGAdam Grant28:43

       You also, you did, I thought, such a beautiful job making prompts an opportunity to be in dialogue with great thinkers and writers and creators. And I, I think that's another layer I'd never really thought about, and it's also clearly what you've done in your journaling with Jon, is to say, "I'm not just writing to myself. I can actually be in conversation with other people I admire, with other people I care about." And I think the act of, of treating it as a dialogue, um, it, it also changes the way that you think and feel.

    2. SJSuleika Jaouad29:12

       I do think of journaling as a conversation both with the self and with the people around you, and those people can be imagined or, or actual people. And so even though I had a real resistance to prompts, in a way I was prompting myself. I always begin my day by reading something. It can be a paragraph, it can be an essay. Uh, but I like to be in conversation with the ideas of people who challenge and intrigue me. And so that's what I set out to do in this book. It's not just journaling prompts. It's a mini essay from each of these various thinkers and artists and writers. Um, because I like that sense of call and response that happens when you get to not only dialogue with your own words but be in dialogue with the ideas of someone else.

    3. AGAdam Grant30:08

       One of the things that it made me think about was- I, I did some research years ago with Jane Dutton where we were interested in so the juxtaposition of gratitude, receiving somebody else's generosity, and then contribution, offering, you know, something of value to others. And we did multiple experiments showing that when people kept contribution journals-

    4. SJSuleika Jaouad30:30

       Hmm

    5. AGAdam Grant30:30

       ... it was, in some ways, better for them than keeping gratitude journals. That when, when they wrote about what they were grateful for, although often that made them happier and gave them a sense of connection to others, it also left them feel- feeling passive, like they were just recipients of, of other people's actions. Whereas when they wrote about their contributions, it created an active sense of, "I matter. I have something to offer-

    6. SJSuleika Jaouad30:52

       Hmm

    7. AGAdam Grant30:52

       ... I have something to give," and it seemed to inject greater meaning into their lives. I, I remember when we did this research, [laughs] journaling was... It was just a, it was just a vehicle for getting people, you know, to, to feel something and to see themselves in a different way. And as I've, I've shared this research with people, they get so fired up about the idea of adding a contribution journal to, you know, whatever their gratitude practice is. I think a lot of people are in the habit of trying to count their blessings. What do you think is different about counting your contributions?

    8. SJSuleika Jaouad31:25

       It's such an interesting shift. I think there's a kind of positive feedback loop that happens when you not only note what you're grateful for, but when you note your own contributions, and it makes you want to do more of that. And so something I started doing at 22, uh, when I was at my sickest, is I maybe had like one or two hours in the day where I felt well enough to do something. And what that meant is I had to get really specific about how I wanted to spend that time and who I wanted to spend it with, and it was really clarifying. And so I'd ask myself in the morning if there are three things I can do today, what are those three things? And right now I have more energy than one or two hours, but I still ask myself that question when I wake up to center myself. And it's not usually work related. Uh, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And sometimes I ask myself that question at the end of the day, "What were the three things that mattered most to me? What were the three contributions that made me feel most nourished, most in integrity with myself, most successful?" And not in the conventional sense of success, but in the sense of feeling like you've done good.

15. 32:46 – 41:38

    Lightning round on levity + gravity: fun age, prank calls, and playful partnership

    1. AGAdam Grant32:46

       Ah, yes. More of that, please. Okay, this is a great segue, actually, to the lightning round. First question is, I met you and Jon separately. I think within minutes of meeting each of you, um, you give off a, just an unusual sense of soulfulness, of being deep and reflective and, you know, thinking about the meaning of life. And unlike most of the people I know who, who, who exude that poignance, you both also live life with so much levity along with gravity and, you know, joy and playfulness. And I, I just remember this kind of, "Oh, ooh, I love this," because they both have both, and I don't know very many people who have both. And I just, like, I, I'd love your lightning description of like what is that quality? How do you maintain that together?

    2. SJSuleika Jaouad33:32

       So I'm reminded of a prompt that you wrote, I don't know if you remember it, for my newsletter, The Isolation Journals, and you asked, "What is your fun age?" Do you remember this?

    3. AGAdam Grant33:45

       Yes, I do remember this. Okay. We should probably explain fun age. My least favorite part of college was that people wanted to go out drinking and dancing [laughs] neither of which are things I do.

    4. SJSuleika Jaouad33:55

       [laughs]

    5. AGAdam Grant33:55

       And like I wanted to go to a water park or play video games or play ping pong. And it just hit me one day, like my adult friends, the, the ones I really love hanging out with, are the ones who have the same idea of like what fun is as I do. And so like my fun age is I'm an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old, and it sounds like you two share that.

    6. SJSuleika Jaouad34:13

       So I think for both Jon and me, our fun age is both 80 and eight.

    7. AGAdam Grant34:19

       Yes.

    8. SJSuleika Jaouad34:20

       It's like we are total boring homebodies. Like picture us on rocking chairs on the porch, and that is literally what we do, and we're also little kids. Uh, we, I think we really intentionally cultivate and, and, and really try to tap into that sense of not just childlike wonder, but complete absurdity and hilarity. So when I was getting my bone marrow transplant, we would entertain ourselves by making prank calls, and not in a mean way, but Jon is an incredible impersonator.

    9. AGAdam Grant34:57

       [laughs]

    10. SJSuleika Jaouad34:58

        And word got around, and the nurses started coming to my room being like, "Hey, can you prank call my boyfriend? Can you prank call my husband?" And so every night we would just do hours of prank calls, and we were... Like I've never laughed harder in my entire life. Jon would call up Wynton Marsalis and pretend to be an elderly Brooklynite named Ernie in search of milk. Whatever it was, it was like totally silly and harmless. We'd leave voicemails, and it was never, you know, the kind of prank calls that, that leave people feeling bad, but that inevitably leave someone just like sputtering and cackling at the absurdity of whatever is happening.

    11. AGAdam Grant35:37

        Wait, so you're pranking people you know and then-

    12. SJSuleika Jaouad35:40

        We're pranking people we know

    13. AGAdam Grant35:41

        ... and then at some point Jon reveals it's him?

    14. SJSuleika Jaouad35:45

        Never.

    15. AGAdam Grant35:46

        Never?

    16. SJSuleika Jaouad35:46

        Although some people have caught on now.

    17. AGAdam Grant35:49

        Give me, so I, I-

    18. SJSuleika Jaouad35:49

        Some people have started pranking us back. [laughs]

    19. AGAdam Grant35:52

        Okay, so I, I have to hear, what's an example? Like do you have a, do you have a favorite prank?

    20. SJSuleika Jaouad35:55

        Okay, here is an iconic example. We were at a dinner party and because people know that we love to prank call, they'll come prepared sometimes with like fun phone numbers that they want us to test out.

    21. AGAdam Grant36:09

        [laughs]

    22. SJSuleika Jaouad36:10

        And so we called Jonathan Franzen, and at this point it was like 10:30, 11:00 PM on a Tuesday and we're like, "Is it too late to call? Hopefully, you know, they have their phone on do not disturb." So- John calls Jonathan Franzen, and this lovely woman picks up, and he says he's from the Alabama, John says he's from the Alabama Football Association, and may he please speak to Jonathan Franzen [laughs] And we all expect her to hang up, and instead she goes, "Oh, wonderful. Just one moment, please." Um, hands the phone to Jonathan Franzen, and John proceeds to explain that he's from the Alabama Football Association, and he's wondering if, uh, Jonathan Franzen would be willing to donate a kidney.

    23. AGAdam Grant36:56

        [laughs]

    24. SJSuleika Jaouad36:56

        And they get into this long conversation for 10 minutes, which ends with Jonathan Franzen graciously declining because he's actually a Texas football fan.

    25. AGAdam Grant37:07

        [laughs]

    26. SJSuleika Jaouad37:08

        And I will tell you that by the end of this call, we were all diehard Jonathan Franzen fans. And so I love it. It's like a little Rorschach test, uh, what their fun age might be.

    27. AGAdam Grant37:21

        Ugh, I loved this so much. I loved prank calls as a kid.

    28. SJSuleika Jaouad37:24

        We also just prank each other in general. We're constantly leaping out from behind a couch to scare each other, um, swapping weird little objects around the house to make each other laugh. Yeah, it's that sense of, of fun and, and delight. Do you think you and your wife share a fun age?

    29. AGAdam Grant37:43

        I think so. I think, I mean, first of all, we also, like, our [laughs] our, our preferred way of, like, going out at night is to stay in our pajamas and read or watch a movie. So that absolutely works. But board games too. Like, we could-

    30. SJSuleika Jaouad37:56

        Yes, board games

Episode duration: 41:47