Nir Eyal | Beyond Belief | Talks at Google

I'm very excited to welcome Nir Eyal today. Nir is a best-selling author and a leading thinker on psychology of the behavior of change and human potential. Nir joins us to discuss his book here, Beyond Belief, which reveals the hidden assumptions you carry shape what you see, how you feel, and what you do, and how you replace them with the beliefs that unlock your true potential. And unlike vague, just-believe type mantras, NEAR offers pragmatic, research-driven systems for retaining the mind and body, and grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and unforgettable case studies, I must say. The book introduced the three powers of belief: attention, anticipation, and agency. So mastering these powers can help transform how you see challenges and how you feel about the future and to act when it most matters. So, Nir, like I said, it's my pleasure to welcome you today to Google.

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

First of all, I'm going to ask, of course, a question to the audience. I want to see a raise of hands from you all. Who here considers themself a lucky person? Oh, that's good. Most of you. Okay, and who here would like to increase their chances of luck? Me too, right? All of us. And this is something, of course, you talk about in the book, and you talk about it as a very practical outcome of our beliefs. And can you explain to us a little bit more about what you mean by provoked luck and how everybody here can increase their chances of luck through these three powers of beliefs, ensuring that they obviously have more luck in their work, relationships, and their health?

Sure. So the book is really about how beliefs shape our perception of reality. And so beliefs have this incredible power to change what we see, what we feel, and ultimately what we do. And when it comes to this first power of belief, the power beliefs to change what we see, I don't mean that metaphorically. Beliefs literally change what you are able to perceive. Why does this happen? Actually, you know what, let me— I want to show you something. Do you mind bringing up that slide? I want to show you why it is a myth that you see reality as it is. Most people think, well, I see things as they are. I'm lucky, I'm unlucky, I'm good at this, I'm not good at this. I'm— this is hard. This is— we see reality as we think it is. But in fact, that's not true. And let me show you. Can we go to that second slide? I want you to look at this checkerboard. Not that checker— not— why is it so green? OK, anyway, which— it still works. Which square, which tile on that checkerboard is darker? Which looks darker? Clearly, A looks darker than B. If anybody doesn't think A is darker than B, you should have your eyes checked. For everybody— A clearly looks darker than B. But if I show you the next slide and I put two gray bars next to squares A and B, you will see that in fact they are the same exact color. Kind of a cute optical illusion, but what does it mean? Why am I telling you this? Well, let's go to slide number 3. And you'll see that even when you know this information, you know the truth, you are convinced because of evidence that I have provided to you that square A and B are the same color, when you look at the first image on the left-hand side, you still can't see it any other way. A still looks darker than B. Mm-hmm. Do you understand what that means? It means that our logical mind can't override our priors. We still see things as we believe them to be because your prior beliefs are that checkerboards are a certain way. And so when that pattern is violated, it doesn't change reality, it doesn't update reality. Your brain forces you to see reality as you believe it to be. Whether you like it or not. Why does your brain do this? Well, because your brain cannot process all the information that is coming into it right now. So right at this very second, 11 million bits of information, 11 million bits, are entering your brain. You are processing 11 million bits of information. That's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. It's a tremendous amount of information. The light hitting your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room. Your brain is processing all that information, it's just not focusing your attention on it. Your conscious attention can only process about 50 bits of information. 50 bits of information is about 1 sentence per second. So your brain is only consciously aware, it can only pay attention to 0.000045% of the information available to it. So it has to pick and choose. How does it pick and choose? It picks and chooses based on your beliefs. Literally dictating what you're able to see. So when it comes to luck, they did a beautiful study where they took two groups of people, lucky and unlucky. And these were, by the way, self-identified lucky or unlucky people. It wasn't a fact. They didn't go back into their history and say, oh, you are actually a lucky or unlucky person. They just asked them, do you believe you're lucky? Or like, just exactly as you did. They gave them a very simple task. The task was, we want you to look through this newspaper and identify the number of images you see. Just count them, 1, 2, 3. How many photographs do you see in this newspaper? Now, the people who are self-identified, the ones that believed they were unlucky, took 2.5 minutes to finish this task, 2.5 minutes. The people who believed they were lucky took 11 seconds. Hmm. Why the difference? Well, on page 2 of this newspaper, one of those images that everyone saw said "there are 43 images in this newspaper, collect your reward." The unlucky people didn't see it. It didn't enter that little pinhole of attention that we're all looking at reality through. They saw it, their eyes glanced over it, they probably counted it, but their attention, their conscious awareness didn't see it in front of them. So to them it didn't exist in their reality. Whereas lucky people said, "Ah, 43," boom, collected their prize and they walked out the door. So a big part of making your luck, provoking luck, turns out to be the set of beliefs you have with which you see the world.

Amazing. Thank you. And so let's talk about why this is so important. So I think you and I talk about this in a kind of similar way. So I talk about the analogy of us being like computers, right? So we have our software that we integrate. And this actually— we start to create our software, as I call it, like our playbook between the ages of 0 and 7. Our formative years. And, and we run this software continually. And, and unlike me, where I feel like I'm updating my laptop software every week at this point, us as humans, we don't, we don't take the time to sit down and actually, you know, look at our software and update it. And this is what you say as well. You talk about it in this way as us having this, these pieces of software that can be upgraded and replaced. So can you tell us why it is so important that we do this?

Absolutely. Uh, let me start with another study that blew my mind. In the 1950s, there was a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter, and Richter had a very simple question. The question was, how long can a wild rat swim? Not a very interesting question, but he wanted to know the answer. Turns out a wild rat can swim for about 15 minutes. How did he do this experiment? He took a wild rat— you can't do these kind of experiments anymore, it's unethical, thank goodness— he took a wild rat, put it in a cylinder of water filled halfway up, and he just stood there with a stopwatch and counted. 15 minutes, the rat didn't so much exhaust itself as it just kind of seemed to give up and drowned. Now we had another question. Could he extend that persistence? Could he extend how long the rat swam for? So he did another study. He took a new group of wild rats, he put them in those same cylinders of water, and at the 15-minute mark, right as he knew the rats were about to give up and die, He reached in, pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunk back into the water it went. And he did this intervention a few times. And he wanted to determine, could the rat become more persistent somehow? That because it knew that salvation might be possible, that if it kept swimming, something might save it, would it become more persistent? The answer is yes. I want you to guess how much longer the rat swam for. It started with 15 minutes. What's a realistic number that you think Richter was able to increase the rat's persistence? If you know the answer, if you've heard this study before, please don't say it, don't ruin it for everybody. But if you don't know the answer, what do you guess? What would be a reasonable assessment? How much longer, please? How much? 30 minutes, okay, 100%. That would be amazing if I could take your persistence level and double it, incredible. Go higher. An hour, that would be, an hour? That's amazing, if I could help you focus on a difficult task for 4 times longer. You're coding, you're debugging, you're making a sales call, you're taking an exam. If I could increase your persistence level times 4, that would be amazing, right? But the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes. The rats swam for 60 hours. They became 240 times more persistent through this intervention. Now, why am I telling you this story? Why is this so important? When we ask this fundamental question of how do we become more likely to achieve our goals? Why do some people accomplish their dreams and others don't? What's the determining factor? Is it resources? Is it money? No. It helps, but that's not the deciding factor. Is it information? Well, we're drowning in information. Nobody knows that better than Google. We have all the answers out there. If you don't know how to do something, you Google it, right? You can find the answer on how to do pretty much anything or buy a book on the topic. Information is no longer scarce, so that can't be it. Skill, well, skill can be acquired, just like information. So what is it? Turns out the deciding factor of whether you meet a goal is whether you quit. It's persistence. That is the number one most important factor. You don't guarantee success if you persist, but you guarantee failure if you quit. So persistence turns out to be the most important factor on whether you reach your professional, your personal, your relationships, all those goals. So that Richter study is so important because it shows us that the rats had it in them all along. If you think about what changed for that experiment, the rats had the same rat bodies, they didn't suddenly become stronger, better swimmers. The environment didn't change, same cylinders of water. The experiment hadn't changed at all. The only variable left, we can't ask the rats, but the only variable left is that something changed in their minds. That somehow some flip was switched and what used to be their limit, 15 minutes, suddenly expanded into what was always within them, the 60 hours of swimming. And so that of course provokes the question in us. Where are we quitting? For me, that provoked the question, oh my goodness, like where in my life have I quit? And I've quit many, many times. Usually way too soon. I quit at the 15-minute mark 'cause I thought that was my limit. But really, I had 60 hours in me all along. And so that's really the idea behind the book is how do we harness the power of beliefs? If we know that beliefs are so important for motivation, how do we learn how to sustain that motivation so we can accomplish our long-term goals?

Yeah, absolutely. I love that study, even though not ideal in this day and age to do something like that. But it is a good demonstration of mindset and the importance of that. And I guess in the coaching that I do with my clients, I aim to get to that point where they're totally aware of the things that are triggering them, and so that they can see them. But start, they might not even be aware of those things, and then they get to a point where they're aware of them but they're still falling into that trap of responding in the ways that they used to. And then they get to the point where they see it and they go, oh, I'm not going to do that anymore, I'm going to change direction and do something different. And I guess, like, you know, this weekend just gone in the UK, it was Mother's Day, and family events like this sometimes can be a little bit triggering. And you talk about in your book an example with your mother, actually. And I thought it'd be nice to talk about that and how, you know, in relation to the simulation model. And so can you talk to us a little bit more about that?

You really want me to go there?

I do.

This is a hard story to tell. It's a hard story to tell because, well, you'll see. A few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday. And I wanted to do something nice for her. So I decided to buy her some flowers. The problem was I was living in Singapore. And she was in Central Florida where I grew up. But I stayed up late at night so I could figure out the time zone situation. I Googled a bunch of reviews for local florists in Central Florida, and I found the best one I could find. I called up the florist and made sure they had the right flowers so she would be happy and that they would get out on time. And I did everything I possibly could, thinking that my mom was gonna call me the next day and say, thank you so much for those flowers. You're such a good son. I appreciate it. That didn't happen. Here's what happened. I called her up the next day and said, "Hey, Mom, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers I sent?" And she says, "Yes, I did. Thank you. But just so you know, those flowers you sent, they were half dead, and I don't think you should order from that florist again." To which I said, "Well, that's the last time I buy you flowers." And it went over about as well as you'd expect. Not so good. After, my wife was sitting next to me, and she was on this birthday call with my mom, and my mom turned— or my wife turned to me And she says, "Would you like to do a turnaround on this?" To which I said, "No." I do not want your touchy-feely hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo. I need to vent. That's what we're told to do, right? We're supposed to get things off our chest. We're not supposed to keep our feelings bottled inside. We have to tell people how they have aggrieved us and speak our truth. Well, it turns out that the psychology literature says that's a terrible idea, that venting does nothing but reinforce an effigy of others. That just like you don't see reality as it is, you see it as you believe it is. The same goes for people. You do not see other people as they are, you see other people as you believe they are. And so I had enough sense to not vent, and instead I used another technique called inquiry-based stress reduction, which is a well-studied technique. It was first pioneered by a woman by the name of Byron Katie. But the technique actually has its roots all the way back to Aristotle. And here's what it does. The technique asks us not to change our mind. Because the brain hates changing its mind. I'll say it again, the brain hates changing its mind. Why? Because our past beliefs have always served us. So evolutionarily, evolution does not care about you flourishing. It doesn't care if you're happy. It doesn't care if you're meeting your full potential. Evolution cares, are you alive and can you procreate? And so what does it do? The brain tries to constantly protect you. It tries to pull you back into your limiting beliefs, the things you have always done. I'm no good at this, I'm not ready, this is hard. You're constantly hearing this little whisper in your head bringing you back to those limitations because your limitations are safe, 'cause that's what worked in the past, your priors. So knowing this, inquiry-based stress reduction, asks you not to change your mind, to just collect a portfolio of perspectives, just other beliefs. So how does this work? You ask yourself 4 questions. Here's the first question. The first question is, is this belief true? My belief was, after this conversation with my mom, is that my mother was being clearly too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, obviously you heard the story. She— are you with me here? That's the truth, right? Like, you heard what she said. That is a dumb question. Of course it's true. It's a fact that she was being judgmental and hard to please, and I had to prove to her why that was the case. Okay, dumb question. Let's skip to question number 1. Question number 2: is it absolutely true? Sounds like the first question, not exactly the same. Is it absolutely true? Is this belief absolutely true? There's no other possible explanation other than my mother's being too judgmental and hard to please. Well, the more I thought about it, maybe, I don't know, I mean, she did thank me and she was just saying a statement of fact. The flowers are half dead, okay? So maybe she was actually trying to protect me from not getting scammed by this florist. So maybe she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful. Okay, now I have two beliefs. I had one, my mother's too judgmental and hard to please. Now I have another belief that maybe she wasn't being too judgmental and hard to please. There's another alternative perspective. Now the third question. Third question is, who am I when I carry this belief? When I believe my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, how do I react? How do I feel? Who do I become? Well, I'm not very patient, I'm not very nice, and I become this 13-year-old version of myself. Now the fourth question: who would I be without this belief? Let's say I had a magic wand and poof, that belief disappears from my consciousness, I don't have that belief anymore, how do I feel? Well, I felt lighter. I felt a bit more at peace. I felt more myself. And so in just 30 seconds and 4 questions, I determined very quickly that that thing that I thought was a fact was not a fact, right? It was just a belief. That it wasn't serving me, that it made me feel kind of crummy when I held on to it, and that actually if I If I didn't have that belief, I'd feel much better. So now it's time for the turnaround. Now it's time to actually turn what's a limiting belief into a liberating belief. What is a limiting and a liberating belief? A limiting belief is defined as a belief that decreases your motivation and increases your suffering. That's a limiting belief. It decreases your motivation and increases your suffering. A liberating belief supplies motivation and decreases your suffering. Okay, so what was my motivation level like when I stuck to my first belief, my mother's too judgmental and hard to please? It made me less motivated to work on that relationship with her, right? And it caused me suffering. Even when she wasn't in the room or on the phone, when I was stewing in my own head, it caused me to suffer, it caused me discomfort. So now what inquiry-based stress reduction asks you to do is to ask yourself, could the exact opposite be true? Not to change your mind, remember the brain hates changing its mind, and I hope you do this exercise as well for any limiting belief that you're struggling with, and you can do this with anything, relationships, work conflicts, interpersonal, whatever you're struggling with. So you're not changing your mind, you're just collecting that portfolio perspective. So what's the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please? The opposite is my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, now I have two beliefs. Another one. What's another turnaround? Another opposite of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please? How about I am too judgmental and hard to please? Ugh. Could that be true? Well, I had rehearsed this script that I expected to receive this effusive praise from her for doing this nice thing, and that when that wasn't recited exactly the way I had anticipated, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? Me. Here's another turnaround. I am being judgmental and hard to please towards myself. Ugh, that one really stung because that one actually felt the most true because when I had done something nice that I put a lot of effort and money into and it didn't work out, I felt incompetent. I felt like I had messed up. And so this is what's called a misattribution of emotion. When I feel crummy, I'm gonna make sure someone else does too. And we do this all the time to each other. So here's the thing: which one of those 4 beliefs— you heard these 4 beliefs, okay— which one of those 4 beliefs is true? Which one is false? All of them?

Yeah.

None of them?

All of them? None of them?

Who cares? Who cares? Because here's the thing: facts are defined as objective truths. They are true whether you believe them or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That's a fact. Okay, it doesn't care what you believe. Sorry, flat earthers, there's probably none here at Google, but sorry. Then there's faith on the other end of the spectrum. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. God rewards the righteous. There's no amount of evidence that's going to convince a person of faith that that's not true. It's a matter of faith. It doesn't require evidence. Fact and faith. In between fact and faith is a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. Very, very powerful. So unlike faith, unlike facts, We can change beliefs because beliefs are tools, not truths. We don't have to hold beliefs up to the standards of objective truth, but yet we fight with each other. No, but you said this. No, but you meant that, and I want to show you how you were wrong. And we hold this to the level of facts, but it doesn't matter because that first belief I had that I thought was a fact— my mother's too judgmental and hard to please— meant that she had to change so I could be happy. You don't know my mom, but that ain't gonna happen. And anytime we hold someone else accountable for our suffering, we are producing the suffering because we expect reality to be different from it is. That's the source of all suffering. So that one belief was never going to change, right? That I was never gonna stop suffering based on that one belief. The other three beliefs, huh, I could do something with that. She wasn't held responsible for my suffering. I could take responsibility for my suffering. Doesn't mean I have to be best friends with her. Doesn't mean I have to hang out with her more than I want to. None of that. Doesn't mean I have to forgive her for anything. It just means I don't have to suffer anymore, and I became more motivated to work on that relationship with her. So by collecting that portfolio of perspectives and then trying them on for size, just trying it on and not holding up to the standard of, well, it has to be true— and it feels silly to go and do the exact opposite in this exercise, feels weird. Your brain will fight you tooth and nail to get you to not let in any other perspective because it wants to hold on to what it thinks is a fact. But unfortunately, the state of affairs today is that most of our personal, interpersonal, even geopolitical problems come from this situation where too many of us hold our faith as facts and don't realize that what we think are facts are nothing more than beliefs. They are tools, not truths.

That is it, exactly. I love Kate Byron, who does the turnaround.

That she gets the credit for this technique.

Absolutely. And but tools, not truths. What a great phrase to remember. And so quickfire then. You talked about the limiting to liberating beliefs. Give us some that some people in the room here today might resonate. What's a limiting belief? What could they tell me?

Oh my goodness. I mean, for me, I used to have— I still have. I have to constantly remind myself because remember, we always want to go into passivity. Our brain always wants to drag us back to what has been safe in the past. So for me, a limiting belief, like for example, when I started public speaking, okay, I used to get terrible stage fright. And I had this limiting belief of, well, when I feel my heart beating fast and I feel my armpits getting sweaty and I feel the cottonmouth, that means that I'm not really prepared, that I'm not really good at this, that I shouldn't be up here. And I would actually, I would decline speaking invitations 'cause I thought, well, I wasn't ready for a crowd that big or this serious. I'm not ready yet. I wouldn't take those opportunities. That was a limiting belief.

And now you believe?

Well, what did I do? Here's what's interesting. Pain is not suffering. Those are two separate things. Pain is information. Pain is information, physical and psychological. Pain is information. Even physical pain. Pain doesn't happen here or here or here. All pain is in the brain. All pain is real, but all pain is in the brain. So when I experience those physiological symptoms, I'm giving a freaking talk at Google, people. You know how nervous I am right now? Like, this is, I feel the exact same physiological symptoms that I've always felt. I still feel the cotton mouth, that's why I keep drinking this coffee and I still get the sweaty armpits and my heart is beating a mile a minute, but I interpret it differently. It's not suffering anymore. Now I have a different belief. The liberating belief is that when I feel my heart racing, before I used to say, oh, I'm getting a panic attack or I'm anxious or something's wrong or I'm not good at this or people are gonna find out that I don't know something and they might make fun of me. Instead, it's okay, my heart is beating quickly to get more oxygen to my brain so I can give my best possible presentation about something I think can impact millions of lives. What does that do to my motivation to get on stage? What does that do to my level of suffering? It's freeing. It's liberating.

Yeah, I agree. I feel like we've got a very similar story in that sense. And so I completely appreciate that. And you mentioned something in what you just said then about the pain and the suffering. And I think one of the most common topics that comes up in coaching sessions is procrastination. And you talk about procrastination in the book. And you mentioned that procrastination is actually that avoidance of the anticipated discomfort. And I think especially people getting stuck in that loop, what can people do to turn that pain into a growth signal rather than using it as a reason to disengage?

Sure. So it's actually, I think, a super interesting question. Why do we procrastinate? That it's something that we know we should do for ourselves, something that we decide is important for ourselves, and yet we don't do. And it's not a new question, by the way. It's not, you know, people think, "Oh, it's because of technology and social media and, you know, the cell phones." It's not. You know, Plato was talking about akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest, 2,500 years before the internet. So this is not a new problem. It's because we don't understand what is motivation, not just what is procrastination, but what is motivation. We used to think that motivation is about going, you know, getting a certain goal, a certain reward, feeling good by something because we want something. And that's not true at all. That all motivation, all motivation is about one thing, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort, even wanting to feel good. Hunger, lusting, craving, desire are all psychologically destabilizing. So even wanting that delicious meal or wanting to hang out with a friend or whatever it is that you think feels good, the way the brain goes and spurs you to action to go get it is by making you feel bad. Wanting doesn't feel good. You know, there's that song "Love Hurts." It's exactly right. That's what motivates us is the desire to escape discomfort. So what does that mean? When it comes to procrastination, If all behavior is a desire to escape discomfort, what that therefore means, that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management, it's all just pain management. It's all our perception of signal and judging it as suffering. So when it comes to procrastination, it's because we have this limiting belief that if I feel this way, if I feel this confluence of symptoms, I'm fatigued, I don't feel like doing this, this hurts, this is hard, I'm tired, it's not a good time, it's too late, blah blah blah. I'm interpreting that confluence of signal, of data, as suffering. And so I need to escape suffering. Doesn't have to be that way when we have a liberating belief. So for me, you know, I've written 3 bestsellers, and let me tell you, it's really hard. Like, there are many times, actually every time that I write, I want to check email, I want to check the news, I want to check stock prices and sports scores and scroll social media or whatever. Anything but the writing, 'cause it's really hard work. And I used to think, well, it's because of all these symptoms, that means I'm suffering, because I had these limiting beliefs. I can't do this, not the right time, et cetera. Instead, now I have a liberating belief, a belief that increases my motivation and decreases my suffering. So what do I say to myself? And I have this mantra. The mantra is, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. So now those same, that same information, that same pain, that same data, that was leading me to suffering has been short-circuited. Now that same feeling, this is what it feels like to get better. This is supposed to be the case. And that's actually, I found, what's very effective to disarm procrastination is because now I relish that feeling. I don't feel like doing it, good.

That's great.

Because that's what it feels like to get better. That's the motivation.

Yeah, let's lean into that. You talked about data. So in NLP, we talk about that perception is projection, meaning the individual doesn't necessarily necessarily perceive objectively the reality, but they actually project their reality into the world. And like you said, you see the world as you are, not as it is. And we look for evidence for things to confirm that we are correct. So you talk about like, you know, if you expect a meeting to be boring, then it's quite likely it's going to be boring. Or if you're going into a meeting and you think, oh, this person's going to be really challenging and difficult, you're going to look for all the things that they do to confirm to yourself that they actually are challenging and difficult. And I think that actually it can be quite hard, though, to step out of that. And so you talk about 3 tools or things we can do to actually change that. And I want you to talk about those.

Sure. Let me start by illustrating this point. Because we say this, but everybody thinks, well, yeah, but I don't do that. I see reality clearly. I feel things as they are. So I want to give you a little riddle. Do you guys like riddles? Of course you do. You Googlers, you love riddles. Here's a riddle. 83% of you will not know the answer. OK, 83% of you statistically won't know the answer. Here's the riddle. Oh, and if you know the answer to this riddle, please do not ruin it. Don't say the answer to the riddle, OK? Please promise, don't say the answer if you've heard this before. So there's a father and son who are driving on a deserted road, middle of the night, totally dark. And as they're driving, there's a deer that jumps out in front of the car and there's a horrible accident. The father is killed instantly. The son is in critical condition. He's rushed to the hospital. They take him into the operating room. The surgeon runs inside, takes one look at the boy and says, oh my God, I can't operate on this boy. He's my son. How can that be? Again, don't say it. You know the answer. You've heard this one. Don't say it if you know the— No, no, no, you've heard it before. Don't say it if you know the answer. Just think for a minute. 83% of you will not know the answer. That's totally fine, but just think for a minute. I'll say the last part again. The boy's in critical condition. He's rushed to the operating room. The surgeon bursts into the operating room, takes one look at the boy and says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son." Who has not heard this before and thinks they know the answer? Raise your hand for me. 1, 2, 3, 4, okay. 83% or so. You know the answer? Maybe. What's the answer? Is it his mom? That's right. The surgeon is the boy's mom. Duh. And yet 83% of people don't get it. 83% of men, 83% of women, 83% of feminists, 83% of people who have female surgeon mothers don't get the answer to this question. Why? Because the brain sees what it expects. 80% of surgeons are male, 20% are female. So probabilistically, the brain sees what it expects to see. So if you walk into a meeting expecting it to be boring, that's what you're gonna find. If you have a mother who you expect to be judgmental, that's what you're gonna see. The brain sees what it predicts. It's called predictive processing. That's why you can't see the checkerboard illusion any other way, because that's how you've always seen checkerboards. So we have to disrupt that pattern. We have to understand the facts of the matter, that what is the difference between fact and belief, that there are objective truths, and remind ourselves of those objective truths. So for example, in order to change your default state of seeing, "I'm no good at public speaking," or, "I'm not ready for this," there's a few things we can do. One thing that we can do is to keep a reality log. 'Cause you know, the brain has what's called a negativity bias. It's constantly looking for the bad stuff. This is what keeps the news media in business, right? The first law of journalism, if it bleeds, it leads. Does the news media tell you what you need to know? No, it tells you about things that have nothing to do with you, that you can do absolutely nothing about until maybe an election comes about every few years. And until then, it just scares you.

Why?

Because evolutionarily, what your brain wants is to protect you, to keep you safe. And so nice thing, or good news is nice, But bad news can kill you. So we have hyper-awareness towards anything negative. And we do this to ourselves too. How did I mess up? How was I not good enough? How do I critique myself? My book just launched last week. And we made the New York Times bestseller list. Amazing, super happy. And guess what? Thank you, appreciate it. But then what did I do the next morning? I looked for the bad reviews. I looked for the ones that weren't 5-star reviews on Amazon, right? That's what I wanted to know about. You can't help it. That's our default state. So we constantly have to fight that. So one of the things you can do is to keep a reality log where, you know, I did this when I started doing public speaking. And I would not just note, here's what I need to improve, here's what I need to improve, but what went well. And when I actually started keeping a log of, okay, hey, I did this well, this worked well, that, okay, this maybe needs improvement. But when I started keeping a little log of really what was going on in actual reality, what was the facts of the matter? Another thing we can do that sounds ridiculous but has been shown in many studies to be effective is to use what's called illyism. Illyism is when we talk to ourselves in the third person. It sounds ridiculous, but it's actually been shown to be very, very effective. Why does this work? Think about how you talk to a friend. Let's say a friend told you, "You know what, I gave a big presentation in front of my boss and I really messed it up." Would you tell them, "Wow, you really suck"? You're no good at this. You should probably stop trying. This is too hard for you. Would you say that to a friend? Of course not, you're laughing, it's ridiculous. But we say it to ourselves, right? And so if you can break that behavior and instead talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, like literally, Nir struggled when he tried to make the point of such and such. Like literally telling it as you would a friend. That's also a very, very effective technique. And then finally, the third technique is having that mantra. I call it a secular prayer. These little things that we tell ourselves that whenever we experience that limiting belief, we're replacing it with a liberating belief. For example, with my mom, whenever, I didn't tell you, this is not in the book, but when my mom read this story, I had to share it with her 'cause it was about to be published and everybody would know it. And so I wanted to make sure she was okay with it. And so I sent her the text and she read it and I expected her to say, "You know, wow, you're so introspective and that's really great." You know what she says? "I told you those flowers were crap." And so what do I repeat myself? I have a mantra, I have a little secular prayer that I say that we're all operating with the tools we have. So what's replaced "My mother is too judgmental and hard to please"? We're all operating with the tools that we have. What does that do to my motivation and suffering? I feel much better with that, right? I'm acknowledging, it's like asking my mom to speak Russian. My mom doesn't speak Russian, okay? How could I possibly expect her to speak Russian? She's never learned it. How could I possibly expect her to behave the way I want her to behave in every circumstance? No, she doesn't have those tools. We don't speak that same emotional language, and that's fine because we're all operating with the tools we have. So when you have those liberating beliefs that you say, okay, here's my little mantras, here's my things that I'm gonna repeat to myself 100 times a day if that's what it takes, and sometimes at first that's exactly what it takes. That's how we start to liberate ourselves from these limiting beliefs.

But leaning into that, say mantras and affirmations, I'm sure we've all heard of these.

Well, not affirmations, that's a little different. An affirmation I have a problem with. Because, and this is, there's a whole chapter in the book on the negative side of positive thinking. Affirmations tend to be not true.

I'm glad you take my question.

Yeah, that's the problem. Because, and by the way, you know, manifest, I take, manifesting to the mats as well. Because it turns out that vision boarding and manifesting and positive thinking and affirmations, they have a huge problem in that they're all about outcomes. And that doesn't work. The research study shows, there was a study done by Gabrielle Oettingen where she asked people to manifest. They brought them into a lab and they envisioned a future they wanted. I want to find love in my life. I want a beach body. I want wealth. And I'm gonna envision myself in my palace with my Lamborghini outside and my six-pack abs. All the stuff I want, all the stuff I dream about. And it turns out that people who did that, as she was asking them to do this exercise, she connected them to blood pressure monitors. And she could find that their blood pressure lowered, their heart rate lowered, they became more relaxed, and in follow-ups, turned out they became less likely to do the work it took to get what they wanted. So for example, students who visualized getting an A on an exam became less likely to study for that exam. Because their brain was telling them, hey, mission accomplished, it's coming your way. The universe is gonna bring things to you. Well, it doesn't work that way.

I can't see you sit here and envision abs and love me.

I hate to tell you. Sorry. But there is some truth to this in that we know that athletes visualize. Everybody's heard about how athletes visualize, and that's actually where this technique comes from. But how do athletes visualize? Athletes do not visualize the gold medal and the trophy. That's not what they visualize. They visualize how they will respond physically and psychologically to the obstacles in their way. It's called mental contrasting. The reason that manifesting and visualizing and positive thinking fails, and affirmations oftentimes fail, is because when it feels crappy, remember how we talked about how motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort? When it feels uncomfortable, which it inevitably will on your way to the goal, if you don't have the psychological tools to deal with that discomfort, if you don't you prepare for the pain, you're sunk, you're gonna quit. So what do athletes do? They visualize, okay, I'm on offense and defense is coming at me, what am I gonna do? Or I'm skiing down the mountain and here's what might happen if I mess up, okay, what am I gonna do? Psychologically and physically. That's mental contrasting, that's what we have to do. We have to prepare for the pain so that when it rises, we know what to do. I'll give you an example in my life. So I used to be clinically obese, not just overweight, clinically obese. And the way I got over it, the way I got back control of my body was that I started to visualize not the six-pack abs, not the beach body, that's not what I visualized. I visualized what would I do when I go to a dinner party and someone offers me a piece of chocolate cake that I'm trying to resist, okay? What am I gonna do with that hunger that I really do want, that craving for the chocolate cake? What am I gonna say when I feel socially awkward to say no thanks? That's what I had to rehearse. That's what I had to practice.

Yeah. Powerful. And I think that's something that we talk a lot about at Google is becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable. And you argue that being completely happy actually is unnatural. Like you said, it's an evolutionary disadvantage. And so leveraging this discomfort is actually, like you said, what high performers do. And so I guess, is there something that we can do for ourselves? I feel there's lots of discomfort coming with lots of change. What would you recommend for us in order to deal with that best?

I think in a time of such rapid change where we have so much uncertainty, it's more important than ever to focus on what you can control. You know, we know that there's a formula for burnout. There's literally a recipe for burnout. That it's not the job you do. If I asked you what type of jobs have the highest incidence of depression and anxiety disorder, what type of job? I would think it'd be like, oh, a mortician, or maybe you have to put puppies to sleep, you know, a sad job. That would be sad, right? That would lead to anxiety and depression. No, not at all. It's not about the job you do, it's about the environment you do it in. That there's a confluence of two factors. This is literally the recipe for burnout. It's a condition where you have high expectations coupled with low control. You guys are looking around like half of you are saying, wait a minute, that's my job. Now interesting, if you have high expectations with high control, no problem. That's where we flourish. High expectations and high control, that's where we rise to the occasion. We love that circumstance. But high expectations with low control, that is where we burn out. And so what we do in a time of extreme uncertainty is we find what's called our internal locus of control. In the psychology literature, we know that there's two types of perspectives. People who have an external locus of control, they think that things happen to them. It's the economy. AI is taking all our jobs. There's all these wars, political unrest, all this stuff. That's what's happening to me. That's an external locus of control. Then there are people who have what's called an internal locus of control. These are people who believe that what I do matters, that I can affect my outcomes. These are highly agentic people, an internal locus of control. Now what's interesting in the research is that people with an internal locus of control do better in almost every metric of life. They have more friends, they make more money, they contribute more to their community, they have lower incidences of mental health issues. All the good stuff happens to people who have an internal locus of control. But here's what's most interesting: even if the facts are that your circumstances are victimizing you, even if you are at the bottom of the socioeconomic strata, even if you have been victimized or discriminated against, what studies find is that even if you have every right to say, yes, but the facts are that my circumstances are very difficult, more difficult than someone else's, still having an internal locus of control benefits you. You still do better in life, except in one circumstance. The one circumstance where an external locus of control is not the right perspective is when dealing with others. So you want to have an internal locus of control about yourself, internalizing that there's things that I can do. I do have agency. I do believe that I can affect change. But when it comes to other people, you're giving them grace. You're giving them the benefit of the doubt that there must be some kind of external circumstances that are impacting them. That's what makes us more compassionate and helps us do our best work.

You talk about the positivity, not necessarily always positive talk, but how impactful it can be, especially in the younger years. So in family situations, for example, I can assume some people here might be parents, and therefore the impact that that can have on a child, giving them positive affirmations and reassurance. And, and I believe I've seen this a lot in my friendship groups— those that have had beautiful upbringings have gone on to do amazing things. So what can we be thinking about in terms of that? And you talk about it in your book as actually having an effect of what they believe later on in life and something to do with aging as well.

Yeah, yeah, no, there's some amazing research around how your beliefs become your biology. That we, check this out, we know that people who have positive views of aging in their 30s go on to live, this is a study done at Yale, go on to live 7.5 years longer on average. Okay, positive views about aging, what does that sound like? A negative view of aging, you've probably heard it many times, I'm having a senior moment, right? Something like that. Or aging involves inevitable decline. If that's the first to mind thing that you think of when you get a little back pain or whatever, if you think, ugh, I'm getting older, there it goes, it's inevitable that I'm gonna have inevitable decline, that's a negative view of aging. A positive view of aging is something like growth is possible at any age, okay? Aging involves inevitable decline, growth is possible at any age. Which one is true? They're both true, right? Which one is false? Who cares? The point is beliefs are tools, not truths. So if you choose the belief that growth is possible at any age, how will you behave differently? All right, you will change your behavior. And so this is what's so important about this is that there's kind of a myth out there that your beliefs can become your biology, that these placebo effects, they actually change your biology somehow. That is not true. Beliefs and placebos don't change sickness, they change illness. Sickness and illness are two different things. Sickness is in the body, illness is in the brain. Sickness is a physiological damage, illness is the perception of those symptoms. It's the difference between pain and suffering, 'cause all pain is in the brain. And so it turns out if you have a positive view of aging, you don't somehow vibrate at the frequency of the universe and change your mitochondria, it has nothing to do with that whatsoever. It's not about the woo-woo stuff at all. It's that your beliefs become your biology. They help you live 7.5 years longer. To put that in perspective, that's greater than the effect of changing your diet. It's greater than the effect of exercise. It's greater than the effect of quitting smoking. But it's not magic. It's that people who have a positive view of aging do those things. They take better care of their bodies. They go out and exercise. They see their friends. They're active in their community. Because they think growth is possible at any age versus someone who says, well, I'm just getting older, it's gonna happen more and more. And then they, that does lead to inevitable decline. So that's a great example of how our beliefs really can change our biology, but via behavior.

Great.

I have a little get started guide. It's totally free. There's no obligation. If you go to this QR code, there's a 5-minute belief transformation journal, or you can go to that URL. There's no obligation, nothing to purchase. It's just a guide to help you get started on recognizing your limiting beliefs starting to adopt those liberating beliefs. So that's for you.

For me, definitely the biggest and best takeaway I've taken away from it is that you talk about not just the, the line, I'll believe it when I see it, it's actually turning that into I'll see it when I believe it. I think this has been a wonderful chat, so thank you so much for coming today. Thank you for being a wonderful audience, and please give a big round of applause.

Thank you so much. Thank you.