Stop Ignoring the Habits You’ll Regret Later...
In this live motivational presentation, Dean Graziosi introduces guest Nate Harris, who delivers a self‑improvement talk centered on preventing future regret. Harris defines two types of "catastrophes": problems that remain unsolved and opportunities that go uncultivated. He argues that every meaningful life event falls within three inter‑dependent pillars—finance, relationships, and health—and that a failure in one pillar can destabilize the others. Using the metaphor of a rubber band, he explains "creative tension" as the stretch between reality (the current truth) and vision (the desired future). This tension generates dopamine‑driven motivation, but humans often fall into an "avoidance loop" where they either lower their vision or avoid elevating reality. Harris outlines the brain’s habit automation cycle (trigger‑behavior‑reward) and shows how short‑term pleasure can dominate long‑term goals, leading to habits that feel good but don’t work. He urges listeners to identify specific avoided behaviors in finance, health, and relationships, shrink the entry point for action, and immediately act to break the loop, thereby preventing future regret.
Chapters
And today I'm so excited that we have a special guest for you. This is somebody I respect so much, someone who's been on more stages than you could ever imagine, who speaks from his heart, who is insanely smart. Without further ado, let's give it up for my friend, Nate Harris.
When the catastrophe was what could have been, the saddest words of mouth and pen will always be these: it might have been. You have these two categories of catastrophe. Problems that I don't solve, opportunities that I don't cultivate. And when someone looks backwards on their life, those are generally the areas of regret. Take a moment and imagine the word catastrophe. And I want you to make it personal. I want you to think about the times and events in your life that you would deem catastrophic. Everything that I'm gonna walk you through today came from that question: What in my life has been catastrophic? And as I examined the word catastrophe, as I encourage you to right now, think about those things that would fall into that category. And meditating upon the cause of those catastrophes, I identified two things: that first, we have Catastrophes of problems that we don't solve. And in my work, in my practice with my beautiful individual clients I get to work with, with groups, I've found that life can be very simple. Life that is full of engagement and meaning and purpose is based on 3 pillars. And your good life sits on top of these 3 pillars: finance, relationship, and health. It really is that simple. And obviously within each of those 3 pillars, you have a lot of subcategories. With finance, for example, you have how you generate money and how you have money generate money for you. So earning creation and then capital appreciation, that's finance. And then you have relationships, your relationship in your spiritual life. You have relationships that are romantic, you have relationships that are friendships, relationships that are purely transactional. And then in your physical life, your how you feed yourself, how you move your body, what you do to take care of this one and only body that you have. And what's interesting is anything that actually matters is going to fall into one of those three categories. And what I've learned is that each of those categories lean on each other. So if I have a catastrophe, let's say, in my relationship— let's say my finances are doing great, my health is great, but something catastrophic happens in my relationship life, like heaven forbid, my spouse and I separate, you know, which is unfortunately all too common in the world today. There is no doubt that that singular catastrophe will lean on the other two areas of life. It'll lean on my money and it'll lean on my health. And clearly just the expense of going through some separation of divorce will be heavy. But the decreased earnings, and so the opportunity cost financially. And then you think about, as someone ends what was supposed to be a lifelong relationship, what type of emotions follow that? Stress, anxiety, the pressure, the, the lack of connection, the feeling of isolation and loneliness. And all of that leans on the health and So as one of these three pillars becomes unstable, unless we can quickly stabilize it, it could easily knock the other two. And so when we have a problem that we, that we do not choose to tackle head-on early, that creates catastrophe in our life. The other category of catastrophe that I recognize in my own existence wasn't necessarily problems that cost me things like we just discussed, but opportunities for beauty that could have been in those 3 areas of life. The opportunity to make the right investment, the opportunity to start the right business or build the right business financially, or find the right job if that's someone's thing financially. The right— the, the opportunity to put money away for long-term benefit instead of spending it all now. The opportunity to improve your body, to improve your mind, The opportunity to build a meaningful, deep, passionate relationship with people. These are all opportunities in those 3 categories. And unfortunately, as I scanned through the 44 years of my existence, I saw many times when the catastrophe was what could have been. And there's this phrase I always think back on: "The saddest words of mouth and pen will always be these." it might have been. And so you could say you have these two categories of catastrophe: problems that I don't solve, opportunities that I don't cultivate. And when someone looks backwards on their life, those are generally the areas of regret. We need to recognize the consequence of avoidance. As I thought about the catastrophes of my life, problems that, that could have been solved when they were small, but I didn't solve them when they were small and they grew into something much, much bigger. And opportunities that I could have built when they had an opening, but I didn't and I avoided them, and then that opening closed. It all came down to one word: avoidance. How many of you, as you look back on your life, would recognize that avoidance played a huge role in some of the catastrophes that you've experienced. When I'm working with people and trying to improve myself, it always has to start with honesty. Any program of improvement, any program of development must begin with truth. It must begin with you recognizing within you what actually is real. Any of you who spent time with me probably recognize this little analogy that I use. I think it describes life perfectly. I have this little rubber band in my hands here. The rubber band serves no purpose as is. It only serves a purpose when it becomes tense, when I include tension into it. And this is what we call creative tension. This is a, I believe, a simple, profound analogy for how our lives work. For this rubber band to have, have any tension, I need to pull two points in opposition. And that's life. You, all of us, rely on tension to create the energy to do something, to solve a problem or cultivate an opportunity. We need tension, and that's creative tension. Now, how does that work? The bottom point is what we'll call reality. Now think about that for a moment. Reality, that is truth. That is the now. That is honest about the way things are. But if all I do is I play in reality and nothing more, then I would be classified most likely as a cynic or a skeptic. They don't have tension in their life. They're not going to be creating anything because they just see why it won't work. It's called negative intelligence. Telling themselves what not to do and why things won't work. Nobody ever built a statue of a skeptic. And one of the reasons I love Dean and this beautiful group of people that he's got from all over the world who is so engaged in learning and development is I don't think that's you. I think very few of you are that. You might have people in your life who are that, who try to drag you down, but I highly doubt you would be on this call if that was you. My concern is that you're the opposite of that. So if on the bottom we have reality, on the top we have vision. So here we have the high-functioning life where you have an appropriate stretch between reality and vision. Now, once you've created that tension, that is a good thing. That's positive stress, that's positive anxiety, that's where dopamine exists. Anybody who understands how, how humans move, they move primarily based on dopamine triggers because dopamine is the approach neurotransmitter. It's the thing that says, I'm here, that's there, I want that, go that way. With the lack of dopamine means complacency, it means sedation. A body that's sedated has very little dopamine moving through its system and it has no reason to go. This creates dopamine. Now, once that's happened, every bit of tension seeks relief. And how do you relieve tension? You only have two ways. There's two wave— ways to relieve the tension between reality and vision. And so you only have two options. Option number one is you can lower your vision. Option number two is you can elevate your reality. What would you say most people do? They create a vision. Do most people elevate their reality or lower their vision once it gets hard? So I'm here to discuss with you the loop. It's called the avoidance loop and what we do unintentionally as imperfect humans that throws us into this avoidance. Now, there's a couple of key factors here. The first I would like you to remember, I'll write it down for you, is a simple formula. It's how our brains are wired for automation. Okay, trigger, behavior, reward. TBR. Trigger, behavior, reward. I want you to write those down if you have a pen and pad, and then if you have a pen and pad I want you to draw a little diagram like that. And on this— why? So the y-axis, you have feels good, and on the, on the bottom of the y-axis, you have feels bad. On the x-axis, you get doesn't work and works. And when I say work— works or doesn't work— what I'm referring to there is it gets me what I want, it doesn't get me what I want, it feels good, it doesn't feel good, or it feels bad. All right, now our brain is wired to automate this square right here, the square that feels good and it gets us what we want. Whatever the brain has learned will feel good and gets me what I want, it will seek to automate because it doesn't want to have to re-decide a thousand times over to feel good and get what it wants. That's how it's wired. So what does it do? It pays attention to triggers, a thought or an environmental cue that makes us act a certain way. And when we act a certain way the brain remembers. Did it make me feel good or did it make me feel bad? All the time, everything we do, there's not one thing any of us will do that is not a reflection of moving away from pain or towards pleasure. And this chart demonstrates that. And so what your brain is doing is it has this really neat system to assign what's called reward value. And the reward value is the the place on this chart that the brain places that experience that it had based on a behavior. And it's all arbitrary. It doesn't mean that it actually is true. It's just the way the brain experiences it. The brain at all times and in all places is seeking to classify the emotion as feels good, feels bad, works, doesn't work. And whatever feels good and works it will have you do more often automatically before you don't even think about it. Are most likely spending far more time than they know is good and doesn't even actually feel good, and they know it doesn't actually work to get them what they want, but they're there. The actuality, the reality is that it doesn't feel good and it doesn't work to get us what we want. The score for jumping on social media and death Doom scrolling is right down here. It doesn't work and it feels really bad, but the brain has established it up here that it works and makes me feel good. Why? Because the brain only lives in the immediate. Your brain is designed to feel good now. It wants what feels good now. Your soul is designed to delay what feels good now so that it can reap the rewards of what will actually feel good later. But too often the body wins, and once the body automates, the soul can forget. And every single person in here knows what it's like to pick up your phone and just be clicking things and not even know why you picked it up. That's this cycle working in real time. And unfortunately, if we don't reappraise that scenario, we're going to build our life around a bunch of habits and automated actions that actually don't work and they don't feel good, but our brain never has reappraised them. Avoidance is the ultimate example of that. Because avoidance— what is— remember, what is the body wanting? The body is wanting constantly hurling, sprinting straight on away from pain and into pleasure. The body wants relief. Approaching any meaningful thing means short to medium-term discomfort, whether that's something in your financial life, for example, taking money that you could spend on fast food and investing it into the stock market. And I want you right now to identify one behavior in your financial life that you know you could improve, that you would improve, that you should improve, that you must improve, but you've been avoiding improving. Let me give you an example before, before you go into the exercise. It could be something as simple as I need to stop paying for apps that I don't use. There's an easy one. Yeah, it's $20 a month. I need to stop doing that. I've been thinking about doing that for the last year. I still haven't done it. I want you then to think about something in your physical life, an area of avoidance in your physical life. Maybe it's getting your blood work done. Maybe it's being more consistent with your vitamins. Maybe it's being more consistent with walking around the block twice a day. I don't know, something that you know that you could do, would do, should do, and must do, but you're not doing. Everything always gets harder and more expensive. The opportunities that you've been avoiding cultivating and the problems that you know you must solve now because they're never going to be smaller than they are right now. And if you think they are, you're lying to yourself. Articulate it. Say the words, I am avoiding blank. Shrink the entry point to a point of immediate action and move, and you will see the dominoes fall. So you're not bad because you avoid. You're not negative because you avoid. You're human because you avoid. And if you want to be superhuman, it's time to shrink the entry point and take action today.
