10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris

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

July 31, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

When Yara Shahidi was five years old, she asked for every religious book she could find. By thirteen, she was reading James Baldwin. At eighteen, she was a freshman at Harvard while filming the second season of her television show Grown-ish. Academic advisors and entertainment professionals alike told her there was no way to do both. "I was searching for an 'and,'" she recalls, "but I kept getting presented with 'either/or.'" That tension—between what you want to do and what you're told is possible—is the central question of this conversation. Shahidi's answer is not a grand philosophy but a set of small, concrete practices: a year of saying no, a list of undeniable yeses, and an intentional pursuit of being bad at things.

Optimism as a Daily Practice, Not a Personality Trait

Shahidi is careful to distinguish optimism from naivety. "Optimism is not what exists in a vacuum on your best day, but how you're pulling through for yourself on your worst days," she says. She arrived at this definition after a short-lived period of pessimism in her late teens, when she realized that sitting in critique accomplished nothing. "I got nothing done," she says flatly. "Even being hopeful and even slightly naive at times, I accomplished more than sitting in my pessimism and trying to account for all that could go wrong."

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Guest Context** - Dan Harris introduces a special episode from the podcast *How to Be a Better Human*, featuring actor, producer, and Harvard graduate Yara Shahidi.
  • 2 (02:45) **Yara's Crossroads: The "Are You Sure About That?" Moment** - Yara describes the collision of her two lifelong passions—acting and education—as she began Harvard while filming *Grown-ish*.
  • 3 (08:05) **Optimism as a Practice, Not a Personality Trait** - Yara reframes optimism as a difficult, daily practice rather than a naive feeling, arguing that pessimism is the easy, unproductive route.
  • 4 (11:05) **The "Hard Yes" List: A Practical Tool for Joy** - Yara introduces the "hard yes list" as a curated arsenal of things that provide a material reset during difficult moments.
  • 5 (17:25) **Historical Perspective & The "Highest Order" Question** - Yara discusses how a historical view, symbolized by her "1963" tattoo, helps her balance acknowledging setbacks with maintaining a vision for change.
  • 6 (24:18) **The Pressure to Have an Opinion & The Right to Be Well-Studied** - Yara reflects on the pressure, amplified by social media, to comment on everything instantly, and how she learned to slow down and become granular about what she speaks on.
  • 7 (29:09) **The Lesson of Season One: Giving Yourself Space to Be All Things** - Yara describes her first season on *Black-ish* where she wasn't acting much, leading her to ask "What else do you want to be doing?" and pursue her civic engagement work.

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Guests on this episode

Yara Shahidi

Show Notes

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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