Brian Johnson summarizes key ideas from Heidi Grant Halvorson’s book Succeed in a short Philosopher's Notes TV/podcast episode. Major points: self-control can be trained like a muscle (daily small practices transfer across domains); set goals that are specific, difficult but attainable (stretch between comfort and panic); true confidence combines belief in ability with realistic anticipation of challenges; intrinsic goals (relatedness, competence, autonomy, contribution, growth, health) yield lasting well-being while extrinsic goals (image, wealth, fame) do not; adopt a ‘getting better’ mindset rather than ‘being good’; visualize the process/steps to success rather than only the desired outcome. Episode includes examples (e.g., weight-loss study) and brief calls-to-action to read the book and visit Optimize Me.
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Hey guys, this is Brian with a Philosopher's Notes TV episode. I haven't done these in a long time. Really excited to be back. Today we've got a Philosopher's Notes episode on Succeed. One of my favorite books by one of my favorite people I've gotten to know over the last year, Heidi Grant Halvorson. Check her out@heidi granthalvorson.com she's one of the world's leading research scientists studying the science of well being, the science of flourishing, positive psychology, and she also happened to write the most popular blog post in Harvard Business Review's history on the science of success Goal setting. Really cool human being. Great book. It's all about the science of how we can reach our goals. Really into this stuff. It's nice to have kind of fun self development, but I really love grounded, evidence based, scientifically sound ideas on how we can achieve our ideal lives. So we're going to look at some big ideas really quickly in this episode. Check out the note for more and check out the book obviously to go way deep but but here are some of the ideas we'll explore. 1. The fact that we have to build our self control muscle. You can train it just like a muscle. Very cool stuff. We're going to look at goal targets and how you want to set specific plus difficult but possible goals. We're going to look at confidence, what true confidence looks like. It's confidence in our abilities and the fact that we're going to face challenges. We're going to learn how to go from daydreaming to rocking it. We're going to look at the fact that goals aren't all created equally. Choose wisely. We're going to look at the importance of having a getting better mindset versus a being good mindset. And finally we're going to look at the question. Is visualizing success such a good idea? Well, science tells us it's not if all you're doing is gazing at your vision board. It's much better to imagine the steps you're going to take to achieve your outcome than it is to obsess about your outcome. Very cool distinction. So let's take a quick look here. We're going to start with the self control muscle. The big idea here is the fact that if you want more self control, you can get more and you get more self control the same way you get bigger muscles. You've got to give it regular workouts. Really, really cool stuff. So if you want to build self control and you should want to build self control, willpower, as we talked about in a prior Optimal Living 101 episode, is the queen of all virtues. It's the greatest predictor of your health, happiness, well being, wealth, etc. Now what's cool is recent research Heidi tells us has shown that by engaging in daily activities such as exercising, keeping track of your finances or what you're eating, or even just remembering to sit up straight. There you go. I just sat up straight. How about you? Every time you think of it, this can help you develop your overall self control capacity. For example, in one study, students who were assigned to and stuck to a daily exercise program not only got physically healthier but but they also became more likely to wash dishes instead of leaving them in the sink and less likely to impulsively spend money. Bottom line here is you can build your self control and when you build it in one area, it translates into more self control in other areas. That's awesome. So pick your favorite self control exercise. What's it going to be for you? Go work on it. Next big idea here is goal targets and I realize I'm going really quickly. I've got to to get this done in 10, so wish me luck. And again, check this out for more. So we want to set difficult but possible goals, right? A lot of people set just insane goals. They don't get clear on it and it's just overwhelming. They get stressed out tall. Ben Shahar describes it as you want to have a stretch goal in between your comfort zone, which is here, and your panic zone, which is here. You don't want to stretch so far. You snap. You want to have difficult but possible goals. Again, we can talk about that for a weekend. We're going to move on to the next big idea, which is a really cool one. Confidence in ability and challenges. Let's read this one. Women who imagined that the path to weight loss would be easy lost an average of 24 pounds less than those who imagine themselves having a hard time resisting temptation. Get that? When you imagine that something's going to be hard, you actually do much better at it. Why is that? As she continues, in this point, when you have a sense of the challenge you're going to face, then you do the work necessary to rock it. Now again, this is where we get in trouble, where we're just thinking about how much we want something. It's going to be super easy. Well, I like to combine. I can make this easy, but I also we need to spend time imagining the challenges and how we're going to go through them. Really, really cool idea. So true confidence and I'll do a whole episode on this. True confidence is confidence in ability and the challenges we're going to face. Very, very, very powerful idea. Don't hear that much. Do you daydream into rocket it? We're actually going to skip that one. It's good. You want to move from daydreaming to rocket it. Not all goals are created equally. This is a really, really big idea. So we talk about the fact that we have intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Let's just hear what Heidi has to say about it. She says, as I mentioned earlier, not all goals lead to lasting feelings of true satisfaction and well being. And that's because not all goals satisfy our needs for relatedness, competence and autonomy. These are intrinsic variables. Which ones do in general, goals that are about making, supporting or strengthening relationships do. So do goals that focus on personal growth, physical health, or self acceptance, addressing your shortcomings, or if they can't be changed, simply coming to terms with them. Goals that have to do with contributing to your community or helping others also fulfill these needs. Now, she goes on to say that if all you're thinking about is how you can polish your public image and how you can impress people, the those are extrinsic goals. If you go for accumulating wealth, well, guess what?
You won't.
These won't lead to real happiness. In fact, they'll take you away from happiness. You'll be less psychologically stable and all that stuff. So not all goals are created equally or equal. You want to focus on intrinsic goals. We talk about that in another video I did. Intrinsic versus extrinsic goals. So pay attention to the goals that you're setting for yourself. And as you do that, think about how you're approaching your goals. Are you approaching it with a getting better mindset or a being good mindset? Now, there's a huge difference here. Getting better. When we focus on getting better, we approach life as an experiment. We're trying to get a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. There's a big difference between trying to get better versus trying to always look good. And if you're coming from the looking good mindset and you're going to have a really tough time, you want to orient yourself to the getting better, getting better, getting better mindset. Again, we talk about it more in the note and I'll do a whole video on just that idea as well, for now, moving on. She says, what about visualizing success? Well, here we go. She says, what about visualizing success? I won't name names but it seems that there are an awful lot of self help books out there telling people that if they just picture what they want in their minds it will somehow happen. That would be great if it were true, but scientifically speaking there really isn't much evidence for it. On the other hand, visualization can be very helpful if you imagine the steps you will take in order to succeed rather than the success itself. Mentally simulating the process of achieving the goal rather than the hoped for outcome not only results in a more optimistic outlook and but in greater planning and preparation. Picture yourself doing what it takes to succeed and you will soon find yourself believing that you can. The best part is you'll be absolutely right. So big distinction here is there's a difference between visualizing the outcome and visualizing the steps in the process. And we want to focus on the steps in the process. And I go off in the note, I'm not gonna have time to go off on it here, but I go off in the note on how we confuse things a lot. We want this get everything quick kind of attitude where we have a vision board. We've got our vision of what we want to achieve and we focus on that. But oftentimes we don't take the action required. And that vision board has the extrinsic goals talked about the fact that not all goals are created equally. Most often we're taught to create vision boards that have extrinsic goals on them. Being hot, being wealthy with the mansion on the house, being famous, having a best selling book or whatever it is that we think is going to make us happy. Well that's not what we want to visualize in the first place exclusively. We want to focus on the intrinsic things of improving our lives and our relationships and making a contribution which lead to true happiness. And then of course we want to take action in those directions. So there you go. That's a quick look. New style behind the camera and ah, we're already up to our 10 minutes. Hope you dug it. I'm gonna do videos on all these little ideas too. So there you go.
Alright.
10 minutes goes very, very quickly. Succeed how we can reach our goals. There's a few big ideas. Check out Heidi Heidi Grant Halvorson. She is awesome. Have a great day.
See ya.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To to find out more go to Optimize Me.
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