John Green Wants You to Pay Attention to Your Attention
Worklife with Adam Grant
TED
4.8 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do you pay attention to your attention? John Green is the beloved author of The Fault In Our Stars, and when he started tracking his attention, he realized he was obsessed with evaluating human progress. He decided to start rating everything—from the capacity for human wonder to Canadian geese—on a five-point scale. In this deeply thoughtful conversation with Adam, John shares what he learned from his series of Yelp-style reviews, the gift of a great book, and the unexpected life lessons found in the last lap of Mario Kart. Read the full text transcript at go.ted.com/T4G8
This was an episode of Taken for Granted, but now the podcast is called ReThinking with Adam Grant, and it’s back with weekly episodes. You can listen to them right here in the WorkLife feed, or by following ReThinking with Adam Grant wherever you are right now.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Tom Rivic-Karnack and I'm one of the hosts of Outrage and Optimism, a TED podcast. |
| 0:05.0 | Is it too late to avert the climate crisis? |
| 0:08.0 | This is increasingly the question that is on everyone's lips. |
| 0:11.0 | The answer is, it depends what we do now. |
| 0:14.0 | Each week on Outrage and Optimism together with my co-host, |
| 0:17.0 | we break down the latest news, make it intelligible, |
| 0:21.0 | and help you understand how you can be part of this generation that will make the difference. |
| 0:26.0 | Find Outrage and Optimism wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:33.0 | Hi, I'm Felix Overholzer-G, and I'm one of the hosts of a podcast called After Hours, from TED. |
| 0:40.0 | Each week my friends and colleagues from Harvard Business School break down the latest in business and culture. |
| 0:46.0 | This season we're talking about quiet, quitting, Twitter, innovation and rice farming, |
| 0:52.0 | and why recycling might be a really bad idea. |
| 0:55.0 | Stay tuned for our beat and of the year awards and predictions for 2023. |
| 1:00.0 | Two episodes where everything is on the table. |
| 1:04.0 | Find After Hours wherever you listen to podcasts. |
| 1:13.0 | Hey work, lifers, it's Adam Gran. |
| 1:15.0 | Welcome back to Taken for Granit, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. |
| 1:19.0 | I'm an organizational psychologist. |
| 1:21.0 | My job is to think again about how we work, lead and live. |
| 1:25.0 | Today I'm talking to one of my favorite authors. |
| 1:28.0 | I'm John Green, and I am here in my basement in Indianapolis, Indiana. |
| 1:34.0 | John is best known for his heart-stopping novel, The Fault in Our Stars. |
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