Kelly welcomes Harvard professor Ranjay Gulati back to the podcast to discuss his new book, “How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage.”  

Before we get into it, how exactly does one get the Dali Lama to write the forward for one’s book? Is that a text? An email? 

“You know, sometimes you don’t know if you don’t ask. I just wanted to get the book to him. You know, I got an email address for his office. It was an email and it wasn’t with an ask necessarily. I didn’t hear back for a couple of months. And then, you know, it was a beautiful forward that he wrote. I hope people will read it. It was a little awkward because I thought there was more wisdom in that one page than there was in the whole book. So put me in a bit of a jam there. But what it tells us is that at one level, courage is everywhere.” 

Your first story is how your mom stood up to men trying to steal her property and that was kind of your introduction to courage.  

“Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is taking action in the face of fear. It’s learning to face into your fear rather than succumb to your fear. Now, fast forward, I do research into that. I realized that fear is a primal human emotion, hardwired in the primitive human brain in the amygdala. It’s a survival emotion. There’s, in fact, a great book called The Gift of Fear.  Kelly, I’m sorry, but our ancestors were all cowards. They’re the ones who survived. The ones who ran to danger didn’t have kids. They didn’t make it. So, survival and self-preservation is baked into our DNA. And fear is the alert system for us. So if we’re gonna be courageous, we have to learn to deal with the discomfort.” 

You write about the need to be risk-hunters, which you did with this book in a way. 

“Even as we think about our own careers, you know, if jobs are going to change in a fundamental way, what is that going to mean for me? How do I navigate and think about my career and, honestly, writing this book was a scary thought for me – because it was not in a genre that I’ve written for before. I mean, I’m a business professor. I study organizations and there’s no literature per se on courage. I had to look in psychology, a bit in neuroscience, a bit in sociology, and I’m trying to piece it together. But you know, I had to kind of deal with it. I’m like, hey, if I’m writing about being bold, I better be bold myself.” 

Photo Credit: Evgenia Eliseeva