Enjoy a 57 minute conversation free for everyone. If you want to support this Substack, premium members get additional treats including a supplemental PDF of this conversation and access to an interactive task related to her research.
I interviewed a lot of people for this newsletter (the list includes Wendy K Smith Dr. Sunita Sah Yael Schonbrun Sonja Lyubomirsky Corinne Low Colin M. Fisher Will Storr). Researchers I have admired for years. Friends. Strangers who turned into friends by the end of the hour. I try not to play favorites. But I am going to say Leslie John Is the Kind of Person You Want Sitting Next to You on a Long Flight.
She is a chaired professor at Harvard Business School with an effervescent personality - the thumbnail image does her justice. He fantastic first book is called Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing (get it everywhere, here is the Amazon link). By fantastic I mean: incredible writing, interesting, and useful. Too few non-fiction books nail this trifecta.
I had low expectations for this book because I have read a lot of business books written by a lot of Harvard professors and most of them are the intellectual equivalent of a hotel continental breakfast. I picked up Revealing at my youngest daughter’s volleyball tournament and by the second match I was hiding in the bleachers so I could read another chapter. It is that kind of book.
Here is what we got into with this recorded conversation.
We talked about the single most important study of her career, a seven-experiment PNAS paper that upends what almost everyone assumes about revealing your worst acts to a stranger. I will not spoil it, except to say that it has changed how I think about the people in my life who dodge personal questions, and it should change how you think about them too.
We talked about the spiral staircase of intimacy. How you climb it with another person. How you know when you have climbed too fast. How you know when you have not climbed at all. What to do when you look down and realize the other person is still standing on level two.
We talked about the difference between dysregulated oversharing and the regular healthy kind, and how a cottage industry of advice books has trained a generation of anxious people to withhold things that would have made them more loved.
We talked about divorce. Leslie dropped a hot take on this one that I was not expecting, and I cheered her on because it is something I have been trying to get other people in the well-being space to acknowledge. If this topic interests you, this might tickle you:
We talked about how to give negative feedback to someone who is asking for it but is unlikely to be able to handle it.
We talked about the gap between what happiness researchers study and how happiness researchers behave.
We talked about TMI and what Leslie has been calling its neglected cousin, TLI. Too little information. A concept so underappreciated that this term barely exists in the English language (does it appear in other cultures?).
And we closed with the single bit of advice she would tattoo on a reader’s forearm if she could. Make sure to stick around for the second half of the interview to find out.
Paid/Premium subscribers, the full conversation is waiting for you below, along with a downloadable PDF of the complete transcript. You also get an extra treat. I built something for you this week. It is a 25-question quiz inspired by Leslie’s amazing research program. The questions test how much disclosure changes when defenses drop, and they cover the full menu of things people do not usually admit to in polite company. Cheating. Lying. Lust. Theft. The fantasies that visit you at night that you might even hide from your therapist. This is my first time doing something like this and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did creating it.
Free subscribers, this is the kind of post that exists because paid subscribers make it possible. If you have been thinking about upgrading, this is the one.
I am going to close with one line Leslie said near the end of the conversation. I am not going to tell you what it is. I am going to let you find it yourself. You will know it when you hit it.
Come inside. Listen to this amazing scientist from beginning to end.
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