Leading behavioral psychologist reveals how to be a successful narcissist and why you should stop trying to be happy

• Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, told Business Insider that the very traits that put people in leadership positions, like narcissism, are the same characteristics that make them bad leaders.

• Grant said a humble narcissist, someone that can pair grandiosity with a dedication to self-improvement, can actually be a very effective leader.
• When it comes to happiness, Grant said we are doing it all wrong. He points to research that suggests focusing on achieving happiness makes it harder to attain.
• When you are making decisions about your career he said you shouldn't focus on who you want to be as much as what you want to do. Consider the actual work and process more than the status of the title or accomplishment.

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of "Give and Take," "Originals," "Option B," and the audio book "Power Moves: Lessons from Davos." He sat down with Business Insider at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss decision making an individual and aggregate level. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Climate change is at the forefront of Davos this year. It seems to be millennials and a whole generation of people who care very much about this, but as a group, we aren't making huge progress. How do you get people to shift those individual incentives for the greater good for a better outcome?

Adam Grant: I see a couple mistakes happening systematically as a psychologist when I watch how people communicate about climate change, and I don't even think this is about incentives it's often just about motivation and persuasion. So one mistake is it is a very abstract, seemingly far in the future cause. A lot of the communication is designed to change that to say we need to act in the next eight years, or we're gonna have big problems in 12 years. That's still much further in the future than most people plan to make decisions. It's also hard to personify the effects of, okay so we're gonna have maybe rising temperatures and sea levels and the whole planet's gonna be affected. I'm not used to caring about a planet, right? It's too big, it's too abstract and I also don't feel like my individual actions actually matter.

And so I think we need to do a much better job humanizing the immediate effects of climate change. One of the best examples of this that I have ever seen was the Environmental Defense Fund. A few years ago they sent out postcards with an image of polar bears on a melting ice caps, and it just immediately tugs at your heartstrings and you think "you know what, this is not okay." Somebody should do something about this. And then you start to feel like, well maybe I could do something about this. And I think that if you can get people to care about a polar bear, you can definitely get them to care about the human impact of climate change, and so I think we need some very immediate, very individualized, "here are the consequences that you can effect now" communication in order to move the deal a needle bit.

Silverstein: People sometimes make the wrong decision for their best interest. And when it comes to voting, it sometimes seems like people do that as well. Have you thought at all about the dynamics of voting and how people make that decision?

Grant: Yeah, so this is way out of my expertise. So I'm a psychologist who studies work, and I don't think we become fundamentally different people at the voting booth, but I think we certainly often consider different values and different aspects of our identity, so you should take everything I say with many grains of salt, but I actually think this whole idea of voting your interests or not, it's sort of a misnomer. Because when it comes to interest, people don't just think narrowly about what's good for them. They include in their interest their community, often their state, their country.

And so one of the things I like to think about is what's often called the "circle of moral regard." Do you care about just yourself, your family, your friends and then stretch it outward. And I think when people are accused of voting against their interest, what they're actually doing often is voting for a different part of that circle than what you might be thinking about. I don't know what to do with that necessarily but I think it's something that we should be more aware of and we should allow people to be interested in things that do not immediately affect their economic wellbeing.

Silverstein: And we've talked before about how the people are selected for management positions aren't necessarily the best managers, the qualities that make them chosen by executives. That seems like something that might also be true in political leaders. The thing that the characteristic that gets you there is not necessarily what makes you a good political leader. Is that true, is there any way for us to correct for that?

Grant: They're negatively correlated. So the more likely you are to get elected, the less likely you are to be effective. And that's I think in large part because the things that we admire from a distance are often really toxic up close.

If you look at research on narcissists for example. If you watch a narcissist from afar, they're often perceived as very charismatic. You love the confidence, the bold vision that they bring to the table. If you have to work with that person, all of a sudden you realize, oh they constantly blame other people for their failures, they take credit for other people's successes, they don't listen well and learn well from other people, they tend to be overconfident in their own bets, which occasionally works out well and other times leads to disastrous decisions, and there's a whole body of research on how in teams even, when we're working with narcissists, we're more likely to elevate them into leadership roles and then we're more likely to regret it afterward.

And so I think for me the fundamental problem with elections is I think it's a popularity contest when it should actually be a competence and character contest. So the place that I would personally want to start if I had a chance to kind of reinvent this whole system, is I'd say," you know what, you have to take a test in order to get a license to do most things that have real consequences." So if you wanna fly a plane, you need a pilot's license. You even need a license to drive a car. You need to go to medical school and then take a test if you wanna practice medicine. Same for practicing law. I think it's crazy that we don't have a test or a license to serve the public in office.

My first thought was well why don't we have a civics test? Or a history test? Where you're not eligible to run for office unless you demonstrate that you have some basic knowledge of what's gone on in your country, in your world, or even in your city. But then I wouldn't wanna stop there, I also wanna assess all kinds of abilities that leaders need. I wanna know how well you make decisions, I'm interested in your forecasting skills, can you predict the future, can you resolve conflicts? And so obviously the complexity of developing all these tests and deciding who should be the arbiters of them is something that I've not figured out yet, but I think it deserves some real attention.

I would even say, let's just do a simple knowledge test. We'll allow you to phone a friend, multiple friends, and I wanna know can you assemble a group of people who actually have accurate knowledge? That seems like a useful thing to gauge in potential future leaders. I would even be willing to make it open book and say "the test is gonna be too long, you can't use the book for every question, but if you know where to find valid information you can feel free to access that."

Silverstein: Is there a characteristic that can make that person succeed as a leader?

Grant: Believe it or not there's such a thing as what's called "humble narcissism." This is some really fascinating research launched by Brad Owens in the US and that has been extended to China recently, and the finding is that if you survey people about their CEO or about their manager, that they can identify very quickly whether that person tends to be narcissistic. They tend to think they're better than others, they tend to have a sense of entitlement and grandiosity, and that can be a huge problem for the reasons we've talked about.

But it's also possible to have some elements of humility along with that. Knowing that you have weaknesses as well as strengths, being motivated to overcome those weaknesses. Maybe occasionally recognizing strengths in others and appreciating those. When you think about what it means to be a humble narcissist that research says it's possible to couple the bold vision, the grandiosity, with a constant desire to improve and overcome your shortcomings, and if you can do that, that actually can make you a really effective leader.

I think about Steve Jobs and his return to Apple. So early days Steve Jobs, I think just a plain narcissist, or maybe an extreme narcissist if you look at the typical signatures. If you look at his return though, he gave a speech once where he said getting fired from his own company was awful tasting medicine, but the patient needed it. I don't think he necessarily fundamentally changed as a person, but everyone I know who worked closely with him in both of those windows has said what you got was a more humble Steve Jobs. Somebody who knew he didn't have all the answers who occasionally listened to other people, and that made him a more effective leader, but he still had that incredibly bold dynamic vision. I think there's value in that. There's also another type of narcissism that I think is kinda interesting.

There's a difference between what's often called agentic and communal narcissism terrible academic terms, right? So I wouldn't wish them on anyone, but the basic idea is that agentic narcissists are people who define their success as being a superior to others, whereas communal narcissists are people who often believe that they're special, but part of the way they define that is to want to make a real difference for others. And they end up being much less toxic than the agentic kind.

I always think of the Silicon Valley episode where Gavin Belson says, "I don't wanna live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than I do." That's a little bit of a flavor of communal narcissism but I think the common thread across humility and being communal or a little bit other oriented is if it's not all about you. If you have very high expectations and maybe even you're a little bit overconfident but you care about other people, you listen to other people, you learn from them, that can channel some of your narcissistic traits in a more productive direction.

Silverstein: And let's talk about setbacks a little bit. How do you use that in a positive way so that it doesn't derail you?

Grant: There are a couple of good empirical answers to that question. The first one is you wanna avoid the traps that Marty Seligman and his colleagues have written about when they study the psychology of our explanatory styles.

So the question is when something bad happens, how do you explain that to yourself and others? And what we find is that some people have a very pessimistic explanatory style that sort of shoots them in the foot, where they interpret bad events as completely personal, permanent and pervasive, so they're often called the "3 P's." So you say "look, this is my fault, this is going to ruin every aspect of my life and it's always going to be horrible." And so the thinking style that people are supposed to learn in order to become more resilient in those situations is to say look, it's not always true that those three P's apply, and so it's worth asking, yeah you wanna take personal responsibility for your failures or your setbacks, but what other external circumstances contributed to those?

And then what's the proof that, maybe other parts of your life are unaffected by the job that you lost or by the failure you experienced at work. And especially, I think the permanent one is that, to me, the biggest trap because you'll catch people, you can actually see it in their language when they talk or when they write, they'll say things like, "well I will never be happy again," or "I will always be a failure."

I'm sorry, can you predict the future? Do you have a crystal ball? I don't. It's an incredibly difficult task, and so what you're supposed to do then according to this evidence is you're supposed to edit your own language and say right now, it feels like I will never be successful again.

Silverstein: A lot of your work is around how people make decisions, either with their best intentions or against them and I've always wondered what guides your decision making process?

Grant: So I think this is a great area where there's what's often called a "knowing-doing gap." As an organizational psychologist, I study these things daily and yet I notice, this happens every year, I only teach in the Fall, and one of the things I teach is this trap that's called "escalation of commitment to a losing course of action." It's where you make an initial commitment, it might be an investment of money, it might be a project you take on, it might be a person you decide to collaborate with, and then it doesn't go as planned. So maybe you get negative feedback, maybe you fail, maybe it's just horribly frustrating, and then you have a choice, are you going to cut your losses or are you gonna sort of double down? And what data shows is that people often double down.

So managers end up spending more money on failing projects and also struggling people than they do on their star performers and their really promising projects. They also end up overinvesting time in the people who are not doing well, as opposed to the people who are excelling. I

talk about this every Fall and then as soon as I'm out of the classroom, I find myself falling victim to it. And I think there's a really challenging part of this so I've learned from this is that I actually have to teach this stuff regularly in order to practice it. And what that means is when I'm not in the classroom I need to do interviews like this so, I have an excuse to talk about these principles. But I found myself a lot going back to the research but just writing a little bit about some of these principles, I find myself sort of deliberately talking through them in conversations that I have with people who are looking for advice, when normally I would just go right to the advice. I need to be reminded of how difficult it is to de-escalate.

So let's take a concrete example. One of the things I constantly do is I get over committed and I end up thinking wow, this project sounds really exciting and then pretty soon, I've way overextended myself. So I know that's an escalation situation. And as I'm talking about it, I realize okay, one way to prevent myself from doing that is to set a rule which is I will not ever say yes to a new project until I finish an old one. And as I had that rule handy, I'm a lot more likely to remember that and say you know what, I would love to work on this, right now my plate feels very full, so is it okay if we circle back in a couple months once I finish what I'm currently working on? And then the reality is what I'm currently working on takes several months longer than I expected it to and then I know once enough time has passed whether this is really a project that's gonna sustain my interest or whether it was exciting in the moment and then not at all.

Silverstein: And one thing I'd like you to touch on a little bit that I've seen you post a little bit on is how you make a decision about your career, and it seems so attractive to be seduced by the power of a position or the title of a position or like you talk about, like a book, like a final project, when what it actually takes to get there maybe doesn't work with your style or what you actually wanna do. Can you talk a little bit about how you get people to remind themselves of that?

Grant: Look, I think we're all affected by concerns about status and image. I see this though all the time with my students. I'll give you a few examples of where it jumps out at me and the first time I ever noticed it was, I was actually teaching my first class. I had a student come into office hours asking for advice about grad school, and I said, "why are you considering to go to grad school?" And the answer was, well because I've always wanted to get my PhD. And I thought it was such a weird phrase to say "my PhD." One, you don't have one, two, most people want to get "a PhD."

And it was very clear that this was kind of a centerpiece of her identity in this case, that having a PhD was an important way either to feel educated or to, I don't know, not disappoint her parents, and I came back and I said, yeah there are lots of people who want to have accomplished something, the question is, what do you think about the process of working toward that goal? And what she realized really quickly was she loved consuming the results of research, but did not enjoy at all the process of producing it, and so it was pretty clear that a PhD program was probably not a great fit for her.

I've seen this over and over again since, where I have students who say I wanna go and work for an investment bank, and I say okay why? And they say, well because these companies are very prestigious and you get to work with a lot of very important people. I'm like, do you know what you'll be doing all day? Do you like Excel spreadsheets? Do you like working 90-hour weeks? Do you like not having say over who you work with and what you work on and what you get to learn? And I'm not telling anyone they should necessarily never work in finance, but what I wanna get to is do you actually enjoy thinking about markets? Do you like trying to figure out a merger and acquisitions, or an initial public offerings? And if you find that kind of work interesting it's probably a better job fit for you.

I guess my takeaway here is to say that too often when we think about jobs, we think about who the job will make us, the title we get to carry, and I just think it's a travesty that people are drawn to titles and positions that will impress other people, but then end up being depressed by those experiences, and so I think it's worth asking how do I feel about the day to day work, do I find it intrinsically interesting, is it meaningful, am I gonna learn something from this set of maybe knowledge and skills that I'm exposed to? And I think again, it's a knowing doing gap. We can probably give that advice to others, the question is how often do we take it for ourselves.

Silverstein: And that's hard to reframe it in that way.

Grant: I think it is. I mean in my case, I called an advisor when I was finishing grad school and I said, I know that there are certain places that it's hard to say no when Harvard calls, and I said I wanna make sure that I'm really evaluating the immediate people I'm gonna be surrounded by and the teaching role that I have, so please remind me do not go just because it's Harvard. I actually ended up, I turned down Harvard for my first job offer and went to UNC because I felt that I was gonna learn more from the people that I'd be collaborating with there. And it was an incredible learning experience and after two years, I ended up getting poached by Wharton and one of my closest collaborators ended up going to Harvard.

Silverstein: Oh wow.

Grant: So I don't know what that means, but it suggests that sometimes I don't practice what I preach.

Silverstein: One of the topics that I've been most obsessed with lately is happiness and trying to figure out if that is the ultimate goal and what will actually make people happy and if they're actually making decisions that will lead them to happiness. Is that what people are trying to achieve? How good are we at achieving it?

Grant: I think happiness is not always a good goal.

Silverstein: Okay.

Grant: John Stewart Mill actually wrote, centuries ago, that one of the only ways to achieve happiness is to have your mind fixed on some goal other than happiness. And there's actually some new research in psychology to back this up.

So Iris Mauss and her colleagues have done these interesting studies where they track how much you value happiness. So they would ask, how important is this to you? Is it a central life goal for you to be happy? And then they follow you and they survey you to find out how much joy and pleasure and satisfaction do you have in your life? And it turns out that the people who place extreme value on happiness are significantly less happy than people who just say yeah, happiness is important but it's not my most important objective. And then you can say okay, well maybe there's a reversal of causality there, and miserable people become obsessed with becoming happy. But then what they do is they run these experiments where they randomly assign people to try to pursue happiness and they find that their happiness drops a little bit.

So the question is why? When people start to think about becoming happy, they get too focused on their own internal states and say well how do I feel better? As opposed to saying, okay what can I contribute to others? I think another piece of it is they get stuck in this mode where they're never experiencing. They're constantly evaluating. So I'm trying to be happy, wait, am I happy right now? I don't know, am I enjoying this conversation? Are you enjoying this conversation? Oh no, what if I could've been doing something more delightful? And then you start to experience this horrible fear of missing out and being plagued by FOMO makes you really unhappy. Over time then that turns into what I've started thinking about is ROMO, the regret of missing out, which happens after the FOMO.

I love what Oliver Berkman has called for as an alternative, which he calls JOMO, the joy of missing out. And he says every time you're thinking about all the great experiences you could've been having instead of the one you're currently having, you should instead think about all the unpleasant things that you're not doing and how thrilled you are that you got to avoid them. And I found that really helpful.

But I think in the workplace, this is a mistake that people often make is, I've watched a lot of people who maybe put too much emphasis on status in early career decisions and then they realize, okay, I've gotta really pay attention to what's important to me. And then they try to choose a job that makes them happy and the problem is, I think that joy is often fleeting. The job that makes you happy today might be boring next year because it's become too easy. It might also become repetitive, it might be that your interests change.

Some research I've just read recently that's brand new which shows that when people try to pursue passions, if they think about passion in terms of immediate joy or momentary happiness, they're less successful in pursuing that passion, less likely to find it, even, than if instead they think about a passion as what's personally important to them. It's less about what you enjoy, it's more about what you value, and saying can I find a job that brings me meaning? Because the work that I do is going to allow me to become the person that I wanna be and contribute to the world what I wanna offer.