I've been divorced. I've been a single dad twice. The failure of the relationships were, in fact, a godsend with regard to parenting because it didn't permit the distractions of my work, which are enormous, to take away from the fundamental stuff that for half the time I had to be there in cooking

dinner and doing laundry and, you know, homework. Wow. I have four daughters, and they're 43 to 15.

I'm nowhere near as good a filmmaker, I think, as I am a father.

Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the Science of What Makes Us Tick.

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.

This week, we're back with the king of historical documentaries, Ken Burns.

In this second half of our conversation, things turned a little personal.

We talked about the role of loss and grief in his work, and about how he hates careerism.

And I put him in the hot seat with the biggest challenge I can think of for someone like Ken Burns.

All right, I want to ask if you're up for a lightning round. Well, you know, if I can have six part 12 hour answers. I know. This is a

very constraining form for you. Yeah. No, no, no, I'm just warning you in apology for the

tendency to get excited and then go on. It's part of the magic of your work, not something you

should apologize for. Okay, so first, let you question. What is the worst career advice you've

received? Why would you move to New Hampshire when you've been offered a job in New York City and

you don't have a paying job because you're working on a film about the Brooklyn Bridge, my first one?

And conversely, or not conversely, as a parallel to that, I was told by someone in an animation studio

where we animate the movements on the photographs,

he said, no one will ever look at a Zoom

that's 35 minutes on a single face.

And I said, please do it anyway.

You know?

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