When You Don’t Know What You Actually Want: How To Say No, When To Say Yes, and The One Question That Cuts Through It | Yara Shahidi

Plus: The "hard yes" list, the intentional pursuit of being bad at things (and how that opens doors you didn't know were closed), being "on intimate terms with catastrophe," and optimism as a daily practice. From How To Be A Better Human.

Today we're sharing an episode from another show we love: How to Be a Better Human, hosted by Chris Duffy. In this conversation, Chris talks with actor Yara Shahidi — known for Black-ish and Grown-ish, and now host of The Optimist Project podcast — about what she's learned from building a career and an identity at the same time. Yara explains why she thinks of optimism as a daily practice rather than a fixed personality trait, how a "year of no" eventually led her to build a "hard yes list" of things that reliably bring her joy, and why she's been deliberately pursuing things she's bad at — cartwheels, crochet, the glockenspiel — as a way of staying curious and connected.

It's a thoughtful conversation about purpose, identity, and how to keep growing once you've already achieved the thing you thought you wanted. If you like what you hear, check out How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.

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