#130 How To Stay Focused, Beat Distraction, and Get Things Done | Nir Eyal

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Let me show you, this will blow your mind. Which square looks darker?

A.

Definitely A.

100%.

Your eyes are lying to you. You do not see reality. Successful entrepreneurs have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the $100 bills all over the street. You can change what you see and ultimately what you do.

Muriel has spent 6 years to figure out first to not get distracted and now to change your belief systems. He's been sought out all over the world to to do exactly what he is gonna teach you today.

The 10-minute rule says you can give in to any distraction, but not right now. I, I don't know what to do right now. I gotta do something. That's the cause of distraction. What you will find is that the 10-minute rule becomes the 12-minute rule, the 20-minute rule. You're proving your self-efficacy and your agency. Right now, you are processing 11 million bits of information per second. You can only attend to this tiny keyhole of attention.

We have to be so careful about what we let in here.

More than ever. But how exactly do we do that for technology. Turns out it's actually not that hard. That's the superpower that most people have no clue that they could unlock within them right now. There's 4 steps to becoming indestructible, but the firewall against distraction is—

When you are fighting with somebody else, how do you take a step back and say, oh, wait a second, I might have just perceived that wrong?

So this is a big part of the revelation for me, was realizing that I don't see reality as it is. If you believe, no, no, no, absolutely, 100%, I'm certain, Done deal, you can't change my mind. That becomes your reality, right? Think about it as somebody running a marathon.

If—

who's more likely to finish a marathon? The person who says, I can't finish this marathon, or the person who says, I think I can finish the marathon? Now, the objective fact could be either way. Neither of those are facts, they are beliefs, right? The fact could be that some people don't finish a marathon, but who you're going to bet on, right? Are you going to bet on the person who says, I cannot finish this marathon, in which case they quit, they're out, versus the person who says, I might be able to, or I think I can finish this marathon. They do, or they're more likely to, because they persist, because they try. So the beliefs that get people the most upset, that get people the most agitated, that get people to say, that's ridiculous, those are the beliefs we most need to explore. The ones that we say, that cannot be true, that person is definitely evil, that business definitely will not work, that idea is the stupidest thing ever. We don't see reality as it is, we see reality as we are. And so the more agitated we get by the idea of thinking differently, it's because there's something in us that we are desperately trying to protect. It's called an immunity to change. Your brain does not want to change its beliefs because our default setting— we used to think in psychology that there was a thing called learned helplessness. It's kind of a very prevailing theory, and it explained why poor people stay poor. It's because they learn helplessness, that over time, if you keep trying and failing and trying and failing, well, you just give up. A few years ago, the authors of that study, and they did this with animal studies where they taught, seemingly taught animals to kind of give up and learn hopelessness. Those authors, Seligman and Maier, declared that they had gotten the study 100% backwards, that the study results were 180 degrees the opposite of what they thought, that we don't learn helplessness. That's our default. Our default state is helplessness. We constantly want to retreat into passivity. Think about it. When you're born, a baby is perfectly helpless. There's nothing they can do. They rely on others to help them. We, we don't have claws, we don't have sharp teeth, we can't run fast when we're born. We're completely helpless. So that is your default state. What we learn is hope. We must learn hope. 1950s Kurt Richter, takes these wild rats and he wants to see how long they can swim for. So he puts them in a cylinder halfway full of water, and he sits there with a timer and he watches the poor little rat swim, swim, swim. And he sees that in about 15 minutes, the rat gives up, slips under the water, dies. You can't do these kind of studies anymore. It's kind of cruel, but the rats are already dead, so let's learn from them. Then he decides to change up the experiment. He gets a new group of rats. Same cylinder, same wa— same water, puts the new group of rats inside these cylinders, and he knows that they're gonna last for about 15 minutes. And just as his stopwatch reaches 15 minutes and they begin struggling and starting to give up, he reaches in, pulls out the rat, dries it off, let it— lets it catch its breath, and plunk, back into the cylinder it goes. Now, he does this a few times, so he conditions the rat to do something amazing. Now he wants to see how much longer the rat can swim for. When I ask audiences, they know there's something amazing that's about to be revealed. And so I ask them, how much longer did the rat swim for? Once the rat was conditioned to this new belief set, how much longer did it swim? People say double, they— 3 times, 4 times longer, right? Wouldn't that be amazing if you could be 4 times more perseverant? That would be incredible, right? Running a marathon 4 times longer or sticking with a hard project 4 times longer. That'd be amazing. The rats didn't swim 4 times longer. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 240 times more persistent. 60 hours of swimming. Now, what changed? Same experiment, same body, nothing changed physically. So they didn't have super strength all of a sudden. We think— we can't ask rats what they believe, obviously, but we think the only factor left was something changed in their mind. That when they suddenly had the hope of salvation, that something could save them from their death, they persisted. They changed their belief and then kept going. That's the unlock. That's the superpower that most people have no clue that they could unlock within them right now. That we need to be very humble. We don't see reality clearly. We don't feel things as they really are either. And our beliefs greatly influence what we do. So we call this attention, anticipation, and agency. See, feel, do. Those are the three powers of belief. So that's the most important thing, that if you can harness what you believe, you can change what you see, how you feel, and ultimately what you do. So just like those rats had the 60 hours in them all along, right, it was there. Their belief changing unlocked that potential. And we know, you know, that there's several studies now that find that the defining trait of success in individuals, it's not necessarily intelligence, right? It's not how smart you are. It's really two things. It's persistence and adaptability. And I would argue those two things go hand in hand, that successful people— and I'm guessing you can attest to this— if you want to find who are the losers, who fails a lot, it's not the people who are not successful. Successful people are the biggest losers. Meaning in terms of number of failures, it's the successful people. Why? Because they persist. They keep going. If you can unlock that, if you can suddenly change in your brain the pain, the suffering that comes along with difficult tasks, and now all of a sudden you can persist way longer without having to suffer through it, man, what can't you do?

Speaking of what can't you do, I was fascinated by the section that you wrote about how powerful your mind is and a word called hypnosedation. And you gave an example of a guy by the name of Daniel Gisler.

And it's not just Daniel. So here's what happened. So this guy was a commodities trader, okay? Also very buttoned up, like, very analytical, the opposite of anything supernatural mumbo jumbo. He's very, very analytical guy. And the guy has this freak accident, and he has to get screws put in his ankle. Few years later, he has to get them removed, and he comes across this technique on YouTube called hypnosedation, which is a form of hypnosis, not stage hypnosis. That's a whole nother thing going on there. It's basically harnessing the power of the mind to focus deeply through its attentional filter. So you're basically using that keyhole of attention we talked about earlier to only let in certain signals and not others, right? Because pain is just information, just like the light entering your retinas right now. It's just more information. So he takes this course. He learns how to hypnosedate himself. He starts with these clamps that are very painful pinchers on his hands, and he trains himself over time to tune out those pain signals. And by the time he's finished with his course, he goes into the operating room, and the doctors for 55 minutes cut into flesh and bone, pull out metal screws from his body with zero pain. Local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, all through the power of his mind. So why do I tell this story? I'm not advocating for hypnosedation. You don't have to go do that. But the reason I want people to know about this, and the reason I use it in my life, is that if the brain has the power to change our perception of the pain of surgery without anesthesia, what are we complaining about exactly?

What else can it do?

What else can it do, right? Like, when things get hard, It's just pain management, right? We used to think that motivation was about carrots and sticks. You've heard this metaphor, right? That it's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Well, now we know that's not true. That when you actually look inside the brain, what we can see happening is that the brain is only motivated by one thing, that the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick. What does that mean? That even when we are pursuing pleasure, wanting, craving, desire, lusting, hunger, those things are psychologically destabilizing. So the carrot is the same. When we want to feel good, it's because wanting hurts. You know, they say love hurts. Remember that song? It's exactly true. So what that means, therefore, if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means therefore that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all about managing discomfort. And so what we learn, what the literature shows us, the research finds, is that pain and suffering are two separate things. And that's exactly what Daniel did. He was able to separate the signals coming into his brain, telling him about the pain, and separate it from the suffering, from the response that most of us feel.

You know, it's fascinating because to use it tactically, you talk a lot about relationships. In the book and, you know, intimate relationships, familial relationships. But you have a line that I loved, which was, you don't have relationship problems, you have perception problems. And so can you apply this to a relationship today? And like, we were kind of joking about this beforehand, but I'm sure nobody can relate. But imagine that you're having a fight and you are convinced that your husband is wrong and judgmental, and this is all their fault.

Trying to hurt you.

100%. And yet maybe that's true.

Yeah.

Or maybe it's not.

Right.

So what do you do to use this practice to help in your relationship and your marriage?

So the most important thing is to realize that you are only seeing reality through this keyhole of attention. And so you can't even process your own reality, right? Your brain is predicting what is happening based on its prior understandings. Right. Actually, let me give you an example. You have that optical illusion. Oh, yeah. Let me show you this. This will blow your mind and this will be directly relevant for relationships. So.

Okay.

Okay. So in this illusion.

Explain this.

Yeah, absolutely. So look at this and tell me which square looks darker. A or B?

Oh, A. A.

Definitely A.

100%.

100%. A is darker than B. Mm-hmm. But of course, if you look at the bottom image and I put a strip of the same color, you will see that A and B are in fact the same color. Now look back at the first image on the top. Does it look any different?

It still looks—

It still looks the same.

Of course.

Your eyes are lying to you because you don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain based on priors, based on what's happened in the past. Your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works, so it's predicting a future That doesn't really exist. Now, why does the brain do this? Because it can't keep up with the 11 million bits, right? It has to do this in order to process all the information that's coming into it. So all of us need to bring down that certainty a notch and say, okay, I need the intellectual humility to understand that I only see things the way I see them based on my prior understanding. I only see reality as I am. I only see others as I am. And once we have that intellectual humility, then we can open up other possibilities. Because people don't understand that there's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. Those are two separate things. An emotion is a physiological response. A feeling is an interpretation of that physiological response. So feelings are psychological, emotions are physiological. So, for example, if right now you started getting heart palpitations, you started breathing quickly, we have to go to the ER. That's something to be really worried about. Like, that should not happen right now. But if you're at the gym and you're experiencing the exact same physiological reaction. Hey, I'm having a good workout. You're happy about that. What changed? The context, right? So that's the key to these relationships, is understanding that we don't see reality. That's the first step. And then when we get into these interpersonal conflicts, forcing ourselves to intentionally take the opposite opinion, to do that turnaround we talked about earlier that I did with my mom, to force ourselves to say, okay, Clearly a smart person that I respect disagrees with me. Let me take the opposing argument. So my wife and I are celebrating 25 years this year together. 25 years married. Thank you. Thank you. And we don't fight. We honestly, we don't fight. We disagree. We disagree. We do not fight. Fighting is bullshit. There's no need to fight because if I respect this person and I know she's no dummy, I wouldn't have married her if she was. She's a very, very smart person. If she has an alternative perspective of what's happening in the world, right, with our daughter or with our relationship or with our business, she should be listened to, right? So it's not a fight. It might be a disagreement. But my job, if we— and sometimes we definitely disagree. We have very different opinions. But one of the things we'll do is intentionally take each other's perspectives, to have a good faith argument where we say, okay, I'm going to try my best not just to mirror what you're saying, blah, blah, blah, because that feels very fake to me, but to actually have a good faith effort to steelman her argument, to make the best possible display of what she's trying to say. And 9 times out of 10, Codie, that's actually what the argument's about.

Interesting. It's such a good point because you're right, I've done the mirror thing before and it does feel like it's parroting, right? But when somebody actually feels heard, right, then it goes away. That's so fascinating. I'm gonna use this because you're right. I think often the other person, you're just listening to kind of get your words in, right? And you're like—

Or to win.

Yeah, or to win. And I think increasingly in a world where everybody's telling you, have your boundaries and you hold the line and don't get walked over and don't become a rug. Well, there's good parts to that, but there also is some sort of forgetfulness about the fact that you might be on the same team with this person. And so if you've chosen to spend your life with them, then maybe it makes sense to listen to what they're saying.

Right.

You know, what's interesting too is you talk about this in regards to luck too. And so I had never thought about the fact that you might not just be a lucky person, you might just have a different attention to luck.

That's right.

And is that true? Like if we pay more attention to luck, or if you pay more attention to luck, could you in fact be luckier?

That's absolutely what the research shows. And the study that really demonstrates this, they took two groups of people, One were self-identified lucky people, people who call themselves, hey, I tend to be pretty lucky, and people who said, no, I tend to be pretty unlucky in life. And they gave them a very simple task. The task was to look through the newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper. And they said, if you do that, we'll give you $250 as soon as you finish. Finish as quickly as possible. The unlucky people, again, self-identified unlucky people, finished in 2.5 minutes. The lucky people finished in about 11 seconds. Why? Because when they flipped to page 2, one of those images said, "There are 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize." So the unlucky people didn't even see the ad. Again, their reality was different. Their beliefs didn't let them see the totality of information. That 11 million bits of information, that bit of information didn't even get in. Whereas the lucky people, ah, bingo! And they went to collect their prize. Ah, it's a fast, right? And so this is a classic hallmark trait of entrepreneurs. What, what, uh, Walter Isaacson called about Steve Jobs, he called it the reality distortion field.

Mm-hmm.

That entrepreneurs do, successful entrepreneurs have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the $100 bills all over the street and they have this crazy belief in themselves that they can go and make an enterprise that nobody else sees possible. Right? I mean, you did this in spades, right? How many people said, ah, that can't be done, that's a silly idea?

No, it's so true. I mean, one of my favorite quotes is that pessimists sound smart and optimists make all the money.

Yes.

And I think you're right.

Literally.

Well, I didn't realize there was research to back it, but it does seem to be true. I mean, we talk about turning on your reticular activating system and how, and that's not really probably a right way to say it from a science perspective, but just when you train your brain to look for something, Apparently you find it more.

That's so true. I mean, we have a mutual friend, Vanessa Van Edwards.

Yeah.

And I love how she— I never had heard it before, but I love how she says, don't say, how you doing? What do people say when you say, how you doing? I'm busy. Things are tough. Okay, good, fine. She said, what's good?

Right?

What a simple way to help us refocus on the good things in life. In my family, since I did this line of research, whenever something good happens, We say, somebody in the family will say, "Ah, everything good happens to us." We just say it out loud, right? It's just like a family phrase. Everything good happens to us. Now, what we don't say, which a lot of us, I used to say all the time, is, "Ugh, that's just my luck," or, "Why does this always happen to me?" Or, you know, "Again, I'm stuck in traffic. This always happens," or, "She's always like that," or, "That's so like him," right? Why do we do that? We are doing that. To reinforce the comfort of these limiting beliefs that essentially keep us stuck. Whereas if we refocus our attention on the good things, guess what? Not only do we see more of those things, more of those good things start happening to us as well.

Wow. So you actually have lines that you tell your family to say consistently?

I don't tell 'em to do anything. We, that just become kind of a family tradition.

You have lines that your family says continuously, and then you have lines that you guys do not say. Is that right?

Well, we don't— nothing is enforced. It just has become kind of like a family mantra. I have a lot of mantras that I repeat to myself all the time as well. And that's something that's changed in my life quite a bit because I found this research around the power of prayer. And I stopped praying when I was 6 years old. I prayed when my family came to America. A few years after they came here, they got scammed out of every penny they had. They literally, like, some American guy saw that my parents barely spoke English, and he took every cent they had, and my family had to start over, and we had some really, really hard times. And that's the last time I remember praying, and I remember it being very helpful. But then I got older, and I stopped believing in the supernatural, and I just didn't find any organized religion that really spoke to me, and so I stopped praying. And then while I was doing this research, I came across this really difficult-to-ignore evidence around the power of prayer. And what blew my mind is that prayer works even without faith. That for, it turns out the biggest religious community in America today, the largest religious group are nones, not the Catholic nuns, not N-U-N, N-O-N-E, people who don't affiliate with any religion, like I used to be. And it turns out that those people, and many of them call themselves spiritual but not religious, you hear that a lot, I'm spiritual but not religious, meaning I have some kind of belief in some kind of supernatural, that there's something bigger than me, but I don't attend any kind of faith tradition. Turns out those people are much more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do affiliate with some kind of religious community. So I kind of got jealous, to be honest. Like, I wanted some of those benefits. Incontrovertible. And then I came across this amazing study where they test— there's a standard protocol to test people's pain tolerance. Basically what they do is they put people's hands in very, very cold ice water,, and they see how long they can last, and they monitor when they grimace, strain, and then eventually when do they say, okay, I can't take it anymore, they take their hands out. And they had 3 groups of people. One group was a control group, so no, no, you know, nothing changed with them. The second group were people who prayed with some kind of faith tradition, okay, they had some kind of religious background. The third group were people who didn't have a faith background and who were taught how to pray, and they were told that I said, if you don't wanna say God, substitute it for anything of meaning, Mother Nature, the universe, the sum of all forces, whatever's meaningful to you. And it turns out that the people who learned how to pray and the people who prayed out of a faith tradition had a much higher pain tolerance than the people who didn't pray at all. So there are these psychologically protective effects to prayer. And so one of the things I did, I went to 5 faith leaders. It sounds like a setup of a joke, right? A rabbi, an imam, a priest, a swami, and a monk all walk into a bar. And I actually interviewed all 5 of them, and I said, "How does one pray even if you have uncertainties about God?" And so I took away these 5 lessons from them, and I've adopted them in my life and found that, you know what, they're incredibly beneficial. So now for the first time in my life, I pray. Because beliefs are tools, not truths. I don't need to have perfect certainty. I used to say, well, I can't pray because I'm not sure if everything in that book is 100% true. And if I can't prove it, I can't step into church, I can't go to synagogue, I can't step into a mosque. No, it's not true. I've relaxed that. Because you know what? Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me. It's improved my life. It's made me more patient. It's made me more calm. It's made me more at peace. And so I've stopped really asking, can I prove it's true? And rather asked, does it serve me? Does it improve my life and the life of those around me?

The most successful people in the world know exactly what Nir Eyal is telling us, which is that success is not actually a discipline. It is a habit and it is a belief. And if we can build systems around our beliefs, then they become habits. And this is what I have found over and over again in my life is that I don't have to have more willpower. I don't have to be more disciplined. I just I need a system that makes it so I get to be thoughtless, have no thought at all, which is why I'm obsessed with this company Beehive that helps us create systems around email and our newsletters. We don't have to come up with something wild and crazy to sell our audience. We can actually send out an email every single week from a third-party provider that already does all the monetization, all the design work, all of the ads inside of it, all of the data so we can see who we're sending to and when we're sending it. You know why most companies don't have a good email list or a newsletter anybody wants to read? Because they don't have a system that makes it easy as 1, 2, 3, send in order to get one. That is why I'm obsessed with this company Beehive and with systems thinkers creating a way where newsletter reading, creating, and writing becomes so habitual you do it no matter what. In fact, I asked Beehive for a code for you guys. So if you don't already have a newsletter, or if you do and you want a better one, go to beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com. Use code CODIE30 and you get 30% off your first 3 months because making money should be a system, not a discipline. What is interesting about this is we're talking here about beliefs, but your work kind of compounds.

Mm-hmm.

It seems like your first book was about, um, how to get people obsessed with something in some ways, hooked, right? How to, how to hook people to a product, which is near and dear to my heart. Mm-hmm. Your second book was about distraction, right? And how to not be distractible. And then this third book kind of gets to the core of it, which is like, in order to not be distracted or get hooked, like what do you believe in your head? There's something deeper, right? So I wanna go there too, but I also wanna talk about your 10-minute rule and what it does to help with distraction in a world that is very distractible.

Yeah, yeah.

What is it? Can you talk to us about it?

So the 10-minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, but not right now. You're going to give in to that distraction in 10 minutes. Now, why is this so powerful? Because we know that abstinence backfires, that sometimes abstinence can work if you can remove what we call the external trigger. Right, when people are trying to get off of some kind of addictive, something they're addicted to. If you can remove that substance and all the things associated with it, right, your peer group and all that stuff, the paraphernalia, yes, that can be very helpful. But how exactly do we do that for technology, right? You can't just stop using technology, nor would you want to, right? So it's incredibly empowering. So that's not a good solution. So telling yourself no doesn't work. It releases what's called psychological reactance. Psychological reactance is when someone tells you what to do, your reaction will be, don't tell me what to do, right? F off. If your boss micromanages you, that reaction, don't tell me what to do. Or if your parent told you to put on a coat, don't tell me what to do. I know what to do. That's psychological reactance. Now, the crazy thing is that you can elicit psychological reactance even when you tell yourself what to do, right? That's how weird our psychology is. So a better way than, no, don't do it, and I'm a bad person if I check social media too much, and I shouldn't do it, no, no, no, stop doing it, is not to say no, it's to say not yet. I will do it, I'm a grownup, I can do whatever I want, but I choose to do it in 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes are too long, make it the 5-minute rule, the 2-minute rule, doesn't really matter. So whether it's I'm trying to quit smoking, whether it's I'm trying not to give in to that chocolate cake, whether it's I'm trying to focus on an important project rather than checking email every 3 seconds. So if I tell myself I will do it, but in 10 minutes, and then your job during those 10 minutes is to do what's called surf the urge, because these emotions, we think that they're going to be there forever, right? We feel boredom. We think we're always going to be bored, lonely, tense, uncertain, stressed, anxious. We feel like it's always going to be there. But that's never the case. These sensations are like waves. They crest and then they subside. And so if you can ride out that sensation for just sometimes a few seconds, you can refocus your attention. Because again, what causes us to get distracted, we think it's the external triggers. We think it's the pings, the dings, the rings, all this technology. That's only 10% of the cause. Studies have found 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of some kind of ping, ding, or ring? 90% of the time, it's because of an internal trigger. Remember, time management is pain management. What is an internal trigger? Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is 90% of the time you check your phone. It's because of a feeling. I, I, I don't know what to do right now. I gotta do something. That's the cause of distraction 90% of the time. So if you can just ride out that sensation like a surfer on a surfboard, what you will find is that the 10-minute rule becomes the 12-minute rule becomes the 20-minute rule. And over time, you're proving to yourself, wait a minute, I'm not addicted to these things. I'm not addicted to distraction. I can wait for a minute. I have control over them. You're proving your self-efficacy and your agency.

What's the flip side of that? Like, you talk about something else I really liked, which is, so we're going to stop the distractions here, maybe with this 10-minute rule, plus a few other things I want to go into.

Yeah, that's just like one teeny tiny technique.

God, they're so good. We're going to go through all of them.

Thanks.

But the next was, like, you had a whole section about how to basically increase your luck surface area and, and about daily habits you can do to train your brain to see things that other people cannot.

Right.

Can you talk about what daily habits you put into place so you train your brain to find luck?

Sure. So this is called entrepreneurial alertness, that you can literally create your own luck. And so there's a few things you can do, and these are traits common among entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs, it's funny, don't understand why everybody doesn't do this, but they're very common traits. So one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone. And we can do this in all kinds of small ways. I think one of the best is to talk to people, right? You spread your luck surface area when you just talk to folks. On the flight here, uh, I just came from Barcelona, talked for an hour and a half in the galleyway of, of the, the flight, right, where, you know, people by the restrooms where they give out drinks. Talk to this lady for an hour and a half. Now we're friends and we're keeping in touch. Just But I don't know what's going to come out of that. But that's something that I think before doing this research, I would not have done. And now I'm very open to. So pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Another thing we do is to express extreme amounts of gratitude, that you increase your entrepreneurial alertness when you become attuned to ways to thank people in your life. That even the small— Tina Seelig taught me this at Stanford. She has a big old stack of these thank you cards that she just whips off, you know, as soon as she can write, "Hey, thanks for that pleasant good morning greeting today," or, "I really appreciated your comment in class today," or whatever, "Thank you for doing that." Like, she never ever skips an opportunity to tell someone that they had a positive effect on her life. And of course, what happens is that the more surface area you spread with gratitude is the more you are thought of when good opportunities arise. So if your thank you note is on someone's desk next to, hey, here's a business deal, or here's an opportunity, or here's something to talk about, well, maybe there's a connection there. So you're creating luck. You're provoking luck by showing more gratitude and entering into that daily habit. And then the third thing is to intentionally fail more. That if I were to tell you whatever it is that you're stuck doing, let's say you're trying to you know, start a podcast or, uh, make your sales calls or whatever it is, uh, find love, for example. And I told you I took a time machine and I looked into the future and I found that all you have to do is to fail 5 more times. Go on 5 more dates and then you'll find love. Um, uh, make 5 more sales calls and then you're gonna close that big deal. If I told you that, would you then say, well, I don't wanna, I don't wanna do those failures anymore? No. You'd be like, come on, let's fail quick.

Let's go.

Come on. I wanna fail 5 times so I can get to the 6th success.. And so that's one of those daily habits, is to relish the failures, to look forward to them, to teach your brain. Again, there's a difference between pain and suffering. Something can be difficult and yet meaningful. You don't have to suffer from it. So if you can teach your brain through the power of beliefs to want to get through those failures and learn to relish those failures, that is a habit that will increase your luck surface area.

Is there actual science that shows that people who are successful don't remember the failures as much? Is that a thing? Like, do you train your brain where eventually you don't even mean to and you kind of can't remember all those failures?

Yes. We see others by how we think of them, but we judge ourselves differently. That if somebody messes up, it's because they're incompetent. But when we mess up, we have a story, right? Like, you just don't— if somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're being a jerk. But if you cut someone off in traffic, it's because I'm in a hurry and it's very important, right? So we look at our beliefs, even our memories, actually. We know that memory is incredibly vulnerable to revision. That every time you think of a memory, you are actually revising it in your brain. Actually, there's a friend of mine, Chris, that I was telling him about my research, and he says, you know what, there's a very, there's a perfect example in my life. You know, for years I couldn't cry. I couldn't cry. And it really hurt my relationships with my girlfriends because they would say I wasn't emotionally available because we would have a difficult time. And I just couldn't cry. And you know why I couldn't cry? It's because when I was a kid, I went to a funeral at 6 years old, and it was really traumatizing. And ever since then, I can't cry. And he told his sister this story. Chris told his sister that, you know, this is, you know, it's another breakup, another reason. Here's why I'm not emotionally available. It's because I can't cry. And I went to this funeral, and she says, Chris, you didn't go to that funeral. Mom and Dad thought you were too young. You were at home with the babysitter. It was his older sister, she remembered it. And he had been living with this memory that never even happened.

That's crazy.

And we do this all the time. Memory is incredibly vulnerable to revision. Elizabeth Loftus has these amazing studies where she implants memories of people going on a hot air balloon ride that never happened, and they'll describe the wind in their hair and the color of the balloon, completely made up. And this is, where does this get back to? That based on those memories that we think are so true, you know, we think of memories as like a video camera. It's not a video camera at all. It's incredibly vulnerable. That, you know, people will take it two different ways. Some people will say, "Oh, this terrible thing happened to me. This person did this thing to me." And maybe it happened, but 100% sure it didn't happen the way you think it did. You have revised it since, for sure. Second example is when people who have a positive outlook on life, they can look at the same exact events and you see, because that happened, that's why I have to prove others wrong, or that's why I succeed is because I had to show them. So same exact thing can happen. You can have post-traumatic stress, right? And that can cause people a lot of suffering. Or for some people, you have post-traumatic growth. It was because that terrible thing happened. That's why I'm so driven today.

Do people ever push back on your research and they're like, you must have never been any through anything very hard because how could you say I couldn't have PTSD instead of having you know, PTG.

Do you get that kind of pushback? I'm not saying that. I would never say to somebody that they're not in pain. All pain is real. All pain is real. The pushback I oftentimes hear is that, are you telling people to lie to themselves? Are you telling me that I should gaslight myself and make up a different truth? Because you're saying that beliefs are just tools. I can make up whatever I want. And my response is, guess what? You're already gaslighting yourself. You are already lying to yourself. You're just lying to yourself with a limiting belief. So you could choose a different belief. Now, the whole point here— what is a limiting belief? What is a liberating belief? A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation or causes suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or eases suffering. And that's a choice. That's a choice, even when it sounds crazy. So I never tell people to change their beliefs. I tell people to try on different beliefs. So what you're doing is just like you try on a pair of glasses and you say, "Eh, it doesn't fit my face. I don't like it. This is weird." Okay, let's try on a different pair of glasses. You're already wearing those glasses, that keyhole of attention, those 50 bits of information that's already there. You just didn't choose it. Your society chose it. Your background chose it. Your history chose it. All these other things chose it. You didn't choose it. It's kind of like your face, that you can't see your face. We all have these limiting beliefs, but they're always hidden to us. And the ones you most defend are the ones you most need to examine. So when people hear this and say, that's crazy, you don't understand what happened to me, that's what needs some digging. That's what needs some examination if they want to stop suffering. Look, some people don't mind the suffering. They find their identity is the suffering. And I'm not here to change anybody. I'm telling you what worked in my life. I found that I started living when I disconnected the pain from the suffering. The pain can still be there, but just like Daniel Gissler, that could use the power of his mind to not interpret the pain as suffering. And we can do that, not just with surgery. I mean, if we can do it with surgery, we can certainly do it with our past experiences and with our challenges and tribulations.

That's so good. Yeah, my husband and I always say to each other, do you wanna be right or do you wanna win? And it's true. Like, do you need to prove your point all the time? Time, or, you know, do you wanna move forward in the world?

Right.

And so, but I, I like this differentiation of liberate, uh, liberating beliefs and limiting beliefs, because if you do get to try on two hats, that just means you pick one.

Right.

And if that's true, and if we have all this research to, to suppose it, then, then why not? The other thing that I think's really interesting about this is, um, you know, you started your career by essentially figuring out how attention worked with tech products. And so if today we're feeling overwhelmed by a lot of the things in front of us from technology, I think we have a lot of reasons, excuses, you could use whatever word you want to say that it is not in my power to be undistracted, or it is not in my power what I focus on. But you had this line from one of your, it was from, no, it was from your last book that was, there will be two types of people. In the world. There will be those who, uh, are distracted and there will be those who are indistractable and the indistractable will win to summarize your statement. What do you mean by that? And do you still believe that's true?

More than ever, because the world is becoming an increasingly distractible place that with, uh, the dawn of AI, we know where this is going and it's not It's not all bad. I'm quite the tech optimist. I have to be because I know history. I know that the world is terrible and there's a lot of suffering, and also it's better than it's ever been and it's getting better. And even that idea, I bet you right now people are thinking this guy's crazy. They're like, isn't he watching the news? Doesn't he see all the terrible things happening in the world today? Yeah, those things are happening and Things are getting better, and I'm optimistic about the future because we can create the future unless we give up. So when you believe there's nothing to be done, what do you do? Nothing. And this is exactly the message that has been spreading in mainstream traditional media tells you technology is addictive and it's hijacking your brain. And they have documentaries, ironically, on Netflix. Telling you how technology is melting your brain. There's nothing you can do. Yeah, that's exactly what the tech companies want you to think. They want you to think there's nothing you can do for your children. They're all addicted, that there's not— it's hopeless, because what are you going to do? Nothing. That is the message of passivity they are trying to default us into. That is our default, to do nothing, because now I've absolved responsibility, right? It's not my fault. Zuckerberg is doing it to me. Maybe that could be a truth, right? I don't know. Is that a fact? Or is it a belief? I choose to believe I can do something about it. Turns out it's actually not that hard. There's a few steps anyone can take to become indistractable to themselves and to teach their kids to be indistractable. And if you don't teach your kids how to be indistractable, they will be part of this mass of people who can't control their attention because they don't want to and they don't learn the skills. I mean, we're not taught in school how to focus our attention. And I think those who do not learn how to be indistractable will be at the whim of whatever is happening, right? The gossip in the office or the whatever's happening on Twitter or whatever happening in the news or some war 3,000 miles away that's got nothing to do with me. But that's what I keep paying attention to, as opposed to how can I make people's lives better in my family, in my community? How can I affect change right now, right here? I'm paying attention to all this other stuff because, frankly, the media wants me to. They make money. I don't care, people rag on social media. How exactly do you think the New York Times makes money or Fox News or CNN? They're all in the same business. They're monetizing your attention. So you better hold onto it carefully.

It's such a good point. I was thinking about, I heard a quote yesterday and I can't remember who said it, but the summary was basically when David asked for a bigger life, a bigger challenge, more, God didn't just give him easy, he gave him Goliath. And, you know, part of me, what your work makes me think about in some ways, if we wanna go super optimistic, it's, well, what if, you know, this next level of what I would consider to be superhuman, which is I don't feel pain, which is I could 240x my ability to withstand treading water, AKA, you know, what happened to the rats. If we wanted to become more superhuman, well, then we kind of need bigger challenges, which might just be this AI in front of us, this tech in front of us. And if you could see it instead, not as defeatist, but what if this is the opportunity? If, you know, whether you believe in God or not, but if God's like, all right, you're ready for the next level of the game.

That is a real life hack. And that was not my natural. I was kind of highly anxious, kind of, you know, ran hot and was that kind of person who repeated, oh, why does this tend to happen to me? And I mean, just today, right? Like, I was preparing some food and it dropped on the floor. Okay, you're talking about like big AI challenges. I'm talking about like day to day as well. The food drops on the floor. Before, I'd be like, god, why does that happen to me? I'm late. I've got this interview with Codie Sanchez. Now I say, all right, I have an opportunity to practice patience. Right?

Yeah.

Like, I can find an opportunity here. Is it a fact? No, it's a belief. I choose to believe that there's something. And I literally do this 10 times a day with like, whenever something happens a little funny in my life that before would bring me down. And of course, it takes a toll. It drains that battery throughout the day. The more you tell yourself, there it is again, or there it's at. I used to do this with my ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD, and every time I got a bit distracted, I'd say, there's my ADHD again. And now people my age, we start saying, all my peers, oh, that's what happens when you get old, right? It's inevitable, right? Oh, this hurts. That hurts. Inevitable. That's, that's what happens. And so when you're having that senior moment, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about where your keys are? Are you thinking about what you just forgot or what the distraction is? No, you're thinking about this label you've attached to yourself. And so in this way, your labels become your limits. Uh, there's— and even more so, your beliefs become your biology. There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live 7.5 years longer. Now, but to put that in perspective, Codie Sanchez Sanchez, 7.5 years longer, that is more than the effect of exercise. That's more than the effect of what you eat. That's more than the effect of smoking. Think about how much time and attention we hear about you should eat right, don't smoke, exercise. Who tells you the best thing you can do for your longevity and lifespan is to believe differently, is to have positive views about aging? Now, why is that happening? Are the beliefs magically changing the cells in your body? Nope, that's not how it works. What's happening is that two beliefs about the world can be equally true. So for example, a positive view of aging sounds like this: growth is possible at any age. That's a positive view about aging. What's a negative view about aging? Aging involves inevitable decline. Okay, two perspectives. Which one is true, Codie Sanchez Sanchez?

Both.

Both. Exactly. Which one is going to make me more active?

The growth.

Growth is possible at any age. So why do we tell ourselves this stupid stuff like, I'm not a morning person, I'm a Sagittarius, I have ADHD, that's why I can't—

this, this—

these are all limiting beliefs. Now, sometimes they can be a map, right? So for example, an ADHD diagnosis can guide you to work on something that you weren't aware of, that there's a path to help you get some kind of guidance. But it cannot become your identity. Once it becomes your identity, it stops becoming the map. You become the map, and then it's useless because that becomes your default state. Why you can't, why you can't. Rather, you need to reinforce why you can. That becomes the empowering belief that keeps you motivated and reduces suffering.

God, this is so important because I could never put my finger on the point of why I got so annoyed many times in my career, but especially these last couple of years where people would say, well, you know, Latinas, I'm Latina, Latinas and women, you know, they just aren't as successful as men overall. And Latina CEOs, you know, can't, oh, and you know, female CEOs aren't paid this way. And don't you, wasn't it hard when you were in a male dominated industry and like you can't progress very much? And I would just be like, take your victim labels off me.

Mm-hmm.

This is not helpful to me at all. In fact, couldn't the opposite be true? Couldn't it be true that it could be really useful to be in a male dominated field, field where it's Tom, Dick, and Larry every 7 seconds. Everyone's wear wearing blue, black, or, gray suits, and I stand out differently. That could be helpful too.

Absolutely. I mean, that's— and that's— I can hear in your voice that that's motivating.

Yeah.

And you don't seem to be suffering.

No, I like— but I do like the chip on my shoulder.

Yeah.

I like a little—

But that's a belief.

Yeah. Which is interesting. That's a belief.

And is it true?

I don't know.

Who cares? Who cares? Is it useful?

Yeah.

Yeah. You seem to be getting a lot of traction, a lot of motivation. You're not suffering. You're invigorated. Based on this belief that you chose. And what, what's crazy is that we know that even when you have every reason to objectively say the cards are stacked against me, it turns out that people who have an internal locus of control— internal locus of control are people who believe that their actions affect change in the world versus an external locus of control. An external locus of control is someone who believes that things happen to them, right? It's my environment, it's my upbringing, it's society, it's whatever's happening in the world. That's what affects my life. Turns out that all the good stuff happens to people with an internal locus of control. Okay, that's not that surprising, right? That like they make more money, they live longer, they contribute more to the community. All, all good things happen to people with internal locus of control because they have more agency in the world. What's fascinating is that even if you objectively have all the reasons to claim victimhood, it still serves you more to have an internal locus of control. You still will go farther and be happier, have less depression, less anxiety. All the good things come from having that agency. Now, what's interesting, it's important to have an internal locus of control about yourself, but to see others with a different perspective, that you have more peace when you think, you know what, if others aren't doing what I think they should do, it's because they have their own constraints. They're doing the best they can with the tools they have. But for me, I'm going to affect change. I'm going— I believe that I have agency and control.

You know, it's fascinating. Back in the day, we lived in DC, and my husband's a former ex-Navy SEAL, and he was one of the first people to try on the WHOOP, that little bracelet thing. And so they ran it through the teams back then, and they studied them. And so one day, one of the heads, I believe it was Kirsten Holmes, but one of the heads of WHOOP came to DC and wanted to meet with him. And he was like, this is incredible. I must be a specimen. She wants to meet with me because my stats, right? So he goes in. Goes to meet with her, they sit down for coffee, they sit down, they start talking normal things. And she goes, hey, I need to talk to you. It's like, great, what do you wanna know? And he is fit, jacked and all the things. And she's like, well, I think you might have a heart attack. And he's like, excuse me, I'm in, like, I have, you know, 7% body fat. She's like, something is happening to you every day where you are off the charts with your stress levels or your HRV or some measurement that they were able to tell biologically between 7:15 and 7:45 every morning. And I think you need to chill out your workouts and that is too much. Your heart is not going to be able to sustain this. And she's like, so what are you doing from that time? What kind of level of workout is this? And he thinks about it and he's like, I'm driving to work. Because he works out every morning at 6:00 AM.

Not the workout, the driving to work.

Not just the drive.

Wow, it was stressing him out.

It was stressing him out. And he would have these stories to me every day that he would kind of proliferate, like, "Yes, he cut me off, and the drivers in DC, and the terrible drivers." And it was sort of fascinating. And then he changed his perspective. For some reason, he was talking to her and he just said, "I'm just going to assume everybody's pregnant and they're going to the hospital." like if they cut me off, they're either not gonna make it, the baby's popping on the dashboard, like that's what's happening. And he was able to sort of drop his HRV. But, you know, it was a funny story then, but I think about it now, because if it can literally raise your heart rate or lower your heart rate, just based on his belief of what was happening with these same exact drivers every single morning to his commute, what else again can you do?

Okay, I'll give you a similar one up here. There's a case of a guy by the name of Mr. A. He was anonymized, and Mr. A was in a study. This really happened. This is a real study. He was in a group that was trying a new antidepressant medication. He broke up with his girlfriend, bad breakup, and he decides he doesn't want to live anymore. He takes the entire pill jar. Pill jar? What's the word I'm looking for?

Jar of pills.

Jar of pills. He takes all his pills. Then after he swallows all these pills, he decides he does want to live. He rushes to the neighbor's house. He says, take me to the hospital. I need to go to the ER. I just swallowed all my pills. By the time he gets to the hospital, he falls on the floor. He manages to tell the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. They rush him into the ER. They start monitoring his heart rate. His heart rate is dangerously low. His blood pressure is falling. He passes out, and they look on the pill jar, and they can't figure out what he took because it doesn't say the name of the medication because he was in this clinical trial. All it has is a phone number. They call the phone number and they say, "This guy took all these pills. What is this medicine?" They say, "Give me one second." They look up on the computer, say, "Oh, okay, this— he was in the placebo group. Nothing in those pills could have caused this. It's completely inert." They tell Mr. A this. In 15 minutes, his heart rate is back to normal, his blood pressure is back to normal, everything is physiologically exactly where it should be. He's revived. He walks out in 15 minutes. Talk about the power of the mind, right? He had this expectation. He anticipated something to happen, and it did. And again, if that can happen physiologically, what happens when we keep telling ourselves the same limiting beliefs? I'm having a senior moment. I'm too old for this. I'm too young for this. The world sucks. The exercise is hard. People are annoying. Whatever the limiting belief that we keep telling ourselves again and again and again, It has a physiological effect on us, just like Mr. A did.

So what else do we do to not have this? You've given us a bunch of tools. Are there other, like, do you stick a little sticky note on the mirror? Does that work? Do you put it on your computer? Like, what else can we do every single day to make sure that we are not inadvertently giving ourselves our own version of a heart attack?

Well, I think one, we need to identify the beliefs. That's the hardest part is because we have that immunity to change. I mean, I'm sure if you were listening to us talking right now, there's gotta be at least one thing you're like, no, that won't work for me. Perk up. Listen to that. If you are telling yourself, if anything we've said, that sounds ridiculous, won't work for me, pay attention to it. That's your psychological immune system saying, I don't want to change my beliefs. I want to resort to passivity.

So do you write those down and then apply your turnarounds to them?

Exactly. So write it down. Come up with turnarounds. Think of the opposite. And it's always going to sound ridiculous. If it doesn't sound ridiculous, you didn't do it right. It's always going to sound ridiculous. And then step number 3, look for ways that it could be as true. So that's basically how we do this. Now, sounds easy. I wrote this book for me. I have to constantly remind myself how to do this. And then there's all kinds of ways you can do that. One of the things that really impacted me is I'm really working on disconnecting pain from suffering in all facets of my life. There's amazing research around how chronic pain, pain that doesn't have a physical cause that lasts for more than 6 months. So we're talking fibromyalgia, we're talking insomnia, we're talking chronic back pain. All these things, turns out, they are what we call neuroplastic pain. All pain is real, okay? All pain is real, but all pain is also in the brain, right? Pain isn't here, pain isn't here, pain is up here. And so it turns out that we can learn practices to quiet that signal. So just like Daniel Gisler quieted that signal when he had surgery, chronic pain, these symptoms are a hyper-focusing of attention. When I'm constantly thinking about what's wrong, what's causing me pain, I turn up the fear dial. And the more fear I feel, the more pain I feel. It becomes this vicious cycle. So if you can detach that, if you can realize, one, you're safe, that's the most important thing. That I am safe right now. Okay, so, and that can apply in a painful situation. If it's physical pain, it can also be stress, right? In a business situation, you know, I used to have this with public speaking. I would go on stage and I'd get the sweaty armpits and I get the heart palpitations and I get the dry mouth, and I still get that. I'm getting it right now talking to you, but I interpret it completely differently. So I used to say, well, you know, if my heart's beating and my mouth is dry, then I'm going to do a terrible job. And if I was a real public speaker, I wouldn't have these. Now I don't say that anymore. Now I say I have a different story. Now my story is that I tell myself, you see, the reason my heart is beating so fast is because my brain needs more oxygen so that I can deliver my best possible presentation. Is it true? Does it matter? It works. Maybe that is a psychological placebo that I'm using, but I've told myself a different story. So just like you can constantly remind yourself when you're stressed, when you're anxious, when you feel like, oh, I need an escape, I'm safe. I'm safe. Second, reduce the urgency. When we have a problem, whether it's— you know, I used to struggle with insomnia, anxiety, ADHD, all kinds of things. I wanted to fix it right away. Why isn't this fixed, right? Give me a pill. Give me a solution right now. There needs to be an urgent solution. That increases the fear cycle. Why? Because if I can't find an urgent solution, am I going to have this forever, right? Then I start getting into this rumination loop of like, when is it ever going to go away? And what causes many of these problems, again, it's that pain-fear-pain cycle. The more I fear something, the more pain is caused, the more I fear in the future. So reduce the urgency and then look for examples of how your safety is validated, right? Bring, for example, you can bring humor to the situation, bring levity to the situation, or repeat the situation. So I used to have back pain, and the standard advice is if you have some kind of pain, ice it, heat it, don't move, immobilize, rest, right? Don't stress it. Turns out that's not always the best advice. Now, if there is an actual physiological cause, different story. But if it's chronic pain that lasts for more than 6 months without a physical cause, that's not the right idea. So what do I now do? I still get that back pain, right? I'm 48. I'm going to get it from time to time. Now, I don't immobilize and say, oh my God, I'm going to be in pain. No. I do the same movement 10 times. I literally, if I'm, I just felt it as I was sitting down here. Okay, then that means I need to do it 10 times to teach my brain I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. And so I use it in the example of chronic pain, but we can do that for all our limiting beliefs to constantly remind ourselves again and again. So for example, when I'm writing, writing is really hard. I've written 3 books now, thousands of articles. I've been in the New York Times, I've been in the Atlanta, I've been in a lot of places. It's always fricking hard work. So the mantra I've developed, the secular prayer, if you will, that I developed that I tell myself is when it's difficult, when I'm in pain and I want to reduce my suffering, I disconnect the two by telling myself this mantra. You can steal it, you can make up your own. My mantra is, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. Just remind— that's a simple mantra. I can say it a couple times a day, and now I'm relishing that feeling. Oh, it's painful?

Good.

That means I'm getting better. If it didn't feel painful, everybody could do it. But I'm developing this superpower, right? Just like you were saying, that because I'm Latina, because I'm a woman, I have an opportunity here. I'm N of 1. I've got something special here. So I'm leaning into that discomfort as opposed to trying to run away from it by scrolling it away or clicking it away or emailing it away. Good. That's a positive now versus something I should run away from.

I recently thought that willpower was a depleting asset. Like, I've heard that recently. I didn't know that that was one way or another. And then I, now that I have that as a belief, I've thought, oh, okay, well that, that means that I need to make less decisions in this certain way. I need to do X or Y or Z. In your research, have you found that willpower is a depleting asset? Do we only have so much of it in a day?

We used to think that, that there was, there was, there was this research, it was called ego depletion, that your willpower runs out like gas in a gas tank or battery charge on your phone.

Yeah.

That the more you use up your willpower, you're, you're done with it. And I, I used to totally believe this and I would come home from work and I'd say, Oh, I'm spent. I'm gonna go on the couch and have a jar of ice cream and watch TV because I've got no more willpower. It's spent. It's gone, right? You use it up. Well, it turns out it's not true that when we try and replicate those studies— and this happens in the social science, this is how science works. Science doesn't say anything. Science is the process of doing repeated experiments and seeing if they replicate, and then we can draw conclusions based on evidence. But the evidence doesn't show that ego depletion exists. You do not run out of run out of willpower like you run out of charge on your phone. Unless— there's one group of people who really do run out of willpower. Those group of people are only people who believe that willpower is a limited resource.

God, that's such a mindfuck.

I know!

What? We have to be so careful about what we let in here.

So true. Because if you believe, "I'm spent," guess what? You are. Wow. But if you don't let that enter your mind that willpower is not a resource, it's a feeling. But you don't say to yourself, oh, I'm always gonna be happy, or I'm always gonna be sad, or I'm— no, it's just a feeling and it comes and goes. So yeah, sometimes we have more willpower, sometimes we have less. It's not a resource unless you believe that you're gonna run out of it.

This is just so good. I mean, I already told you this, but I was like walking through all my notes this morning. I was on the treadmill, I was on a run, and I just was picturing everybody I was gonna send this to. I was literally picturing, and yeah, I mean, Starting with myself and then starting with everybody else that I want to have this tool in their life, because it's very seldom we hear shit like this. I live in Austin, everybody's into crystals, fucking astrology, whatever else we've got going on. But it's very seldom that you hear this stuff in such a clinical way and without so many shoulds in it. A lot of, hey, this is what I'm doing, here's what the science says. But you're very particular. I've tried to get you a few times to say, will you do X, Y, and Z? You're like, no, I'm not telling them. I'm saying this is what we do. Really powerful. I also want to uncover one other thing that I found interesting from your research. I hadn't ever heard the term before, hedonic adaptation. Can you tell me what is hedonic adaptation and how could it ruin your focus?

So hedonic adaptation is when our circumstances improve to a point where we no longer appreciate them, and so we need more and more and more and more. If you think about, for example, how today the middle class doesn't feel particularly well off, right? But if you compare the middle class today, the assets that they have, the color television, the iPhone, all the plumbing, if you look back 2 generations, certainly 3 generations, the kings of France didn't have indoor plumbing, right? The kings of France didn't have antibiotics, right? They constantly had tooth decay and syphilis and all kinds of terrible things things that even though they had all the money in the world, they didn't have the luxuries that we have today through modern medicine and all these things. But we have adapted, so we have so much more, but we don't feel any happier because of it. And so that's something to watch out for. Now, the antidote to that is, again, beliefs and beliefs powered through gratitude. And so taking that pause to realize that I'm alive, like, I can breathe today. Like, that, that we keep thinking we need more to be happy. We— these things have to happen. But if we actually put things in perspective, and it's very difficult to do because we are so inundated with how terrible things are all the time, all the news— the news doesn't tell you all the great things that happen today. I went to journalism school. The first rule of journalism is if it bleeds, it leads. It's not to inform you. The news media is not there to inform you. The news media is there to make money. And it's not a political issue, it's a business issue. Not that there's anything wrong with that, right? It's okay to consume the news. It's all right to be informed if that's how you want to spend your time, that's fine. But when it becomes something you have to do, when you become enthralled in that story and you have to keep up with the latest everything that's going on, everybody else is suffering, you become distracted from what really matters in your life. And so it's very important to refocus, to actually bring perspective back to what really matters. And be very careful with that media diet that is designed in a way to constantly keep you unhappy, to constantly keep you unsatisfied.

Yeah, it's fascinating. YouTube, we know that if you have a negative versus a positive thumbnail and title, you have a 23% higher click-through rate.

If it's negative versus positive?

Correct. Wow. Yeah. And also sort of the scarier it looks often, and scary is the right way. I can't remember how they actually determine that one, but dark colors, I believe it's like very dark or very red, and those two things have some sort of signal to us, and those thumbnails outperform as well. And so, you know, if you go to some, you know, creator's account and you look at their YouTube, you'll find often that the ones that are really viral are like, warning, disaster, you know, world ending. It's over. And it's because they have a higher click-through rate.

Because we have what's called the negativity bias. Again, our default is pessimism. Passivity. We like the negativity.

Why?

From an evolutionary basis, good things are nice, right? Good things are nice. Bad things will kill you. So what are you going to pay attention to? What's going to be let through that keyhole of attention? The good news? No, that's nice. What do I do with that? Bad news? Oh my gosh, there's terrible things happening. I have to do something. Warning, warning, right? Danger. That's what gets our attention.

You had a line that was really helpful to me about tactics versus strategy and how if we only apply the tactics but we don't understand the strategy of why we're using them and our deeper why, we probably won't internalize them and actually do it. But you did have one tactic I kind of liked. Well, you have a lot, but one in particular was about intimacy time and your wife and cell phones. And I just, you know, I was—

Oh, you went way back. That's great.

I was trying, I was, you know, I was looking at the YouTube comments and seeing what people ask about on this podcast. And, and one of the things I keep seeing pop up is this desire for like a deep intimate love. Mm-hmm. And I don't know, I'm not a relationship coach. I have no idea. Like if you wanna help, I, I can look at your EBITDA numbers. We can try to raise 'em. Like that's what I got. But you had at least one tactic that I really liked and I wonder if you would share this tactic and it's pretty simple and I think anybody could use it today.

Yeah. So this was, this was a long, this was when I first kind of started writing in public and I wrote an article called The Strange Sex Habits of Silicon Valley. And it was basically about this phenomenon that at the time was kind of novel. The Apple App Store was 3 years old at the time, right? So it was brand new. And I started seeing that every night my wife was fondling her iPad and I was caressing my iPhone, and we weren't being intimate with each other. And that had some negative consequences on our relationship. And, you know, we've been married now for 25 years. And I learned— one of the things I learned was the power of what's called a pre-commitment device. And this is a very old technique. In fact, it's in the Odyssey written by Homer. It's a very, very old technique where you make a pre-commitment. So you remember the story of the Odyssey? Ulysses, this Greek hero, has to sail his ship home, and he has to sail by the island of the sirens. And he knows that there's this temptation. He knows that there's this distraction of any sailor who hears the siren song crashes their ship onto the shore of the sirens' island and dies. So he knows this is gonna happen, so what does he do? He enters into a pre-commitment. He tells his crew to tie him to the mast of the ship, and he tells them, "No matter what I do, no matter what I say, don't let me go." And he tells everyone in his crew to put beeswax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song. And it works. And today we call this a Ulysses Pact. So what we have to do is, as the last resort, there's 4 steps to becoming indistractable, but as the last line of defense, the fourth step, the firewall against distraction, is we make a pact that when distraction rears its ugly head and the first three techniques, for whatever reason, didn't work, there's a failsafe, there's a last line of defense. So what did I do in order to stop going to bed too late and restore intimacy with my wife? We went to the hardware store and we bought this $5 outlet timer. Okay? And this outlet timer, will turn on or off whatever you plug into it at a set time of day or night. And so what do we do? At 10 o'clock at night, every night, the internet router shuts off. Okay? Now, today, this is many years ago, today we actually don't even need it because we've been trained now, it's become a habit. 10 o'clock, all right, internet's shutting off. Now, could I turn it back on? Of course I could turn it back on, right? Like I could tether to my cell phone, I could, you know, go under my desk and pull out the timer and I can replug it in, but now there's effort. Now there's friction. So what I've done is to take a mindless behavior and add some mindfulness. Now I have to think about, wait a minute, is this really worth it? Do I really need to check more email or social media or whatever? Or should I go to bed?

Right?

So adding that bit of friction as a pact, as a pre-commitment device in advance, and this is the key, that if you leave it to the last minute, you will fail. If you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, you're going to eat it. If you're trying to quit smoking but the cigarette's in your hand, it's too late, you're going to smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, it's the first thing you pick up in the morning, right? But if you plan ahead, there's no distraction you can't overcome, because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. These problems with distraction, it's not a character flaw, it's not a moral failing, there's nothing broken about you. It's just that you haven't learned how to control these uncomfortable impulses. It's just pain management. So if you plan ahead, right, there's no distraction you can't overcome if you plan ahead for it.

Is it true that, like, a lot of times you can't actually see the opportunities in front of you because of the way you view reality? Or is there something else going on?

So you remember this, this optical illusion?

Yeah.

I'll give you an example of how I can demonstrate how you don't see reality and you can't see even the possibilities that are ahead of you with a riddle. Do you like riddles?

Yeah.

Yeah, you do?

I'm nervous though. Okay, here's a riddle.

If you know the answer, if you've heard it before, don't say it, okay?

Okay, deal.

There's a father and son, and they're riding in their car late at night. There are absolutely no lights on the highway. All of a sudden, a deer jumps in front of the car. They have a horrible accident. The father is instantly killed. The boy is in critical condition. He's rushed to the hospital. When he gets to the hospital, he's wheeled into the operating room. The surgeon barges through the door, takes one look at the boy, and says, I can't operate on this boy. He's my son. How could that be? Now, have you heard this before?

No.

87% of people who hear this riddle can't get the answer. Okay, so do you have a guess?

No.

How could that be? You want me to say it again?

Yeah, I don't know. He has two fathers. They're gay.

Okay, that's one possible answer. That's not the answer. That is one possible answer. Can you think of another one?

No.

You're going to hate the answer.

Oh, no.

The answer is the surgeon was his mom.

Oh, my God. That's terrible. You never said it was a man.

I never said it was a man.

Oh, my God.

Now, why did that happen?

Because I'm a misogynist.

No, no. In fact, Even self-identified feminists don't get this. Again, 87% of people don't get this riddle.

Why?

Because they can't see the reality. They can't— their brain doesn't let them see based on their prior beliefs. Even though 20% of surgeons are female, 80% are male. And so your priors dictate that you can only see reality a certain way. Now, if I can do that with a simple riddle that you kick yourself over, Is it any surprise that when you're trying to convince somebody to start a business for themselves and they go, that wouldn't work for me, and here's why, and I can't because of this situation, that they can't see it, Codie? They can't see the possibility, just like you couldn't see until I told you the answer. By the way, if anybody ever tells you this riddle again, you'll know exactly the answer, right? So obvious.

Yeah, I was part of the 13%, right?

But the fact that all these people, we— they can't get the riddle because of these prior beliefs. And so this is why we have to be so, so careful about the beliefs we let in and how we need to consciously, actively test ourselves and look for this portfolio of perspective so we can look at other points of view.

It's so useful because actually, it's almost a little bit like a magic trick, like how when you see somebody do a magic trick, then it makes you question your own capability. And until then, you almost can't pattern interrupt enough where somebody could go, oh, I can actually read this book. And get it deeply inside. But hopefully we gave everybody enough pause and they had the same thought that I did, and then they're out of their mind to not listen back to this and say, how can I do this differently? Yeah. God, that was good. I'm glad it worked and also so ashamed that it worked.

There's nothing to be ashamed of. Seriously, it doesn't mean you're—

Oh no, I don't actually care. No, I actually have really nice things that I say about myself in my head, so that has no bearing on it. Nir, this is incredible. I love your new book, as evidenced by the fact that I keep talking about it. And like, in case they haven't seen here, there's a lot of bookmarks, there's a lot of tabs in here. So Beyond Belief, incredible, will be out for sale by the time we do this. And I just want to say thank you for writing it because it's not an easy path.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

You chose the hard path. Thanks, Ira.

Thank you.