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I recently sat down with organizational psychologist Adam Grant for an episode of his podcast, ReThinking. Even though he was the one interviewing me, he shared some of his own valuable insights from the world of academic research. In our conversation, we discuss the importance of accepting your failures, how falling short of your goals can be a good thing, and whether nice people really finish last.

As an organizational psychologist, Adam Grant believes that great minds don’t think alike; they challenge each other to think differently. In ReThinking, he has lively discussions and debates with interesting thinkers to uncover bold insights and share surprising science that can make us all a little bit smarter. If you like this interview, you can find ReThinking with Adam Grant wherever you get your podcasts.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

David Duchovny, Adam Grant

David Duchovny  00:28

Hey, everyone this week, I want to share an episode of another podcast I was on as a guest, rethinking with Adam Grant, just like this show, rethinking features in depth, interviews with people whose life experiences you can learn from except this time you’re learning from me, hopefully. It was great sitting down with Adam, who is an organizational psychologist for free, to talk about my life and how I’ve learned from failure, and I learned a lot from him in our conversation as well. If you like this show, you might like Adam’s show too. For more from Adam Grant, you can find Rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Now onto the show.

 

David Duchovny  02:14

We gotta as a culture and as a country, accept our elves and grow, grow from our house and call me a loser, and I’ll say thank you.

 

Adam Grant  02:24

Hey everyone, it’s Adam Grant, welcome back to Rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED audio collective. I’m an organizational psychologist, and I’m taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is David Duchovny. You probably know him best as an actor. He won Golden Globes for his starring roles in The X Files and Californication, and had iconic appearances in Zoolander and The Chair. But he’s also a best selling author of four novels and a screenwriter, director and singer songwriter, and he’s been the subject of A song, an unusually catchy one by Bree Sharpman.

 

Adam Grant  03:39

David’s new film is Bucky effing dent, and he’s the host of a new podcast, Fail Better. So we’re gonna talk about failure, David, let me start by asking you, did you wake up one morning and think I know what the world needs another podcast.

 

David Duchovny  03:57

Well, actually, I thought, hey, I’m the only person in the world without a podcast, so I guess I should have one. I was a big Samuel Beckett fan. I was a big fan of failure in a weird way, not in a in a schadenfreude way, not in a way of like you fuck or you failed, but more just like the bittersweetness of it, the humanity of it, because we all go through it, brother and sisterhood, of it. And I said, if I’m going to have a podcast and talk to people, can I talk to them about failure? Can we release some shame around failure? Can we talk about resilience? And we looked around and we saw there were these podcasts which I found objectionable. They were all about business failure and Haha, or how I started one business, and then I learned from my failure, and now I’m a crypto billionaire, and I was like, well, that’s not what I’m interested in at all. I’m not, I’m not interested in making money or talking about people making money. So yeah, I guess we figured we fell in to a place that hadn’t quite been trod over so many times. In the world of podcasts.

 

Adam Grant  05:04

There will definitely be people wondering, what does a successful actor, filmmaker, novelist, Princeton Summa grad possibly know about failure?

 

David Duchovny  05:13

We kind of go through the world thinking that words correspond to reality, when in fact, it’s just an illusion. We’ve all decided to believe. And therefore anything I feel, think, move inside, has to be translated into words. And has already failed. There’s already been a failure on the way. And for me, that’s the heart of it. You know, it’s not just like, oh, that book did well, or that book got reviewed well, or that performance got reviewed well, or that movie bombed. It’s just this sense of human expression for me, whether it’s acting, directing, writing, playing, music, whatever, that the inspiration has to be translated into the human expression. And there’s a failure that happens immediately, and it’s how you navigate that that makes you a better or a less vile artist, I think.

 

Adam Grant  06:06

That’s fascinating. When you first started describing that, I thought you were gonna talk about the game of telephone that we ended up playing, where what you’ve expressed is not what I hear, but you’re talking about a much earlier failure of what’s in your head or in your experience not being translated accurately into language.

 

David Duchovny  06:22

Can’t be I mean, language is an approximation.

 

Adam Grant  06:26

As an organizational psychologist, I spent most of my career studying professional success and failure, I’d love to hear about what you think is your biggest professional failure and how you dealt with it.

 

David Duchovny  06:35

Failure has so many different aspects to it. You could call it a box office failure. You could call it a artistic failure. You could call it an editing failure, a scoring failure, an audience failure, a timing failure. I did a movie called House of D that I wrote and directed and acted in, in like 2000 and I don’t know, three or four, and it was not well received. It was a very different thing for me to do, because I was coming off of this global hit of The X Files, like a generational television show that there really is no comparison to the breadth of the audience that it found globally. And the movie I made was very small, very personal, and just the Coming of Age movie, and I just think it was confusing when House of D didn’t do well, the failure was very personal to me, because I was being authentic with it. You know, in retrospect, I can see that I was dooming myself, but I had no other expressive or artistic choice at the time, because I was coming out of being associated with this huge show, and I was like, well, here’s what I want to do. This is my vision. This is the kind of stuff that I want to do, and people didn’t want it.

 

Adam Grant  08:02

It seems that, at least from a commercial perspective, you come out of the X Files, and nothing you possibly do could ever be that successful again.

 

David Duchovny  08:12

Right, it hurt a lot, and it hurt a lot for a while, and it still hurts to this day, not like it did, but it lives on in that way, in many ways.

 

Adam Grant  08:24

So how have you dealt with that over the last two decades?

 

David Duchovny  08:30

Well, I just kept working for one I didn’t give up. I just kept moving forward. I tried to to look at whatever lessons, critical lessons I might learn from it as a craftsman, as a maker of things hard to do in the moment when you’re smarting and bleeding. I I tried to look at, you know, my willfulness and making a small movie after coming off such a big show. I tried to look at my contrariness. But other than that, it’s just like, Okay, well, that was I know what I was trying to do, and I know as a first time filmmaker that I was going to make some missteps, and I could see those, and I learned so much just in the doing of it that I had more confidence no matter what happened afterwards. And if I do things for the right reasons, which I don’t always do, and I’m aware when I’m doing things for the wrong reasons, but if I do certain things for the right reasons, then whatever happens, it’s okay.

 

Adam Grant  09:32

I’m reminded of some recent work in psychology suggesting that one of the reasons it’s so hard for many of us to take failure and criticism is we immediately focus on feeling better, as opposed to asking, How can I do better? And when you want to feel better, what I think most of us instinctively do is we say, okay, I’m going to distract myself. I’m going to avoid the pain altogether. And then we fail to learn the lessons. It sounds like you didn’t do that.

 

David Duchovny  09:59

I felt like, you know, I’d been punched in the stomach. But I also had young kids, you know, and they didn’t give a fuck. Nobody that loved me really cared. So there were, there were people around me. I’m not talking about like an illusory bubble of people telling me I’m fantastic, but it was just like people telling me there are other things in life. I don’t know what the lesson is ever except that failure just just opens up other doors, you know, if only because it makes you think in different ways. Success is a terrible thing to happen to anybody.

 

Adam Grant  10:33

Easy to say as a successful person, isn’t it?

 

David Duchovny  10:36

It is, yeah, and it’s somewhat glib, of course, but in terms of like, what you learn as a person, about life or about your soul or about anything, success is not a teacher. Success is something else.

 

Adam Grant  10:52

I think it’s fair to say that the Winner’s Curse is real, that oftentimes success makes people complacent. It sounds like one of your lessons from failure is not to put all your eggs in one identity basket.

 

David Duchovny  11:04

That’s certainly my nature. One of the blessings of being a performer is you get to do different jobs all the time. And then if you add to that other expressive aspects, like fiction writing or music or whatever, then I have all these ways in which to fail, but also all these places where I’m learning. I’m 50 whatever, and I’m learning something, and my brain feels like it’s 19 or 20. I know it’s not, and I know I can’t ever be as good a guitar player as if I had started when I was young, but to get to do something new, Zen Mind, beginner’s mind, that phrase I’m reminded of that all the time. It’s like a fountain of youth on the inside, it’s just like, oh my god, I’m so excited to do this really simple thing. It’s new to me.

 

Adam Grant  11:58

I think this is for a lot of people, part of the the appeal of a portfolio career, that if you have a range of different projects going, you don’t end up over invested in any one of them.

 

David Duchovny  12:10

That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that phrase, portfolio career, and I kind of want to hate it to be honest.

 

Adam Grant  12:17

What do you hate about it?

 

David Duchovny  12:19

I hate that it’s a strategy. You know, when it’s something like, I feel like I just just kind of intuited my way through it. I mean, I don’t know how you can actually strategize a portfolio career. You either want to do multiple things or you don’t, you know.

 

Adam Grant  12:35

Okay, this, this goes to something else I wanted to ask you about, which is, I wanted to get a sense of how you decide a role or a project is worth doing. I think one of my favorite moments in your career arc, as I know it, was when you landed in Zoolander as a hand model, which might be my favorite David Duchovny role of all time, just because it was so unexpected, and so hilariously deadpan. Why did you want to be in it? What did you see in Zoolander? Because I don’t think it was expected to be a big hit. It was relatively low budget. It was not heralded. What did you notice there?

 

David Duchovny  13:06

Well, it was never a hit. It came out a week or two after 911 so it didn’t do great business at first, it didn’t do much business at all. It was just in the afterlife of movies that it became a cult thing, and then that it is in people’s minds. What did I see? I mean, I just really liked what Ben was doing. And for me, it was very important, again, reacting to coming off the X Files or ending The X Files. I wanted to do comedy, you know, I wanted to exist in the comedy world. So I was like, here’s that world. It wasn’t the kind of comedy that I would ever write or ever conceive of, but I thought I can play in that sandbox. There was even, like, a love of language in my character that I really responded to. You know, zulena says, But you’re a model, and I say something like, I’m a finger jockey, a finger jockey. We don’t think the same way the face and body boys do, but like, finger jockey to me, like, I go anywhere with that writer, you know, somebody who came up who called a hand model, finger jockey. That’s, that’s a comedic mind, you know, that’s working in language. And I was like, yeah.

 

Adam Grant  14:24

It must have been after watching the chair and seeing you play that hysterical caricature of yourself that I wondered how much of that is real. And I looked up your backstory. Had no idea that you’d been a PhD student in English Literature at Yale, why? Why were you there? Why did you walk away without finishing your dissertation?

 

David Duchovny  14:45

That’s a question my mom asked me until she died. I thought, not being a gambler by nature. I thought, well, if I get a PhD, you know, I’ll have a job. If I can get tenure, I’ll really have a job. And then. And I’ll have three or four months off a year. So that’s why I was in graduate school. Like I couldn’t be a pro basketball player. That would have been my first choice. I couldn’t be a doctor. Didn’t want to be a lawyer. You know, you talk about strategy. That was my strategy, was find a way to make a living that that affords me the freedom and time to pursue a life of creative writing.

 

Adam Grant  15:27

And why did you then abandon it?

 

David Duchovny  15:30

I always knew that my heart wasn’t in it in a way. I always knew that I could do it, and I think I was a decent teacher, but I knew I wasn’t going to be a great literary critic. There were just people around me who were better, and I knew it wasn’t authentic to me. Something told me that that would be like a death in life, in a way, and that’s no criticism of criticism. That’s no knock on academia at all. It’s more of a knock on me.

 

Adam Grant  15:58

Why did your mom want you to finish?

 

David Duchovny  16:01

Because my mom grew up in a small town in Scotland where nobody went to college in a class system, Great Britain, early 20th century, and the only way for a person to advance out of those circumstances was education, and that’s the vision that she had for her kids, even though the world had changed and America was a little different than the circumstances in which she grew up. For her, that’s what a poor person could do with hard work. Was be a be a knowledgeable person. And it was also just, you know, finish what you started. That’s a parental thing. You started that thing, finish it. You know, I think it would take me years. It would take me years, and unless the idea really excited me, I don’t think would be a good use of my time.

 

Adam Grant  16:50

No, I think the opportunity cost goes up quite a bit over time, you found an alternate path to get the creative freedom you wanted. So why invest in something that six people might read?

 

David Duchovny  17:03

Well, what’s interesting about the dissertation that never was it was called the thing that doesn’t exist is called Magic and technology in contemporary American fiction and poetry. And when I think about my subsequent years as an actor, or whatever you think about, even the X Files, magic and technology kind of fits into that area. And I think now that everybody’s concerned with AI and all that, what I thought I was going to be writing about in the dissertation was how magic was a primitive technology. Magic was how people did things that technology now does for us, fly through the air, turn water into wine, do all these things that magicians and prophets used to do with their magic in there. But there was always a sense of good magic and bad magic. And there was a moral to magic. Dr Faustus, you know, he made a deal with the devil for that power. But with technology, there was never, there was never a weapon. There’s never been a weapon that the human race has created that hasn’t been employed, right? So there’s never been a sense in which somebody says to technology, you know, toasts are bad. And I was saying that these creative writers, these novelists and poets that I was going to be writing about, were actually looking at technology and trying to discuss it in ways that were prophetically morally judged, like we’re trying to do with AI now.

 

Adam Grant  18:30

So your non dissertation of the 80s was anticipating the moral technological dilemmas of the 2020s.

 

David Duchovny  18:38

You could say that, but since it was never written, you really can’t say that.

 

David Duchovny  18:45

David, let’s move to a lightning round. You ready?

 

David Duchovny  21:23

I think so.

 

Adam Grant  22:34

Okay, first question, what is the worst career advice you’ve ever gotten?

 

David Duchovny  22:38

Take an auditioning class.

 

Adam Grant  22:40

That was bad advice?

 

David Duchovny  22:41

Yeah.

 

Adam Grant  22:42

Why?

 

David Duchovny  22:43

Auditioning isn’t acting.

 

Adam Grant  22:45

What is it? Is it selling?

 

David Duchovny  22:47

It is.

 

Adam Grant  22:48

What is your favorite X Files character? Who is your favorite X Files character? Or what? Well, could go either way.

 

David Duchovny  22:57

The Fluke man, our wonderful writer, Darren Morgan, played a six foot intestine worm.

 

Adam Grant  23:04

I did not anticipate that answer. Okay, what is something that you’ve been rethinking lately?

 

David Duchovny  23:11

That magic and technology and contemporary American fiction and poetry?

 

Adam Grant  23:16

Touche, what’s a question you have for me as a psychologist?

 

David Duchovny  23:21

Can we really find solutions through talking when most of our emotional life and chemical Life is subverbal?

 

Adam Grant  23:32

That’s a great question, yes.

 

David Duchovny  23:37

That’s a great answer. It’s a hopeful answer.

 

Adam Grant  23:38

It’s an easy one. Can we get it perfectly, based on what I know about how you think, are you ever going to be satisfied with the the amount of slippage that exists between our subconscious experience and our conscious expression? Probably not. Can we get closer? I think yes.

 

David Duchovny  23:58

Because I have this fundamental, intuitive sense of failure between the expression and the execution. I’m not a perfectionist, and I’m quite happy with the stabs that I make in the dark.

 

Adam Grant  24:13

I think that’s a healthy attitude. There’s a body of research on what’s called referential processing, which is how fluidly you translate images into words and vice versa. So I think a master would be an art critic, for example, and I have none of that ability. I can go to a museum, stare at a painting, and I can’t even come up with a word. But we I think we both know people who are gifted at that, and I would say if we study how those people do it, it’s probably more of a teachable skill than than we’ve realized. And maybe that is, in some sense, the the forgotten and soon to be rediscovered value of the humanities. They’re going to help people build that skill and say, Look, if you know, increasingly, artificial intelligence is going to is going to handle a lot of the the processing of information that we use to have to do ourselves. What’s left for humans to do uniquely well? One thing that’s left is for us to be able to access experiences that AI can’t have lived and figure out how to articulate them.

 

David Duchovny  25:13

That’s very sad.

 

Adam Grant  25:14

You think I don’t know, I think I think it’s kind of encouraging.

 

David Duchovny  25:16

I agree with you, but it’s sad to think we’re pushing ourselves out of existence or utility, but I totally agree with you. As a creative person, I’m not very much afraid of AI. I don’t think AI will ever make a masterpiece.

 

Adam Grant  25:34

And even if it did, I just wouldn’t care that much.

 

David Duchovny  25:38

And the evidence of it not being a masterpiece would be the fact that you didn’t care that much. But then again, masterpiece is a slippery word.

 

Adam Grant  25:46

It certainly is. I’m thinking about the Watson created horror movie trailers. Have you seen those?

 

David Duchovny  25:51

No.

 

Adam Grant  25:51

I first caught one. Maybe 2018 or 2019 so before the generative AI wave that’s picked up in the last year and they were chilling. I cannot believe that they were created by an algorithm effectively, but as soon as I found out, I don’t really want to watch this. I want to be scared by a person and their vision.

 

David Duchovny  26:13

I don’t want to denigrate the horror or anything like that. But I guess something that makes it It’s bread and butter by scaring the shit out of you probably is more easily attainable by an algorithm than something that has a more complicated mission. Let’s

 

Adam Grant  26:30

Talk about fucking dent, I love the vision for this film. You have a character Ted who’s trying to reconnect with his father, who’s a huge Red Sox fan in the 1970s basically, in order to salvage their relationship and his father’s failing health, Ted sort of creates an illusion that the Red Sox are winning.

 

David Duchovny  26:55

Well, the reason that he does this is because his father is dying of cancer, but he’s convinced that he can’t die until the Red Sox win at all, and the Sox are doing very well that year, so he thinks he’s going to die at the end of that year, but he’s going to live until that happens. And his health seems to start to suffer as the Sox begin to choke back their lead, and so his son, in order to try to keep his health, starts faking the outcomes in the hopes that the Sox do come back eventually, and he can bring his father back into the real world. But for me, the movie is about failure. The Sox, at least until the 2000s were the epitome of a failed franchise, and there was even a backstory that they had traded away the greatest player to ever play, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees, and they were cursed, and they were losers. The movement of the film is really about loving losers, because we’re all losers. Ultimately, we all die. That’s the final loss but we all go through heartache. We all go through loss, and that’s what joins us all, very similar to the podcast idea. I don’t have many ideas, but I can spread them out over different formats and make it look like I got a few. The other aspect of the film that was interesting to me as a writer was this idea of of changing narrative focus. The father, he’s trying to write the story of his life. He’s trying to change the story of his life. He’s been the victim, he’s been the villain, he’s been the scapegoat, and he wants to die a hero, you know, and it’s the same story, but it’s a different way of telling it. And I think that’s something that I’ve come to later in life, is that, you know, we can all share the same facts about ourselves, but real mental health and spiritual health and even physical health comes from the way in which we tell the stories of our lives to ourselves and to those around us. And I’m not talking about lying. I’m talking about telling the story in a way that benefits the most people.

 

Adam Grant  33:34

It seems to me that there is such a thing as objective failure. Your team loses the game. A surgeon fails to save a patient on the operating table. But most failures in life are subjective. You created a goal which is a fiction. It’s an expectation of how things are going to go, which has your hopes and dreams built into it, and then you fall short of that expectation, which was just in your imagination, and you count that experience of failure, and then to your point, people end up telling themselves all kinds of lies to convince themselves that they didn’t fail, when, to me, so many of those failures were actually in the expectations that were set to begin with. I’ll give you a quick personal example on this one during covid I wrote the most read New York Times article of the year. And I didn’t set out to do it. I was trying to name this experience of languishing that people were going through, of feeling empty and sort of stuck. And when the article went viral, I immediately knew I will never write an article that’s successful ever again. I’m a psychologist. I don’t write op eds for a living, and if I set myself the goal of having the most successful Article of the year, I’m going to feel like a failure with every subsequent article I write. So I sat down and said, I have to redefine my goals if I get an idea out there that helps somebody that matters much more than the number of people it reaches. And in doing that, I feel like I’m protecting. Myself from the the arbitrary feeling of failure every time I release an article that falls short. So that’s, I guess, my reflection on the fiction of failure. How do you react to that? And do you play the same game?

 

David Duchovny  35:11

There’s a saying that goes expectations of future, resentments, you know, and I think that that’s, it’s a good rule to live by hard not to have expectations, but they’re tricky and they can be dangerous. You wrote an article that was authentic. It came from a need. You set out to communicate something authentically, and that must have been in its DNA, and I would say that helped it get so widely disseminated, because you didn’t have an angle on it. You didn’t, you didn’t set out to be popular. It just, it just reminds me a lot of what I was talking about earlier. You know, there is no way to ever have a success like The X Files. It it doesn’t happen. Can’t happen. It’s certainly not going to happen to me, but I don’t think it’s going to happen to anybody else either. I mean, it’s just, we’re in a different world now in terms of consensus and culture in that way. So to play that game is just a losing game, and you got to figure out. My friend Gary Shandling said, I think he made it up, but it’s a really good phrase, which is he said, people that say nice guys finish last don’t know where the finish line is, but it’s kind of like you got to know where the finish line is, you know, and it’s not the day after you had the most popular article, and it’s not the day after you had the least popular it’s a continuum. You have to keep your eye on the past and the horizon while living in the present, which is difficult, but you got to do it.

 

Adam Grant  36:36

People who say nice guys finish last don’t know where the finish line is.

 

David Duchovny  36:40

Yeah, you like that?

 

Adam Grant  36:41

That’s profound.

 

David Duchovny  36:44

That was Gary Shandling man. He was a genius.

 

Adam Grant  36:47

Tell me what that means to you. Because my first reaction to it is, you’re, you know, you’re focusing too much on a short term outcome and too little on long term character.

 

David Duchovny  36:57

I’ve never really tried to unpack it. I just heard it, and I was like, true and like to think about where is the finish line in one’s life? It’s not death. You know, that’s not what he means. It’s something else.

 

Adam Grant  37:11

To me, it signals, let’s think about what really counts, as opposed to what’s easy to count. Yeah. Well, as I reflect on a couple of the arcs of this conversation. It seems to me that a mix of success and failure, however you define it, is more of a life well lived than a life of just accumulating and accelerating successes. Because as much as success gratifies, it seems that failure is a better motivator and a better teacher.

 

David Duchovny  37:41

Well, also success alienates, you know, sets you apart. You know, failure gives you many brothers and sisters, and failure creates empathy. Failure should engender empathy, I think, in our country now, failure engenders mockery, and that’s one of the things that I wanted to kind of address with the podcast and the movie and the novel of Bucky fucking dad. You know, it’s really our inability to accept our own failures that makes us such a schadenfreude kind of culture. And you look at somebody like a Donald Trump, who cannot accept an L his whole presidential run is like not accepting his L, and there’s nearly half the country that’s going to get behind this.

 

Adam Grant  38:34

So it seems like then your your hypothesis is that people’s desire to take others down is because they’re they’re so ashamed by their own losses.

 

David Duchovny  38:46

It’s a lot of what we do we project onto the other the fears that we have about ourselves.

 

Adam Grant  38:52

Interesting and this, this notion that success can make you lonely, that it alienates. What advice do you have for coping with that, for all the poor, struggling, successful people out there?

 

David Duchovny  39:07

They’re fine. They’ll come back. They’ll have a failure, they’ll come back to Earth. They’ll get there.

 

Adam Grant  39:13

Love it. Well, David, this has been really fun and fascinating. I think your mind is a really unusual and interesting place.

 

David Duchovny  39:20

Oh, well, thank you.

 

Adam Grant  39:26

Such a powerful sentiment that people who believe nice guys finish last don’t know where the finish line is. Personally, I like the idea that there is no finish line, but if I had to draw one, for me, it’s not about what you achieve, it’s about what you contribute in how you treat others along the way. Rethinking is hosted by me Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED audio collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kinglsey-Ma, and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our Fact Checker is Paul Durbin, Original Music by Hans, Dale Sue and Alison Layton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Don bun Chang, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

 

Adam Grant  40:17

So it sounds like she was worried that abd didn’t have the same cachet as a PhD?

 

CREDITS  40:22

Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know that abd really exists, you know, because everything else is in Latin, and abd just means all the dissertation. That’s how bad that, moniker is.