How To REWIRE Your Brain To NEVER BE LAZY Again (Try This Today) | Andrew Huberman

We are in control of our thoughts and behaviors. We can't control all of them, but my goal is to be as deliberate and non-reflexive as possible.

How do we get to that place?

Every step is not equivalent. If it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, everyone would pursue their goals. Everyone would push back against adversity. Everyone, I mean, you can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs, and I do think inspirational stories are very high value. In fact, I think they're vicarious dopamine. I think they give us the sense that we could, which then orients hope, which then orients us to the world again.

Maybe it's possible for me.

That's right. So let's say, let's take the example of somebody who's.

But there's a finish, that's that story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time. Is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go and so it's harder and harder.

Well, it's just very non-linear. You know, it's some days go, you know, I know this from my scientific career. Some days it's easy, some days it's hard. It's all over the place, right? So I think the thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be an effort longer, and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort.

And not think about the reward, but just say, oh, I'm enjoying the process.

Right.

Well, you just described the first step. The first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process, which is the key operation in order to succeed, is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there and it can feel.

Overwhelming and depressing and I'm not good enough.

That's right.

I should just give up. What am I doing this for?

That's right.

And those thoughts will affect us.

And they're very realistic, right? I mean, as Carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field, positive self-talk oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. Lying to yourself won't work. Saying I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner. We all haven't lost. Or you haven't won yet is great.

But that's not the most effective use of these systems. Well, you're also being out of integrity with yourself. You're telling yourself a lie. You're like, and then you're losing your ability to have confidence because you're just lying to yourself.

And if it's really extreme, there's a name for it. It's called delusional.

Right?

Right.

And people will start to point that out and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your goals. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels. I'm not just staying in bed all morning.

I'm not, yeah.

A good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend, he did nine years in the SEAL teams. His name is Pat Dawson. And we were talking about the Admiral McRaven thing, you know, get up and make your bed. And they really do that. And I think the way it was described was, so at the end of the day, even if everything doesn't go well, your bed is still made. For me, that's not that big of a reward, frankly. And so I said that.

I love it though, I make my bed.

Oh, I definitely make my bed in the morning, but I mean, going back and seeing that at the end of a hard day, it's not enough. I felt like there was something else there. So I asked him, he said, well, it's very interesting because part of it is about not just making your bed, but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed. You're not lying in bed and ruminating. You're not back on your heels.

You're not on your phone.

That's right. When you look at, and you have spent a lot of time with people in high performing communities, mainly through some consulting work, but what you find is that we can all be either back on our heels, flat-footed or forward, center, and when you look when you look at people who are in these high performance communities, they try and keep their center of mass forward almost through what seemed like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee. But it's not just about what you're doing. It's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior. So the key to this is if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody. people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine. They hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day one. Day two, you put them on. Day three, you go out the door. Day four, you walk around the block and then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons. Okay, great, but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasureful and to give you energy, the key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be, let's say I go out and I run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself, this is the good part. This is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. So it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with single is made up of, you know, single steps. But the key is to reward the harder steps. Not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want.

Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside.

You could if that was a huge barrier for you. It was very hard. It is very hard for you. Running the 10 miles, that's hard. Find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process. So this is why I think reps in the gym, the final reps, like reps to failure, are usually not the best example. First of all, most people aren't doing reps to failure and it doesn't translate to young kids and stuff where they probably shouldn't be doing heavy weight reps. to failure, this kind of thing. What you want, however, is if you're going to go there to think about, this is the hard part because that's when adrenaline, norepinephrine are getting maxed out and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down. I don't want to highlight them too much because they are a very niche and specialized community, but you look at people in special operations, you look at the process, like the whole evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't. It's really about putting people in distress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress, but buffer that stress. Reward the process through teamwork, reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels, not being flat-footed, but center of mass forward. And I should also be clear, I'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like, you know, work, work, work. In fact, if you're spending too much epinephrine, if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie, you will burn out eventually unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine. And the recovery process is especially important. There's a second reward system. So you've got the dopamine system, and I guess to really put a box around it, the subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process. The tough conversation with a significant other, it's like when it's really tough and you want, you just, that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the good part because I'm not speaking or this is the good part because I'm not reacting. Right, I'm not reacting or this is the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly but I'm on the right path. They're upset, they're not feeling your empathy, this kind of thing or you're not really understanding what's going on, you're getting frustrated but if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, really dialed in so that the the next time I'm going to breeze right past this. That's really how the process works. Because remember, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, even if you get a billion dollars, or you win a Nobel Prize, or you win the presidency. It's all internal. These neurochemicals are all internal. And while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively, like food, sex, sleep, all these things will trigger these neurochemicals, we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things.

How do you do it then? How do you bring dopamine in your brain subjectively through daily conversation with yourself?

So, there's a process I'm going through right now where I'm trying to write a book and it's hard. It's hard. And I was told that the harder it is, the better I'm probably doing it. I was like, great. My editor is ready to kill me because I'm slow and I'm a very slow person. I drive people crazy. I'm glacially slow because science is slow and I like to get things right.

You want to rush it?

I like to get things right. But I'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published, I can stand behind, it was the best we could do with the tools at the time. And I just know that when I look back on a writing career or a scientific career, I want to be able to say, you know, every journal we put it in was rock solid, everything was rock solid, we had fun doing it, the relationship, so I go slow. But as a consequence, what I'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days. I think social media is great, I teach neuroscience on social media, because I think it's important to do public education. I think distraction too. But it's incredible. and it's incredible how much time and energy it can take. So what I've started doing now is I turn off my phone and I lock it in a safe. And I experience extreme anxiety.

Right?

It's so weird. Why is that? Is it because it gives you so.

Much dopamine that when you're not having it? Well, this is scary because I actually think, brief anecdote, on the weekend I was driving, there's a kid that I mentor, and I picked up my phone and I was texting while I was driving. And he said to me, this is really embarrassing for me, he said, I wish you wouldn't text while you drive. And I put it down and I realized this is crazy. I know that my life and his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message, which means I wasn't doing it rationally. It's just pure reflex at this point. I don't think I'd pick up the phone because I don't even know what I'm looking for there anymore. It's just become reflexive. For me lately, the longer I can keep that phone safe and write a grant or this book, what I tell myself is the agitation is good. At least I'm not doing that. And then I find that as I start to write and I get into the process, I start feeling good about it and I'll pause and say, okay, I have control over my behavior. I can put that thing away. There might be a nuclear war out there and I'm just doing this anyway. I have control over my thoughts, my feelings and behavior. So I tell myself that and then I find I have immense energy and all I want to do is write. And I kind of tunnel into the process. And I think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete. I think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful.

So what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience.

As long as I'm writing, I'm on the right path. As long as I'm not writing and I'm looking at my phone, I'm not on the right path. Because for me, the two or three things that are most important for my career are writing grants, working on this book manuscript, and writing scientific manuscripts.

I mean, there are other things as well. Anything else that you're not doing is holding you back from doing that. That's right.

So, you need to be focused, center mass forward on doing those things. That's right. So, I don't do any jumping around, power poses, things like that. I will use tools to kind of ramp up my dope. I mean, there are certain songs that are really embedded in my. Emotionally, my emotional thing that go back to, you know, when I was a, you know, wild, you know, skateboarding, punk rock teenager that will get me fired up. And I think there's real utility.

That's pure dopamine. That's just dopamine, but it's not sustainable.

You have to subjectively keep yourself motivated, I guess. That's right.

And so.

And then if I finish a chapter, I will. stop for a moment and I'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself. I'm big on like self-reflection with humor and just thinking this is crazy. You know, my brain is under my control. There would be people out there that say there's no free will, but I do not believe that. I put my hands in a lot of brains. You stimulate certain brain areas, people do things. You stimulate other brain areas, people think things. Ultimately, unless you have electrodes in your head and someone's stimulating them, we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors. We can't control all of them. But my goal is to be as deliberate and non-reflexive as possible in life. That's my goal from when I wake up in the morning until I go to sleep.

How do we get to that place?

Little by little and by rewarding each thing. If you get up and you, we use the make the bed example, make the bed, you're not back on your heels, you make a cup of coffee, you sit down, you script out something in a journal, you exercise, maybe you call a relative that you think might you need to hear from you or that you'd like to talk to. You do something in a deliberate way, just being deliberate and learning to push away the things that are trying to make you reflexive is so important.

I think same thing as reactive or what's reflective?

Yeah, so there are two modes of brain operations. So now this is getting a little nitty-gritty but one is deliberate where we're thinking duration, path and outcome. What should I do? What But how long should I do it and what's the outcome? Deliberate.

Yeah.

Intentional. And it feels like work. This is what people need to understand. That deliberate thought, deliberate action, writing the book, doing the workout you don't want to do, whatever it is, having the conversation, it's supposed to feel hard. It's supposed to feel hard. But you should subjectively reward it so that you get better at doing that. So it's supposed to feel hard because it's associated with this release of these neurochemicals that create this agitation. The mental strain you feel when you're learning something is the trigger for neuroplasticity for your brain to change.

Say that again. The mental strain you feel while doing something is the what?

Is the trigger for neuroplasticity.

Which neuroplasticity allows you to expand your mind to do more things. That's right.

So, neuroplasticity is a process of taking something where there's duration, path and outcome, where I'm working hard, I'm thinking hard, maybe it's a hard conversation, maybe it's a business plan, maybe it's a scientific career. and the goal of neuroplasticity is to make things reflexive so you don't have to think about them. Right?

For instance, I just started taking Spanish class one-on-one and it's extremely hard. It makes me want to say, why am I doing this? This is gonna take me years until I'm conversational. Who knows how long until I'm fluent? You know, if it's this hard as like this stage, man, is it ever gonna get easier? I have those moments every time I'm doing class. I'm like, this sucks. Right. Because I'm like, oh, I'm 37. Can I learn this language at this point? It's so much easier when you're five. Now it's almost impossible. I watched your video on this a couple days ago on social media. And the video you talked about this is, yes, it's harder when you're older to expand your neuroplasticity, but it's going, it's almost the, what I'm hearing you say is like, it's the only way to live is the older you get, you need to constantly be expanding it, otherwise you'll be going backwards.

That's right.

So, you know, when you want to learn something new like Spanish or a new physical skill, your mind shifts over. The forebrain comes on and says, okay, we're going to pay attention to things.

And now what am I doing?

I get so tired. I'm like... And we start doing evaluative stuff to other people, to ourself, and you can start using all sorts of examples like, wait, you know, I was a professional athlete in your case, or I want to be clear, I was never a professional athlete, but you were a professional athlete. You've been successful in other regimes of life. it still feels like effort, right? And so, but that effort is because two things are happening. One is adrenaline epinephrine is being released, so it doesn't feel great.

It's not fun.

It's like, ugh. And then, in addition to that, by bringing focus to something, you're recruiting a neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is the molecule of focus.

Now, it's important-- which takes energy and effort.

It takes energy and effort. You feel it in your body and in your brain. and it tends to highlight, acetylcholine will highlight the areas of your brain that are active during that learning phase when the teacher's talking or you're talking and making that effort, it's paying attention to how you're moving your mouth, what it sounds like to you, feedback cues, and it's marking those brain areas for change. And then later when you sleep or when you work out or when you're having a conversation with somebody, that's actually when the brain changes occur.

So, during the actual activity, it's when you're not doing the activity, resting or recovering, when it starts to expand or it starts to contract.

It's when the, so, neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience and is the main way in which we go from deliberate action, duration, path, outcome stuff to reflexive action and thought. That process has two parts. One is the trigger, which is in adults, is triggered by focus and attention and even heightened state of agitation. The more frustrated you feel, the more you're actually triggering learning. It's saying, this is important, this is important. Because the brain just wants to do whatever it wants to do. It needs to cue itself to, oh, this must need to change. And then the second part is deep relaxation, meditation, in particular a form of meditation called yoga nidra, which we could talk about, but forms of deep relaxation, deep sleep, like slow wave sleep, that's when the connections between neurons called synapses actually get stronger. That's when the connections that you don't want get removed. And that's also in certain cases where you get new neurons actually born in your brain to help these circuits speak Spanish.

This is why in sports growing up, I remember I would go to like basketball camps in the summer and I would always learn new footwork. And I always just wanted to be like the fancy guy doing like whatever finger roll layups or something as a kid. But then we would go to these basketball camps and we just work on the fundamentals and footwork and like all this different stuff. And I remember being in the moment of being very frustrating and challenging. I was like, I don't get this. And I would suck at it. But then the next day I would come back and I would all of a sudden like have it after a few times of doing it. But I never learned how to do it in the moment. It was always like, okay, I might have got it once, but then I fumbled on it. It was the next day or the next few days where it's like, oh, I can just shows up. It shows up. It just shows up. And that's because when the mind is able to relax, it's then making the.

Connections on how to do that thing. Yeah, so in deep sleep and rest is when the connections actually get built up. It's sort of like with resistance training, right? The gym is a little misleading, resistance training, because people get the famous pump, and so they get a visual glimpse into what they might look like later. But then of course it goes back down, right? But actual hypertrophy, the enlargement of the muscle fibers and the strengthening of the neural connections, is later when you sleep. So it's the same thing with neuroplasticity.

How important is it for us to constantly be learning and challenging our mind the older we get?

Well, I believe it's very important for living a full life. And my hero in this, two heroes actually is, I would say, Richard Feynman, the great physicist who had a very playful attitude about learning. That's one thing that I really should illustrate. If you are in frustration and strain, a sense of play is great because in play you have focus. You have intention and alertness and it keeps you light enough that there's that dopamine release. Dopamine is released in play for a reason because kids and animals, young animals and young children learn social interactions through play. A puppy bites another puppy and the puppy barks out loud, that's why they have those sharp puppy teeth, to say that's too much of a bite. Then they play a little bit more. They're finding the boundaries. They're finding the limits to which they can use physical force for hurting another or just for playing. They learned soft bite. Play in animals is an ancient form of sampling these neural pathways. And as adults, we tend to be more demanding of ourselves. We don't tend to embrace as much play. Richard Feynman is somebody who really incorporated a lot of play into his adult life. He learned how to, in addition to being a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he also played bongo drums. he learned how to sketch and paint late in his life. He did float tanks. He was kind of a wild man, but he had a lot of fun and he was a lifetime learner. So I think it's important because it's a great way to learn dopamine release. And it's a great way to expand one's experience of life.

This is when I was in Poland with Wim Hof earlier this year. I took a group of 13 guys and we were all nervous to get into this ice tub together for 10 minutes, up to here. And for the first two minutes, it was not fun. We were just like, this sucks, this is cold. But then all of a sudden we were like, let's have fun. We're gonna be in here for eight more minutes. We might as well try to enjoy it. So we started chanting, we started singing, we started just in a rhythm together, smiling, and it was like, it's more enjoyable. It's still gonna be challenging, but you might as well try to have the most fun in the challenge than just suffer, right?

Yeah, team and community. Not by coincidence, is a powerful tool for buffering stress. Children can learn very easily. Their brain is hyper plastic and very quickly is the whole job of the young brain is to take things that it's taught and very quickly pass it over to reflex, including morals and beliefs. And automatic. Yeah, and this is what's scary is also, the things that kids hear and they're exposed to, those beliefs become reflexive. Now, around age 25 or so, the brain is still plastic and forever for the entire life, but then you need more focus and you need what's called self-directed plasticity, neuroplasticity. Self-directed, meaning the only person that can change their brain for the better after about age 25 is the actual person.

You.

You can't force neuroplasticity on somebody, positive neuroplasticity. So, the other element that's really important to plasticity is this deep rest phase. and it's associated with the release of the molecule neuromodulator serotonin. Serotonin is a reward molecule just like dopamine, except that it's released in the brain in response to the subjective experience that we have enough resources. So when we eat a big meal or we enjoy, even better, when we enjoy a meal with friends or family and it just feels like one of those incredible evenings, You know, you're reset. It's that feeling of being reset. It's an anti-depressive effect. When we are, when you hold, you know, if you hold your child or a partner that you love or your dog, if you love your dog, there's this feeling of having enough. And so whereas dopamine is really the molecule that makes us look at things outside the boundaries of our skin, like to be in pursuit of things, It really is the pursuit motivation molecule. Serotonin is really about feeling like we have enough in our immediate environment. And it's so powerful because unless that serotonin box is checked off periodically, we cannot lean back into the dopamine outward pursuit process for very long.

So we need serotonin to feel more, what, complete, whole, safe, safe.

Once you feel, this is where people I think that the go-getters get it wrong, no pun intended, where getting after it and being hard driving is really important. We've all seen examples of this. I've seen a number of these in Silicon Valley friends that did very well in tech get to the point where they reach that finish line and then they don't have a whole lot or a whole lot of people to share that with and they end up very isolated and depressed. They go through this whole cycle of trying to find themselves. You need to balance serotonin and dopamine. Maybe across the day, maybe across the week.

Can you talk about dopamine focus and motivation and how to manage our dopamine hits? Because it seems like every 30 seconds we're getting dopamine now. Whether it's drinking coffee, having candy, social media, email pings, dings on the watches, whatever it is, it's a dopamine overload it feels like.

Yes.

So how do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time?

Yeah, great question. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation.

The molecule of motivation.

Absolutely. I mean, for years and years, people thought dopamine was about pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive.

Okay.

There's a simple experiment that illustrates that, but I would be remiss if I didn't first mention two excellent resources for people that want to learn a lot about dopamine. These would be perhaps interesting people for you to talk to directly. The first is a book called the Molecule of More, which is all about dopamine. The author is Lieberman. I don't know him personally, but I love the book. I wish I had written it. The second is Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And the author there is Anna Lembke, L-E-M-K-E. She's a medical doctor and psychiatrist and runs the dual diagnosis addiction clinic at Stanford School of Medicine. She's a colleague. I consider her a friend and she is world class, second to none in all things dopamine as it relates to addiction. So wonderful reads. And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is kind of paraphrasing elements from their book. So I want to be clear. So here's the experiment. Take two rats. You give them a lever they can press. and they can get food out of that lever, they can get heat if their cage is cold, they can get all sorts of things that are great for a rat, including a mate to mate with if they press this lever. Both rats press the lever just fine. Now you take away dopamine from one of those rats. You can actually do that by using a toxin that can kill off all the dopamine neurons. Okay? There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these dopamine neurons, much in the same way that Parkinson's destroyed dopamine neurons. What you find is that both rats or both people still experience pleasure from food, from sex, from warmth when they're cold, from cool when they're too warm, etc. However, if you take that rat, both rats, and you move them one rat length away from the lever. So they have to just do a little bit of work, little bit of work in order to press the lever. Or you take a human who has no dopamine neurons or very little dopamine and you make the pleasureful thing a little bit more challenging to get to. The ones with no dopamine do not pursue pleasure at all. That's just one example of what now are hundreds of examples in the neuroscience literature showing that dopamine is the molecule of pursuit, craving, motivation, drive. Pick your favorite word.

Dopamine is a good thing in motivation.

Provided it's in proper levels. Yes. That's right. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. Now, there's a double-edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned, accurately trigger dopamine release. Seeing positive comment, a compliment, food, the more palatable a food, a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's baked but doesn't have anything on it, one truly releases more dopamine than the other. I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine. Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%.

Gives you more dopamine.

More dopamine is released. You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain, there's one related to movement, one related to reward. Broadly speaking, there are others, but broadly speaking, the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names, but we'll just confuse people. But you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement. So nicotine, about a 50% increase. Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling. Methamphetamine, thousand or even thousand fold increase.

Holy cow.

So huge increase in dopamine.

That's why it's so addictive.

So addictive. But what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before. How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before.

That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things.

That's right. Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine, hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore. Okay, now eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge. Let me give an example. This is a true story example. I out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name.

But.

In talking about dopamine, someone I know has a child, the kid is in his 20s, he was a decent student, excellent athlete, really charming, nice kid. I've known him since he was little. And he reached a point where his friends had graduated high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that. He wasn't into that. You know, this resonated with my earlier story. He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working. And he was convinced he had ADHD and he was depressed. And he started taking off down the path of medication, which, by the way, have helped many, many people. Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, we are drugs that increase dopamine. Because dopamine increases focus, it increases motivation, and it increases drive, essentially. The willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that have dopamine pursue, the ones that have depleted dopamine do not. So this guy, who is a real story, was struggling in a major way. So about three months ago, He was watching a lot of videos online. He was texting a lot. He was mainly playing video games, video games, video games, video games. But he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore. And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something. Why? Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus. He heard about the dopamine system and Anna's work and I talked to him and he decided to do what some people call dopamine fast. But for him that meant no video games and he did two weeks of no screens, which at first I think was agonizing for him.

Oh my gosh.

It's now three months later, it's a little less than three months later. I actually talked to his parent today. Working full time off all ADHD meds. Has a girlfriend, I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive feature as opposed to someone who's spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive feature regardless of boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. He's very focused on his work, he's excited by things, and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games and he enjoys them again like never before. There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset. When you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus in order to excite you. So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated, unstimulated, most of the time it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, no, no, no, no. Now, there are a few hacks that can actually help. And Anna talks about some of these in her book. The main thing is to if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great, but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively. Like, what are some examples?

Texting, Instagram.

I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot. I'm going to grown adult and I spend three hours on it. But I do a lot of work there, right? I'm trying to put out content that's educational. But sometimes I think to myself, like, I'm a grown man. I'm saying two hours a day on Instagram. Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time now. But if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that it's.

You're scrolling.

You're not even sure what you're looking for. Like, what am I doing? Exactly. I just wasted this time. Exactly. And what you're looking for is something to jolt that. this line. So you want to limit those behaviors or in some cases if it gets really severe like it was for this individual you want to eliminate completely for 30, 60 days. Ideally it's 30 days. Now this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera. But some of those drugs of course have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic. You know these days I'm not a pot smoker, I've never liked drugs or alcohol, I kind of lucked out that way. But, you know, there's and I'm not trying to demonize. I'm not passing judgment. But, you know, cannabis, for instance, is pretty prominent in prominent use. And a lot and a lot of people, the idea of 30 days without that is that I think they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. But and I'm not here to tell people what to do.

Right.

Then there's about drugs, alcohol or anything. But the idea is 30 days of no interaction with that thing. person, behavior, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things. I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. All of that hinges on this dopamine system. So, you have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure or else they will soon not deliver pleasure, and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with. So the way to think about this is just to set up constraints. And as I'm stealing Anna's words left and right, forgive me, Anna, she has many more important things to say, and she says them much more eloquently than I. But she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake for breakfast. But we sort of understand that dessert comes at a certain time of day, and after completing certain things. But we for some reason, we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media. Because social media isn't just comments. You and me saying, oh, like Lewis put something up. There's that. That stuff's great. But then there's also a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff. There's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival. And so you need to restrict the amount of time. and especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the, you know, social media. And I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything, anything that you enjoy. Food, for instance. You don't want to overindulge in highly palatable foods. It's just bad for us. We know this for a number of reasons. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting.

What do you mean?

This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym. And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be just work out, including while I'm running. Why? Because these days we are layering in dopamine. We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking, okay? Big increase in dopamine. I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase. And some of them have L-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor. Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulates dopamine receptors. So you're getting it from the energy drink. Plus, it's the video game you're playing. Plus, you're with your friends. It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great, except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under stimulating and you're gonna think, I can't focus on this. So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class because the Canelo fight was that awesome.

It was insane.

It was amazing. Yeah, he's amazing. I am a boxing fan.

It was crazy.

And he, if you had to like build a boxer, you'd build him like that. Just his head, his shape, the right hook.

And it was just like, the roar of the crowd and just the energy, it was amazing.

Yeah, that's great. There's a beautiful story unfolding there with him.

Yes.

So that could be it too. There's a kind of a letdown. And so I think it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration, it's real. That's real. And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset. You don't have to necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tale of joy, but then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.

So true, man.

And if you're going to sit down and try and do work and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work. So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the period right before it's a little boring, frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate, sounds like a pretty boring life, right? It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up, but I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work out. And I think that's a functional dopamine increase. And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop. Now, there's some other hacks that Anna's talked about. And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof. Other people have done this, although this was happening long before Wim. There's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water. So this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use for anywhere from three to six minutes creates a 2.5 X increase in dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine increases alertness, feelings of well-being They did blood draws in this study, so these are real data. It wasn't conjecture. They really know this. And there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts or people who are struggling with ADHD who start doing regular cold water exposure, three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time, and discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase.

This stuff is fascinating, man.

It's really interesting to me because dopamine, coming up in neuroscience, I've been in the game a long time now, almost 30 years. But dopamine was always thought of as pleasure. But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure. And immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasureful, dopamine system crashes down.

What happens in the body when dopamine crashes?

Well, there's an interesting thing that happens because there's a hormone called prolactin, which is actually involved in milk letdown for nursing, but is also increased in both men and women in anticipation of childbirth. This is actually responsible for the so-called dad bod. Prolactin lays down body fat stores. It tends to make people a little more sedentary. and this has been shown in humans and in animals, it tends to reduce libido and sex drive. And so if you think about dopamine is a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years. So, you know, whether or not, you know, we think about currencies like dollars or euros or bitcoins or Ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine. Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for. And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience. This is why people were on cocaine or methamphetamine, which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase. They tend to be all about plans and action. They're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body, whereas drugs like cannabis and psilocybin and drugs, these are not drugs I recommend people use recreationally. I'm not passing judgment, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying and not saying, that any drugs that increase serotonin tend to make people kind of still focused on their internal landscape, their thinking. It's kind of an internal reflection thing. So the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another. And the prolactin system is associated with the serotonin system. So prolactin is kind of about, it's a mellowing out.

Interesting.

And just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, 1% of the world's population, a huge number, a very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera. And most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine. And oftentimes you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs and they'll be writhing like this with their face. Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement. I say this for two reasons. One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera. But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated who's bipolar or has schizophrenia. But if you see someone in their catatonic or they are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's, we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis to eliminate the voices and things of that sort. So I say that because I, you know, I, we have a big homeless population issue in California and elsewhere, too. And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, you know, we make this disparaging judgment that everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy. But oftentimes that those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system. Gotcha. Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a, you know, 1% of the world's population is a huge number. That's a lot.

And a lot of people suffering from these things. Ultra performers, you know, the people we study, these people we profile, these top one percenters, they do things differently and they have realized that success and greatness is not related to the volume of tasks that you complete, but simply the significance of them. And ultra performers are able to get themselves to do the things they know they should be doing even when they.

Don'T feel... How do they get themselves to do that?

So there's seven things and we can rip through them, but the metaphor here is take the stairs. So the title of the book comes from take the stairs, which is a metaphor for we live in an escalator mentality world. It's easier to gravitate towards the path of least resistance, towards what is convenient, towards what is comfortable. This is an escalator, and yet the truth of success in any endeavor, any industry, like when you all the people that you've interviewed here, it's always the same story. It's that they were able to get themselves to do things they know they should be doing, even when they don't feel like doing them, i.e. take the stairs. So what we're trying to do is take the stairs. It's discipline. Discipline is the antidote to procrastination.

Yes.

And there are there's seven key strategies that we can talk through, but understanding that the enemy is procrastination and these three types, which we haven't covered the third one yet, but procrastination is always there. And in fact, so the third type of procrastination is called priority dilution. And this is fascinating to study. Priority dilution is the chronic overachievers form of procrastination. What's different about it is unlike the first two, so classic procrastination and creative avoidance, you know, priority dilution is not about being lazy or disengaged or distracted, but it is the same net result of the first two, which is that you leave the office or you end your day with your most significant priorities incomplete. not because you're lazy, but because you allowed your attention to shift to less significant but perhaps more urgent tasks. Charles Hummel once wrote an essay called the Tyranny of the Urgent. I believe it was in 1969. And he's talking about how we are victims to the tyranny of the urgent and the more successful you become, the more the more you become a leader, the higher you accelerate in an organization, your enterprise grows as an entrepreneur. You've got more and more people vying for your attention. The bigger your personal brand grows, you've got more and more opportunities, more distractions, more things coming at you, and your priorities, if left unchecked, naturally dilute. Right.

So you got it.

Yeah.

Okay. So priority, dilution.

Yeah. So that's the third type of procrastination. So, you know, the question is, All right, if procrastination is problem, what's the solution? And I really believe the solution can be boiled down to one word. And it's a word that nobody likes. It's discipline. And it's not hard work. There's a difference. There's a distinction. Discipline is doing the things you know you should be doing even when you don't feel like doing them. If you can develop the ability to do that, then you literally have unlocked the ability to do anything in life, which unlocks the ability to achieve virtually anything.

Yeah, and I think Greg McKeown was talking about the effortless pursuit of accomplishing. There's like the path of resistance that will get you there, but when you know you need to take the hard path, how can you make it feel effortless? How can you play games with yourself when you got to do chores? How can you sing a song when you're mopping the floor? Whatever it is, how can you make it feel effortless? So it's not like this is exhausting and draining and, oh, I got to do this in order to get somewhere in 10 years. It's how can I reframe my mind around the activity to support me in having energy in the thing I don't want to do.

So let's talk about it.

Not be drained by the thing that I don't want to do.

Yes. So that is the first principle actually, it's called the Paradox Principle of Sacrifice. So now you mentioned Greg McKeown, his essentialism was his big breakout book. And the whole message of that book is the disciplined pursuit of less. Really?

Not trying to do everything.

No, yeah, just the pursuit of less.

That's what essentialism, that's how he describes it, the discipline.

Being disciplined. by focusing on less things.

By focusing on less things that are more significant. But you bring up the conversation of going, okay, well, you know, people here take the stairs and it's like, well, I don't want to take the stairs. You know, it's like, I don't want the hard work and you have to reframe it. So here's the paradox principle. In fact, I'm going to tell you a story. So in Colorado where I grew up, we are world famous for the Rocky Mountains.

Yes.

Okay, so to the western part of the state we have the Great Rocky Mountains. What a lot of people don't realize about Colorado is that as a state it's divided almost exactly in half. And to the eastern part of the state are the Great Kansas Plains. So it's really flat. Because of that unique topographical landscape, Colorado is one of the only places in the world that has both buffalo and cows in very close proximity to each other. Have I ever told you this? I don't think I've ever shared this with you. Okay, so what happens, there's a fascinating lesson to learn about greatness and achievement and success from studying the way that these two creatures respond to storms. So when a storm comes, storms almost always start in the west and they like brew in the west and then they roll out towards the east. And what cows do is very natural. Cows can sense that a storm is coming from this direction. And so a cow will turn east to run away from the storm. Now the only problem with that is--.

It's gonna catch up to them.

It catches up with them, right? So the storm catches them and without knowing any better, the cows continue to try to outrun the storm. And they actually run with the storm.

And they get trapped by the fence and then they're stuck there.

They're doing-- they're making it worse. Because they're trying to outrun the storm, which is stupid. But here's the thing. Humans do the exact same thing all the time. We are constantly trying to avoid these inevitable challenges that come along with the difficult circumstances that our very own choices have led us to be in. I can speak from personal experience here. There was a time in my life where I was 45 pounds overweight. People who are unhealthy are always making rationalizations for why it doesn't matter, nothing works, I've already tried it. It's not that big of a deal. It's fine. I've also been, there was a time in my life where I was over $50,000 in personal debt. People who are in debt constantly trying to find ways around paying their bills.

And paying off the minimums and spending money on other things.

Yeah, they keep spending. People who are struggling in their marriage are often avoiding the difficult but meaningful conversations that need to be had. If there's any hope of reconciling that relationship. And the key insight that the ultra performers have had that most of us have not is ultra performers have realized problems that are procrastinated on are only amplified. Problems procrastinated on are amplified. So waiting always makes it worse. Now, here's what Buffalo do. This is very unique for the animal kingdom. So Buffalo wait for the storm to cross, like right over the crest of the mountain top. And as the storm rolls over the ridge, Buffalo turn and they charge directly into the storm.

That's crazy.

So they run at the storm and by running at the storm they run straight through it, which actually minimizes the amount of pain and time and frustration they experience from that storm. It's such a great metaphor for all of us because all of us are dealing with different storms in life. You know, we have relationship struggles and health battles and we're trying to launch a business and we got young babies and you know, all these different, you know, COVID and we all have challenges. We don't get a choice about whether or not we have storms. The only choice that we have is how we respond to those storms.

Yes.

And more specifically, when we respond to those storms. So the natural human default is to run away from the storm. But what we miss is that it actually makes it worse. So this brings us to the paradox principle of sacrifice, which simply stated is this: Easy short-term choices lead to difficult long-term consequences.

Yes.

Meanwhile, difficult short-term choices lead to easy long-term consequences.

I've got a perfect example I'm living them right now from a long-term consequence. 20 years ago, I had surgery, I had eight teeth removed because I needed braces. So I put that off for a number of years without doing that. But then I finally got my wisdom teeth removed and then four more teeth. So it's wisdom and then four. And I was delaying it, delay, delay. But I was having, like, pain.

Right.

Finally get the teeth removed. And I'm supposed to do. Let it heal for a couple months and then go get braces on. Okay. And I'm thinking, this is so painful. I don't want to have two, three more years of braces now and deal with more pain. And I said, you know what? I'll just live my life like this with four gaps. I can still chew everything. It doesn't look too bad. Let me just live my life like this.

Okay.

And for 20 years, I had problems, little problems that continued to stack up. I had digestive problems because my back teeth weren't fully touching, so they weren't actually chewing the food properly. I finally started chipping my teeth in the front that I had to fix a couple times because it was only the front two teeth that were actually chomping and connecting. And I realized, wow, this is gonna impact my overall health, not just my teeth and my mouth, but my entire lifestyle if I don't solve this pain now. So at 36, I said, okay, I'm getting braces and making, you know, retainer braces, and it's more painful now. But I'm also glad that I'm taking the actions now and not waiting five, 10, 20 years when my teeth are falling out or something. So I'm taking the disciplined pursuit of the pain now for greater health for the rest of my life.

Yeah, and that's the switch. And right, problems procrastinated on are always amplified. Now here's the shift, and this is really important. We think of it as a sacrifice. I'm enduring pain. But the truth is we always experience pain. We're all trying to go through life trying to dodge pain. It's impossible. It's inevitable. We always experience pain. The only choice we have is whether or not we pay that price now, today, or we pay it later with interest. Procrastination and indulgence are really nothing more than creditors that charge you interest, which means when you make the sacrifice, just as the buffalo charging the storm, it's not a sacrifice. You're just, it's a short-term down payment on a rich future blessing. It's just harder now, but it's easier in the long term. See, people misunderstand take the stairs. They think it's like, oh, just do the hard thing, make your life as hard as possible. No, it's the freaking opposite. Take the Stairs is a methodology for giving you the easiest life, the best life, the most rewarding life, like the easiest life, but it is predicated upon an unpopular truth, which is that the shortest, most guaranteed path to the easy life is to do the hardest parts of things as soon as possible so as to avoid avoid the interest that will come with it if you wait.

Yeah, what is there's like this quote about entrepreneurship or something like, you know, those I'm gonna butcher this, but be willing to do the things today. It's like a meme online.

Do what others want.

Yeah, later.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's the things that others aren't willing to now so you can have what others won't have later.

For the rest of your life. Yeah, Dave Ramsey says live like no one else so later you can live.

Like no one else.

Exactly.

So you're teaching people to get out of debt. It's like if you don't pay the.

Price today, you'll be paying the price forever later. Right, so it's like, it's not, is life gonna be hard? Life is hard either way. It's, do you want it to be a little bit hard now or a lot bit hard later? Exactly. So that's the reframe and this is what was really fun about about the Take the Stairs book was realizing, oh, ultra performers don't like discipline any more than I do.

I like to sleep in.

Yes, but they have learned to train their brain to think differently about it. And you have to train the brain to process choices differently. And once you do, discipline isn't as hard as we think once we know how to think about it the right way. And this is a great example. When you make the calculation, most people just go, oh, that's hard. I'm not going to do it. Well, an ultra performer goes, well, that's hard, but if I don't do it, it's going to be harder later, so I'll do it now.

Yes.

And that opens the gate. So that's the first. We call it the Paradox Principle of sacrifice.

And that's sacrifice. What's the second?

Yeah, so the second one is the buy-in principle of commitment. this is really interesting. So whenever we're forced to make a choice, a decision about something that is hard, there's two types of energy that are expended in our decision making. We have a visual for this that's called the commitment continuum. And so basically, you know, the first type of energy is the one that we all think of. It's the physical energy required to execute the decision. For example, let's just take an easy one like New Year's resolution, I'm going to lose weight. When the time comes to go to the gym, the thought process for most of us sounds like this. We say, Do I feel like working out right now? And what's the answer to that question?

No.

No, never. I don't feel like working out now or ever. And for many people, most people. That's the end of the conversation. The human brain is not designed for success. The human brain is designed for survival. Survival is about conserving energy. Success is the opposite. Success is about expending energy, doing things that are uncomfortable. So it doesn't mean if you do this, if you struggle with procrastination, if you've made bad choices, it doesn't mean you're doomed for failure. It Actually means you have a perfectly functioning, healthy, normal human brain. But success is not normal. Success is not average. Success is not what most people experience. If you are trying to experience success, you need to rewire literally the neural pathways in your brain. It is a neurological rewiring that you're doing to yourself. It's like you're reprogramming your own computer.

Right.

Right.

And part of that is knowing that that we learned from the ultra performers, there's another type of energy expended in our decision making, which isn't physical energy, it's emotional energy. And what we learned is that there's emotional energy expended in simply making decisions. And in fact, very often the emotional energy of making the decision is much greater than the physical energy of executing the decision. And if you think about the gym example, it's not getting ourselves onto the treadmill once we're at the gym that's the hard part. It's when we're sitting on the couch deciding whether or not to go to the gym.

To go to the gym.

But once you get there, the physical energy is there. It's the emotional energy that is clouding the decision. It is making it feel worse than it actually is.

Is that why it's important to, when you make the commitment to schedule the commitments in?

Yeah, I mean that helps. Every little thing helps. So here's the strategy to follow through on commitments that you make that become difficult, which happens.

Yes.

Okay? So in the commitment continuum, you make this decision, emotional energy is expanded, and then it becomes difficult. And you've got two choices. You can move forward with what you said you wanted to do, or you can turn back towards the way you've always done things.

So I'm gonna go to the gym five days a week. for the year. That's my commitment.

Oh, for the whole year.

Yeah.

That's what someone might say, News Resolution, I'm going to the gym five days a week for the year.

Yeah, so yes. So it could be that, it could be, I'm going to double our growth, I'm going to triple our growth. Here's what happens in the moment when it becomes difficult. Most people, the attitude that most of us have is like, is this possible? Did I make the right decision? Can I do this? And the key is to instead ask the question how. Not is it possible, can it be possible, do I feel like doing it? Most of it, it's should. It's should versus how. Most people say, should I do this? Should I follow through? Should I make a different commitment? And you end up becoming what I like to call a should head, right? Don't be a should head because should gravitates you back towards the neutral, towards the safe. The mindset of the ultra performer is one degree different and their attitude says, well, I'm in this for good. I already committed to this and so the question is how? How will I pull this off?

How will I execute this commitment?

How will I hit that target? How will I meet this deadline? How will I get out of debt? How will I lose that weight? How will I save this marriage? How? And so you have to intentionally create the question how, okay? So that you don't inadvertently create the question should. Because should I or can I or is it possible pulls it back towards the negative or towards the neutral and here's the thing about the brain and just science in general, neutral isn't good enough. Neutral is negative. Neutral is absent the positive charge. Neutral is negative. So it doesn't mean you have to be like over the top crazy, like, you know, banging on your chest, doing affirmations, like all the time. Like you can do those things. It just means you have to at least be on one degree to the side of I'm not, I'm not allowing myself to question if I'm going to keep the commitment. I'm dedicating 100% of my energy into asking how am I going to keep this commitment? It's not should I stay married? It's how can I fix this? How can I stay married? How can I resolve this? That one degree of separation in the brain over the course of time creates a trajectory of two completely different outcomes for the same person.

Got it. Okay. So that's about the question how around the commitment.

Intentionally ask the question how.

Okay. And what would be the next step then?

Yeah. So focus.

Is one of them. You know, as we just kind of breeze through some of these. Focus is the idea that focus is power.

How does someone stay focused when life happens? When you go through a Someone dies in the family, when the pandemic hits, when you go bankrupt, whatever. Someone breaks up with you, you lose your job. How do you stay focused under extreme emotional breakdown?

Well, you can't allow your ability to stay focused to be dependent on your circumstances. Because there's always circumstances.

Always.

Always. There's always something going on in your life that's creating challenge and difficulty and pressure.

So it's almost like certain things need to be non-negotiable.

Yeah, you decide. So here's what you do is you decide. You have to decide each and every day consciously, intentionally, deliberately. I know we did another episode on multiplying time and the focus funnel. That is kind of a framework that's from the Procrastinate on Purpose, my second book, about how to figure out what to focus on. But at the end of the day, you just have to decide what you are willing to and wanting to go after and realizing that until you accomplish those things, everything else in your life is a distraction. Everything else is a distraction. But focus is power. And when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. Most people are getting diluted results in their life not because they're not smart enough or not good enough. It's because they're distracted. They are allowing their time, attention and resources to fragment, to dissipate, to disintegrate, to spread and what you need is focused energy to create a breakthrough.

And this is the example of Shehan's wall, right?

Yeah, we talk about that with personal brands.

What is, who is Shehan?

Oh, what's the Shehan wall?

I always love this concept though.

So, Sheehan's Wall, is it... Before you.

Go into that, because a lot of people, especially in the entrepreneurs that are following or listening and watching, the people that are building personal brands, they have lots of things they want to do at once. I've got this passion and these passions, and I want to try this thing, and I want to build four different companies at once. And they say, which one do I choose? So, when someone's got a lot of passions, they want to do it all at the same time. how can this example support them? Well, is your question, how do they.

Know which one to choose? Or, I got set up for that.

Why do they need to choose one?

Yes. Why do they need to choose one? Okay. So Sheehan's wall is an illustration. We named it after Peter Sheehan, who is a colleague of mine. He's a speaker, a really brilliant guy. He's the first person that I kind of heard the concept for, and we've adapted a little bit, but it really came from him. So we named it after him, which is that in personal branding, you've got two groups of people. There are those who are unknown and there are those who are known.

Yes.

And there's this huge invisible wall that you have to break through. And what most of us do is we're trying to break through the wall. And so we're trying to emulate, you know, these people over here and, like, going, oh, I want to have, I want to talk about all these different topics and have all these different business models and be on all these different social media platforms. And I have to do all these different jobs. And they're bouncing off the wall. They complain about noise, but they actually are the noise. They are part of the noise because they're doing a lot. of different things and when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. The way to break through the wall, and this is kind of what we're talking about.

To build audience attention, credibility, results, all those things.

Yes, and that's personal branding, what we just happen to do, but she ends well applies beyond that. But in personal branding, we would say we help clients figure out what's the one thing that they could be known for, find their uniqueness is the term that we would use. and the way you break through the wall is by becoming the world's leading authority on one thing. Not 10 things. Not 10 things. One thing.

One thing first. And then when you break through... Then you can expand into other things.

Yes. So, I mean, if you look at my personal brand as an example, okay, so we're talking about take the stairs. I broke through the wall on take the stairs. That book, you know, when we launched it, and AJ and I created this plan and our whole team, we worked together, we launched this book, we hit Number two on the New York Times, I was 29 years old. That was part of how we broke through all. That's how I met you. That was how I got the first time on the podcast was years ago at this point. And then now we've been able to expand into some other things. Influence really is what we study. But money is the same way. So the Sheehan's wall applies to money. You've heard people say multiple revenue streams.

Yes.

Multiple revenue streams is horrible advice. It is horrible advice for a beginner.

For a beginner, yes.

You do not want multiple revenue streams. When you're beginning, you need one revenue stream that is really good.

Focus the tension.

That is how it works. And if you look at almost every billionaire, they didn't do it by having a lot of different things.

At first.

At first, they made their first million on one thing. They dominated one thing. and they blew through the wall, and then they got a little bit of money, and then they invested it, and then it grew.

And then it diversified into different assets.

And then it grew into other things. Yes. But you don't need multiple streams of revenue. All that's doing is diluting your focus, which is gonna dilute your results.

You're gonna bounce off the wall financially. It's the same thing. Think about one area where you're stuck in a box. Right now, a box is like a cage. 3D box, and 3D is three dimensions. What keeps you in the box? three forces, and these are the three M's. And I want everyone to draw a circle, and in that circle we're going to draw a Venn diagram. You know what a Venn diagram is? It's three intersecting circles. And the first circle is your mindset, three M's. And I always alliterate everything because it helps you to be able to remember it better. First one is your mindset. Now, your mindset are your assumptions, your attitudes about something. Now, let's break that down. for me functionally, what your mindset is about this subject. I want people to make this very personal. Think about something in area you're held back. This is what you believe is possible is your mindset. It is what you believe you are capable of. It is what you believe you deserve as your part of your mindset. Because that's a big thing. That's your thermostat, right? If somebody has a mindset of, like, I could teach someone the method of how to remember names, but their mindset I'm stupid.

I don't deserve to remember names or.

I'm not capable of it. Exactly. Or exactly, or I'm too old or whatever it is, that's a mindset. Brain doesn't work that way. Exactly. Then the method won't take hold.

Won't matter. Exactly.

So this is the formula here. So how do you learn to believe that you are capable? So we'll go into this. That's exactly what the book does. I take people through a process called unlimiting. It's a word that I coined years ago. unlimiting is different than unlimited. Unlimiting is like the process of removing limits.

Limiting beliefs.

Exactly. Or behaviors or habits, right? So unlimiting is an active word where it's you're redrawing the boundaries and borders of your life. Limitless is not about being perfect. Limitless is about advancing and progressing beyond what you believe is possible. That's what this book is about. Now, I apply that towards accelerated learning so you can learn your languages and give speeches without notes and all that stuff. But really, it's a process of liberating yourself out of that box. So one of the dimensions that keep you in that box is your mindset. And we can go deep into how to change negative beliefs and everything. I talk about the seven lies. Lies for me, again, is an acronym. Lie is a limited idea entertained. because it's not true. It's not true that you don't deserve it. It's not necessarily true that you're stupid, but it's an idea we're giving energy to. We're entertaining that idea in that moment. I show people how to unravel it in the three-step process. But that's the mindset. Okay. All right. Now, the second M, you can have the greatest mindset and believe everything is possible. You're capable, you deserve it. But if you don't have the second.

M, which is motivation, you're not getting.

Out of that box.

Right now in your career, I I believe I can do it, but I'm.

Going to sit here and eat chips on the couch. Exactly. And so your motivation for me is your drive, it's your purpose, it's the vitality that you bring to something. Now, most people think motivation, they'll say motivation is a lie. And in some respects it is because the way a lot of people perceive motivation is just rah-rah, get excited, get hyped up, and next day nothing changes. So my evidence, the evidence of motivation is something is happening. There's an action. There's a new action taking place. And if you're not doing that action, you're not motivated. No matter what you say, if you're not doing it, it's better well done than well said. Even like a lot of people on social media, they promise things, but prove it. Don't say it, show it. You take it to action because knowledge is not power. It's potential power applying. It makes it powerful. So motivation for me is a three-step formula. And here's the formula. And I go deep into in this book because there's a chapter on each part. The key to sustainable motivation, how to overcome procrastination if you're putting things off, this is the key. It's this, P times E times S3. Now this is a formula for sustainable, not just a surge of motivation, right? We've all watched the Limitless movie where he takes a pill and he can learn languages and read really fast and remember everything. And Dr. Mark Hyman, who wrote the forward of the book, who's a mutual friend of both of ours and I know he's been on your show, he says that there is no genius pill, but Jim gives you the process for a brighter brain. It's the process and there's no side effects, right? Yeah, that's good. But going back to this, when he had a surge of motivation, but then when the pill wore off, it goes back to no motivation. But this is the key. There's no pill, there's a process. these three things, P times E times S3 is sustainable for the rest of your life. Because I've lived on no sleep for over a decade. My sleep has gotten much better since of recent, just some breakthroughs in medicine and everything else like that. But I had sustainable motivation. I was still doing all the conferences, still doing my podcast every week, still speaking and traveling and doing all this stuff because I had these three number one, so the P stands for purpose. Now again, if you feel not motivated in any area of your life, pick, so some people could have motivation. Now some people are very motivated to sit on the couch and binge watch Netflix. They're highly motivated to do that, right? But if you're lacking motivation to work out consistently, and now here's the, here's another lie, limited idea entertained, is that you have to enjoy the activity, right? Like, you know, it does doesn't mean that you have to do that. Like, I was having this conversation with Tom Bilyeu, right? And he was like, I work out four o'clock, five o'clock every morning. I was like, Do you enjoy it? He was like, no, I don't like working out at all, you know? But he's motivated, doesn't miss a day. So he has the motivation. So motivation doesn't mean you enjoy it. Like, every morning I do my cold showers, you know, like Wim Hof, right? It's not fun all the time, but- Exactly. I grew up in the Northeast. I hate the cold, right? But I do my cold showers or my ice baths. You know, I post all the time on, on Instagram about doing it because I know I have a purpose. Yeah, right. So I don't enjoy it, but the P in the formula is purpose. Reasons reap results. And if you get the reason. So even if I'm not, you know, getting my sleep, I have a purpose. I have a reason to help people every single day. I want every single person that comes in contact with me, whether it's on my podcast or a video, or a book, their brain is better off because of it. And so that's my reason. And really, you know my story. My first student, three decades ago almost, she read 30 books in 30 days. And what was her purpose? Her mother was dying of terminal cancer. Two months to live, 60 days. And the book she was reading, Health, Wellness, Energy, right? And she ended up saving her mom's life. And that's when I realized that if knowledge is power, learning is our superpower. I dedicate in my life to make that kind of difference. And that's what, that's what. So I have my reasons to do something so I don't have to pump myself up. So P is purpose, tap into your reasons. And it can't be intellectual. You know, you have to feel it. Of course.

Right.

And even you could even feel the pain. Like, who's counting on you to do this activity? You know, who's watching you, who's role modeling you, right? Who's counting on you to show up today? You know, it could be beautiful too, but if it gets you to move, that's what's important. Have that reason, the purpose. This E, now my mind does this thought experiment, scientific experimentations, right? If somebody just has a reason, are they always motivated? Are there any cases where they're not motivated? And I said, yes, if they're lacking the E, energy. So somebody can have a reason to work out, or they could have a reason to read, you know, or learn Spanish. But if they're trying to do it late at night and they didn't sleep the night before, or they had a big processed meal, it's hard to have the motivation. Exactly. And their food coma, they can't be motivated because they lack energy. So in the book, I talk about 10 keys for brain energy, the 10 things that I do to light up my brain. And one of them is our brain foods. Another one is optimizing your sleep. So I do a whole area. of what I've learned really moves the needle for maximizing your sleep. Because how's your thought process if you don't sleep? How's your focus? How's your memory? How are you making good decisions? I heard that that was the advice presidents give other presidents is like, don't make a big decision if you didn't get a good night's sleep. So I talk about sleep. So in the book, in Motivation, we do a whole section on finding your purpose and even life purpose and and a whole area on optimizing your energy. Now you have energy to do it. I ask myself, okay, you have a purpose for something to work out or whatever. You have or to start a business, you have the energy. In what case, if you're like doing this critical thinking, in what case won't you be motivated? Let's say you want to start a business or whatever. You're just procrastinating on starting that business. for one, you have the motivation, you really need it and you know why. You have the energy because you're eating the right foods, you're maximizing your sleep, you're with not energy vampires. Yes, there is S3. What the problem is, is you're making it too big in your mind. That will keep you from being motivated. Starting a business, like where do you even start? Or getting that perfect relationship or having perfect health, that's way, way too big. So what do you do? simple steps. That's what will keep people unmotivated. They could have the reasons and purpose, they could have the energy, unlimited energy, but they don't know where to start and because they make it too big in their mind. And a confused mind doesn't do anything. Confused mind doesn't do anything. So clarity is power.

I like that.

So small simple step, all you have to do is ask a magic question. What is the smallest action I could take where I can't fail. It allows me to give me some progress, but I can't fail. What's the smallest step? And I cite the work in here of the habit experts that you and I have interviewed, you know, Dr. B.J. Fogg or the James Clear's Atomic Habits and really my take on how to make sustainable habits because what you do repeatedly becomes that habit. But it starts with a small simple step. What's an example of that? I want people to read a book a week. It will change their life. I think if there's one thing people could that would change their life immediately, long-term, it's just read every day. Reading is to your mind what exercise is to your body, even more than audio. And my podcast, and I do everything on audio, I still encourage people to read because it activates a different part of your brain. Also, and I listen to audios when I drive, when I work out, but when people are tested in terms of what they read, in terms of comprehension, what they listen to, reading the actual more and they'll understand more. You know why? It's not only does it activate a different part of your brain because it's active. Because listening can be passive, like watching a movie or anything can be very passive. You don't have to get involved, but reading forces you to get involved. But the second reason why is because usually when someone's listening to something, they're doing something else and they're trying to multitask. They're cleaning their house, they're working out, they're driving. So their attention is not fully on what they're listening to. so that's why the comprehension is down. But reading every single day is a great activity. But I don't tell people, you know, read an hour a day. A small, simple step to get someone reading is read one sentence. That's a small, simple step. Open up the book. That's a small, simple step that you can't fail.

Right.

And nobody's going to stop at one sentence. You know, the example Dr. B.J. Fogg talks about with tiny habits is, hey, we know flossing is good for your longevity.

One tooth.

One tooth. And who's gonna stop at one tooth? So how do you break it down? And really, motivation is energy management. It's really about energy management, meaning when you have clarity and purpose, it gives you energy. When you have energy, like if you activate you eat the right foods and everything else, you have energy. And small, simple steps requires very little energy, requires very little effort output. And there's something in memory called called the Zygarik Effect. It's by a psychologist, a woman who in Europe noticed that at the cafe she frequents that the wait staff would remember all the orders until they were delivered. And once they were delivered, they would forget it. And the Zygarik Effect, which is her last name, means that the mind doesn't like open loops. So like, oh, and all of the series that you binge watch, because at the end they open up a loop and you're like, One more. Who does that? Like one more. And you end up watching until like 2 a.m., 3 a.m. because it doesn't like the open loops. Well, starting something like an order, remembering someone's order, and then it delivered, it closes the loop. Well, when you start something anywhere, your mind still keeps an open loop about it, so it's more likely to finish. And that's another way to overcome procrastination, break it down into small, simple steps where you can't fail. That's the three-step formula. So I do a chapter, so this is really three books in one. It's a whole book on mindset, on how to eliminate negative self-talk, how to be able to get rid of negative beliefs that you don't deserve it, you're not capable of it, how to have optimization. So a chapter on purpose, a chapter on energy, a chapter on small simple steps, and then I added a chapter on habits and flow. Because the ultimate state, and you've had Steven Kotler and all these amazing people on here talking about flow state, is when you're in the zone. Where you lose flow states is you lose your sense of self, you lose, it's effortless, and you lose your sense of time, and there's no motivation required because you're just in the zone. You know that as an athlete, when you're in the zone or you're on stage and it's just coming through you, right? We all have those moments. So we debunk and apply this method for a whole chapter on flow. And then finally, you could have the mindset and motivation and still be stuck in that box. Because again, let's say you believe everything is possible and that's your mindset and you're capable and you deserve it and you're motivated, but if you don't have the last M, which are the methods, then you're stuck in that box. You could have be believed that you deserve this income, you could do whatever you want, but if you're doing the wrong things, then you're not going to get the result. If you're doing the wrong marketing tactics or if you're doing the wrong things in a relationship, right? If you're using bad advice. And in here, I document the example of learning because we learned very poor antiquated methods of learning in school. It was rote repetition. To learn something, repeat it a hundred times in your mind. And the problem is it just takes a lot of time. That's not the optimal way the brain learns. The human brain doesn't learn through consumption. learns through creation, right? The human brain does not learn by consuming, it learns by creating. And so we also learned a bad habit, a method of reading, which was sub-vocalization. Sub-vocalization is, have you ever noticed when you're reading something, you hear that inner voice inside your head reading along with you? Hopefully it's your own voice, it's not like somebody else's voice. The reason why it keeps you reading slow is if you have to say all the words in this book, you can only you can only read as fast as you could speak. That means your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, not your thinking speed. How do you limit the conversation in your mind? That's interesting, right? Because the question becomes everybody reads about 200-250 words per minute because that's how the average person talks. But do you have to say... The question becomes, do analyze it, common sense. Do you need to say all the words in order to understand what those words mean? No. The truth is no. When you see a stop sign, you don't say to yourself, stop. But do you comprehend what that means? 95. Exactly. And just like symbols in the book, periods, punctuation marks, you don't say question mark when you read or comma when you read. So the and there because of all those are sight words and you don't have to pronounce them by sound, you pronounce them, you do them by sight. And that fastest readers actually only sub-vocalize the more difficult words. And so I'm not saying you... Really?

I know I'm just kind of skip through and just go through it.

You read all the words. No, you read all the words, but you don't have to say all the words. And so that sub-vocalization is my example of an old method, an antiquated method that will keep you in that box of learning slow.

So let me do an example. Yes, here's a sentence from your book, part two, about mindset.

Yeah.

And if I were to read this, I would read it slowly just because that's how I'm used to it. I would say, and I already get nervous reading out loud from my childhood fears of stumbling. Deeply held beliefs, attitudes and assumptions we create about who we are, how the world works, what we are capable of and deserve, and what is possible. Mindset.

So let me show you how to actually... So one example, and there's a link in my Instagram for a free masterclass on reading, like a whole one hour tutorial in real time. Here, when people are reading, what I recommend is subvocalization. The key here is first acknowledge that it's there and don't try to fight it. Don't try to not subvocalize because you know this from your study of the mind. You can't not do anything. You can't not think of a purple giraffe because you have to do it. So the more you try not to say the words, the more you're gonna do it. Plus you're gonna be talking to yourself. Am I really understanding this? And you're not gonna understand it because you have two things going on at once. Yeah, right. Exactly. And so the goal here is when you read past a certain speed, 400, there's a sub-vocalization threshold where you can't possibly talk any faster than that. But you can understand it. Oh, perfect example. When you listen to your podcasts or audio books, many people-- Exactly. Exactly. And you can understand it. But you can't speak that fast. So that's proof you could think that fast but not understand it. And so here, one of the hacks that we teach in the book is to use a visual pacer. Like when you use your finger while you read, most people think this is an old antiquated method. They say, Don't do that because that will slow you down. But in actuality, I challenge everybody to take that master class on that link and what you'll find is test yourself. Read without your finger and then read for another minute with your finger, count the number of lines. Just underlining it, that second time will be 25-50% faster. And just kind of what, forcing your.

Finger to go a little faster than you would normally?

You could actually go regular because what happens is you don't regress. A lot of people have another bad method going back to limited methods and we want to unlimit their methods of regressing and back skipping. Have you ever found yourself rereading words or rereading sentences 25% of our time could be wasted doing that and that's a bad habit that we learned when we were kids.

Why do we do that? Why do we repeat a sentence or a word?

Yeah, the same reason why we sub-vocalize because we were taught that. Remember back in school we were taught, so public speaking, when we got in those circles and we had to pass around that book and that book comes closer and closer and closer.

Fear and anxiety. Ah, I'm calling my name.

Exactly, and that's where I believe we learn that public speaking was something to be feared. And that's where it was imprinted on us. And like, for some people, and it was good intention, but people can be sincere teachers, but be sincerely wrong. And I got that, I couldn't even read at that time. So when that book came to me, I would just look at it and it would look like hieroglyphics. Exactly, and I would do that. And I would cry, it would be so embarrassing because everyone's looking at you and you have to perform. And that's where I think my fear public speaking. Why wouldn't do the book report or speak on it and everything came from? But the other thing teachers had you do is once they know you could pronounce and you had to say it out loud to make sure the teacher knows you're pronouncing it phonetically, right? But later on, your teacher taught you the limit with subvocalization because he or she said, all right, read quietly to yourself or read silently to yourself. And that's where you took that external voice and you're like, In order to understand it, I have to hear it. If not outside, then inside. And it's been there ever since. So this book is about unlimiting those bad habits of learning, of rote memorization, of bad habits we make about decisions. Like why are we always date, why are people dating the same people or making the same financial mistakes and everything else? It's not insanity doing the same thing over and over again. It's a bad memory. And we weren't taught decision making. So like in the book, I talk about four super villains that hold us back. And it's really because I talk about superpowers. For super villains and I'll go back to the model and make this very like aha to everybody. Four super villains that are holding you and your team back. Your children back, your team back, your employees back, your spouse back, number one. And they're all driven by technology. Digital deluge. Digital deluge is this information overwhelm. It's like, do you feel nowadays like you can't keep up. It's like taking a sip of water out of a fire hose. And here's the thing, people buy a book, but they don't read the book. It just sits on their shelf. It becomes shelf help, not self-help. And here's the thing, buying a book is a different skill set than reading the book.

I'm really good at buying books. I'm not that good at reading the books.

I can buy books all day long. Exactly, but reading is a different skill set. But digital deluge is a real medical condition. information fatigue syndrome. Higher blood pressure, compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness. And this is happening if you own a business or you have managed a team, that four or five hours a day on estimate, are we spending processing information? Just think about your team, how much they have to process. A lot, right? That means half of their salary is being paid to process and learn and read. So, if someone's being paid $80,000, $40,000 is just to read something.

Oh my gosh.

So if I could double their reading speed, that's like, that's a huge, that's a huge amount of time. Like if it normally takes four hours to read something and you read it in half the time, two hours, what's two hours of the course of a year? That's like I'm about. And we can't even do the math because that's another one of the digital challenges. Okay. But that's two, that's even if you save one hour a day, 365 hours a year. 40-hour work weeks. How many 40-hour work weeks? Nine. Two months of productivity we get back to saving one hour a day on something ubiquitous like reading. That's why this book will help you read every other book to save you time. That's a digital deluge. Number two, digital distraction. With every ring and ping and ding, every app notification, social media alert, it's training our distraction muscles. And we are so good at being distracted. That's why so much of my morning routine, that's the people people do, something simple like brushing your teeth with the opposite hand, because it engages the opposite side of your brain, which is good for making new connections, neuroplasticity. But it's also good for making you present.

You have to focus.

It forces you to be in the moment. It's something you do every day, little things where you add novelty where it focuses you to be here as opposed to about everything else. How you do anything is how do everything. So if you wake up first thing in the morning and touch your phone, I think we should have a to-do list. I think you're not to-do list. Don't touch your phone. Yeah, don't touch your phone first hour of the day. It rewires your brain to be distracted and also it rewires your brain to be reactive. I can't stress this enough. When you pick up your phone the first hour of the day and a lot of people talk about this and we have videos, my video with Simon Sinek has 28 million views on just this thing on Facebook. It literally just says, don't touch your phone because it rewires your brain to be distracted and reactive because you're fighting fires. You're on the defense. Like, why are you going to check your email and voicemail and it takes you off tangent? You're not even focusing on what's most important, like in terms of your win. Our friend, Brendan Burchard, says this exactly. You're like, you have a lot of quotes that you remember, but he says, your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people people's agenda for your life.

Boom.

Wow, Brendan Burchard, your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people's agenda for your life. So don't go on the defense. So don't pick up your phone, because when you wake up, you're in this relaxed state of awareness, you're very suggestible. So you're training your distraction and your reaction. You have to be proactive. You want to be a thermostat, not a thermometer. A thermometer reacts the environment, a thermometer sets the environment. So digital distraction second. Third super villain that's driven by technology that's potentially holding you back, digital dementia. Digital dementia is where our phones become an external storage device. It keeps our to-dos, right? It keeps our phone.

How many phone numbers did you know growing up?

I saw a lot growing up.

Yeah.

How many do you know now?

One.

Like, is there one person? Is there somebody you can text and.

Call all the time? I know my mom's because I've had.

To write it down Emergency contact? Exactly. But if you don't have your phone with you or your phone is battery's dead, you can't. Now here's the thing, nobody wants to memorize 200 phone numbers. I don't want to do that, but isn't it concerning that we've lost the ability to remember one or a passcode or a conversation we just had? I believe two of the most costly words in life. Yeah, in life our business, I forgot. Every time you say the words I forgot, you lose credibility, you lose trust, You lose, you don't show you care about the person. You lose a sale, I can't tell you how many clients come to me saying, Look, I forgot, I called this person by the wrong name, and he was so offended that he didn't do the deal with me. I lost a million dollar commission. Like those kind of things, right? And how are you going to show somebody you're going to care for their future, their finances, their health, their family, if you don't care enough just to remember their name, right? So we do 13-14 tips on just how to remember people's names. We covered it in the previous episode also as well.

Okay.

So digital dementia is where it's a real source. I mean, Dr. Daniel Amen has talked about it. Other people have talked about, don't be over reliant on technology to do everything. Memory is a muscle and it's use it or lose it. That's why I'm such an advocate for mental fitness. I remember I walked into the office one day, I picked up the phone first thing in the morning and a woman's voice was like, I love you, I love you, I love you. I'm like, whoa, who's this? She was like, I found it. She went through our online memory and she was given a family heirloom necklace by her grandmother. It didn't go to her mother or her three sisters. It went to her and she hid it somewhere in her house.

She forgot.

She forgot. And she thought for three years, she thought it was stolen. She felt so much guilt and she got so much shame from her family and she just passed on for generations. And after going through this course and she woke up at 2:00 a.m. in the morning, ran down two flights of stairs, went behind the boiler in her basement, pulls out this crevice, the necklace. And I was like, I didn't teach you a method on how to find lost items in this program. She was like, I don't know what it is, but my focus, I'm just remembering this without even using a method. It's just, she was like, thank you for giving me my brain back. She felt like her brain was 20 years younger because it was fit. And that's what I'm talking about. Mental intelligence is very important. Yeah, facts, figures, foreign languages. you learned how to do that in the methods of the book, mental fitness and mental health. That's also very important. Where if you're physically fit, so if you were going to go up Runyon Canyon or wherever, if somebody is not physically fit, they're going to have to use more effort or energy because they're not trained. If you're an athlete, you could help them as a coach in two ways. You could show them the strategies like how to do a forehand or backhand or hit up golf ball, and you can take them into the gym and optimize their fitness, their heart rate variability, their foods and everything. So get people mentally fit, digital dementia. And finally, the last one that we talk about in the book, digital deduction. I always iterate, DDD. So digital deduction is where our phones and our smart devices are doing the thinking for us. Because it just literally, because it's just spoon feeding you. And I'm not just talking about fake news. I'm talking about algorithms that just give everything. But you don't have to think anymore and we've lost our thinking abilities to the point where you look at a menu and you're like, I don't even know what to eat because normally an app tells me what to eat or what to watch next or what to do everything. They're seeing kids, they have lower ability to critical thinking, critical thinking abilities, analysis ability, reasoning ability because of phones because our smart devices are making us I do three quick things.

One, I take three minutes of those 10 minutes after I've changed my body and I focus on three different events in my life that I'm grateful for.

And it changes your biochemistry.

But there's a value to it because the two emotions that mess up your business, your life, your relationships are.