Do This To Change Your Limiting Beliefs Today (Nir Eyal)

I interviewed billionaires and I interviewed people who are broke. Everybody has limiting beliefs. A limiting belief saps your motivation and increases your suffering.

My guest today is Nir Eyal, the author of 3 bestselling books, including Beyond Belief, which just hit the New York Times bestseller list.

The formula for burnout is 2 factors: high expectations coupled with— Wow. Unbelievable, right?

It was fascinating to see the most science-backed person I know talk about how your mindset and the beliefs that you have matters for everything you do in life.

Beliefs can change how we feel based on what we expect to feel. So if you believe that placebos are effective, turns out they can have a huge effect on your performance.

He spent 6 years tracking down the research behind what actually separates people who persist from people who quit.

But a lot of that positive thinking stuff actually is harmful. Manifesting and visualizing— the research is not so good on that stuff.

Today, Nir walks us through the science, what it means for creators who are trying to build something that lasts, and the specific practices he uses in his own work and relationships to to stop suffering through the hard parts.

What has affected my day-to-day life more than anything, it's that, and you can do this about anything and any situation in your life.

Nir, we sat down at breakfast yesterday and you said that you weren't jet-lagged at all, which is crazy 'cause you'd just flown in from Europe the night before and you're on your way to Asia. But it wasn't that, you said that you don't believe in jet lag.

Well, I don't believe in the symptoms. I don't believe I have to suffer. Okay, let me be precise. I don't believe I have to suffer from the symptoms of jet lag.

Yeah, so I wanna dive into belief in this. And that's just the first introduction. Your new book is Beyond Belief. You just hit the New York Times list, congratulations. Thank you. Now, talk more about that. What does it actually mean to separate, you know, suffering from the symptoms versus experiencing it in different ways, and how does belief play into that?

Yeah, so what most people don't understand is that sleep and the grogginess of sleeplessness actually are highly susceptible to the placebo effect. That the cognitive performance levels, we know that they've done these studies where they take people inside a sleep lab and they give one group of people a bad night's sleep. So they intentionally wake them up with slight little shocks, but not to the point where they're actually out of bed. They just tap them in some ways that they give them a bad night's sleep. And then if they tell them when they wake up, that they had a good night's sleep—

We looked at the data.

Yep, we looked at the data.

They had a great night's sleep.

Completely lie to them and tell them, "Actually, you had a great night's sleep," they perform better on cognitive tests. And the opposite is also a similar phenomenon where if people have a great night's sleep, but you tell them that they had a bad night's sleep, they will perform worse on cognitive tests. And so there's all these things that we struggle with, whether it's insomnia, whether it's anxiety, ADHD, IBS, All of these, there are many of these conditions are highly susceptible to the placebo effect. And so what I learned in writing Beyond Belief is that we should use these as tools, even if they're not truths. And so what I do for my own jet lag, it doesn't prevent waking up at night, side of jet lag, but it definitely affects your cognitive performance the next day. So the first thing you said to me is like, "Wow, you seem so awake. How come?" Well, I took a placebo that morning. In fact, you can buy placebos on Amazon that say placebo pill on them, and you will you'll see 5-star reviews that say fast-acting relief for these placebo pills. It turns out recently that we've learned— most people don't know this— you can actually know that something is a placebo. You don't need the deception at all. It still works because we expect it to work. So this is one of the powers of belief. So that's what I do. I take a placebo to get over my jet lag, and it's amazing. I feel great.

Okay, so I always thought, one, that the placebo effect was real, right? That is fairly well understood at this point. But two, that you had to know that it— or like you had to think it was— you were taking the actual thing.

Yeah. So this is what most people don't realize about the placebo effect, because it's fairly new research, that it's called an open-label placebo or an honest placebo. And this work was done by Ted Kaptchuk, where he took people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, he brought them into his lab, and he said, hey, I've got this treatment, but it's a placebo. It said placebo right there on the jar. And he told them, "It's a completely inert substance. However," and here's the important part, "it has been shown to help some people with the effects of IBS." In this study, that placebo pill performed as well as the leading pain medicine for IBS, the prescription pain medication. In fact, after the study, some people came back to Dr. Kapchuk and said, "Dr. Kapchuk, that placebo pill was amazing. How can I get some more?" So that kind of blew this myth out of the water that you don't have to— it doesn't have to deceive you in order for it to be effective. Why? Because of the power of belief, that one of the powers of belief is the power of anticipation, that beliefs can change how we feel based on what we expect to feel. So if you believe that placebos are effective, turns out they can have a huge effect on your performance. This—

I always relate everything back to Friends as a TV show, and there's a line where they're like, "They don't know that we know that they know that I know," and it feels like one of the circumstances where it's like, The placebo doesn't work, but if you believe that it works, then it does work. And so, you know, you go through these layers and you're like, oh, I guess that actually makes sense.

Okay, this will really blow your mind, okay? So over the past 50 years, the placebo effect has gotten stronger.

Okay.

So why does that happen? And this is a huge problem for pharmaceutical companies. You know, if a drug company has to make a new, they have a new drug that they're trying to bring to market, they have to do testing to prove that it's not only effective, it has to be more effective than the placebo effect or else it doesn't get approved.

Right.

So this is a huge problem for pharmaceutical companies because as the placebo effect got stronger and stronger, the medicines have to get more and more efficacious. So that's a big problem. Why is the placebo effect getting more effective? Because more people have heard that the placebo effect works, which it absolutely does. So I used to think placebo effects mean it's fake, it's not working. That's not true, that the placebo effect is real. It is highly effective, and we should use it a lot more because it doesn't have side effects. There is the nocebo effect. If you expect something to hurt you, then you will feel those symptoms as well. For example, when I go to the doctor and I have to take some medication, I don't want him to tell me or her to tell me about any of the side effects. So I intentionally tell them, "Don't tell me about the side effects. I'll tell you if I have side effects." It's because you have the opposite, the nocebo effect. But we should use placebos more because they don't have side effects unless you expect them, and relatively cheap, right? So what do I use for my placebo? I take a tiny amount of creatine. Because some studies have shown— now I don't take enough to actually make a difference, but thinking to myself, "Oh, okay, this has been shown to improve cognitive performance, and so it's going to help me get over my jet lag," it does.

There's so many layers to this. How much has the placebo effect increased over time? Is this like the tiniest percentage points or is it actually like substantial?

It's substantial enough for drug companies to call it a big problem. And so they're trying to figure out a bunch of different ways.

It shows up in their earnings reports of like, this is actually—

Well, I mean, fewer medications get approved because of this hurdle that they have overcome.

When that— requiring that outsized impact is such an interesting thing because, yeah, it's just beyond what you would expect. Now, I guess what I'm wondering is What other areas in your life do you apply this? Because, you know, jet lag is just one of them, but there's so many more.

Yeah. So not only is there the, like, physical form of a placebo, which— what is a placebo? Placebo is an expectation that affects illness, not sickness. So sickness and illness are two different things. I didn't know this. This was a surprise to me that sickness and illness are two different things. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. Is in the brain. And that doesn't mean that pain isn't real. It doesn't mean that we're making it up. That's not what we're talking about. It's that pain is always in the brain. All pain is real, but all pain is also in the brain. Where else could it be? Pain isn't here. Pain isn't in your back. Pain isn't— pain is registered and processed in the brain separately from suffering. So pain is signal. Suffering is the interpretation by the brain of that signal. Just data. There's, you know, where did the placebo science even start from? We kind of discovered the placebo effect when in World War I, soldiers would come to a medic on the battlefield and say, "Medic, medic, my buddy." They'll be pulling their buddy, say, "You got to help my buddy. My buddy's been shot." And the medic would look at them and say, "Soldier, you're missing an arm." That the soldier dragging his buddy didn't realize that his arm was completely blown off and didn't feel it. So the brain has this amazing power to tune out certain signal, certain data. In fact, you're doing it right now. We all are. That one of the things that I didn't realize is that, you know, we think we see reality clearly and we don't. None of us do. That right now your brain is processing 11 million bits of information right this second. The light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room. Your brain is processing that information, but your conscious awareness is only is only processing about 50 bits of information. So 11 million bits, that's War and Peace every second, twice, versus one sentence per second that's in your conscious awareness. So you can actually, through different placebo mechanisms, whether it's a physical pill, whether it's a placebo shot, whether it's a belief you intentionally believe, even if you're not sure if it's true, so it has no physical manifestation, what you're doing is essentially refocusing that keyhole of attention wherever you want. And what you pay attention to, what you expect, determines what you feel and how you see the world. Hmm.

Okay. That's fascinating. I want to apply this in more areas. In all of your research for Beyond Belief, what are some of the things that came up to you like, oh, this is the most surprising, or where you're like, people would have the most impact from reframing that mindset?

I mean, where do I start? This line of research took me 6 years to research this book because there's so much fascinating research that I didn't believe. Talking about belief. It was too crazy to be true. For example, I went down this rabbit hole of— well, I'll tell you about this guy I met. His name is Daniel Gissler, and he's a commodities trader in his late 50s, super no-nonsense numbers guy, super analytical. And one day he has this freak accident and he shatters the bones in his ankle and he has to get surgery. About a year later, it's time to remove the pins in his bones that were put in during this procedure. And in that time, he stumbles across a YouTube video explaining a technique called hypnocedation. And he learns to hypnotize himself to the point where he can undergo a 55-minute surgical procedure where scalpel is cutting into flesh, where metal screws are wrenched from bone, and he does this completely awake and with zero anesthesia, not general anesthesia, not topical anesthesia. There's no anesthesiologist in the room. I've seen the video. And what's so remarkable is that this isn't remarkable at all, that tens of thousands of people have undergone surgery without any form of anesthesia. They don't do it in America, But Switzerland, France, Italy, it's actually not that uncommon.

Okay.

Yeah. And people have learned how to do this, and it's an ancient practice, and there's nothing magical about it. It's not woo-woo at all. It's something, in fact, all of us can do. I don't want to do it.

Let's be clear.

But the fact that somebody can do it means that we all have this hidden, locked potential. And so what we should be asking ourselves, I think, especially for creators, is why do we quit? If we know that the number one source of failure, the number one reason we fail at something is because we quit. It's not because of intelligence. It's not because of resources. It's not because of skill. It's because we just give up. You know this with your creators. Who are the most successful? It's the ones who persevere and just keep trying and trying and trying. Well, why do we quit? We quit because it hurts. It's hard.

We're suffering somewhere in there.

We're suffering. Right? And that suffering is not from out here. Suffering is up here. And so if Daniel Gisler can undergo 55 minutes of surgery without anesthesia, maybe we can make one more blog post or another YouTube video or push on that goal or take that exam or work on that relationship or build that business. There's so much we can unlock when we learn how to control our suffering.

Okay, so you had a distinction there between pain and suffering. So if we go to— the experiments and the studies around being operated on. I broke my femur as a kid when I was 11, and I had the rods put in, you know, I couldn't imagine doing that without that.

It's terrible, right? It's terrible.

Without that. So in that, is he still experiencing pain but not the suffering associated with it? Or is it in a way that he can turn off those nerves or whatever else and not even receive those pain signals?

So what hypnosedation allows people to do, and I'm not advocating for hypnosedation, let me just be very clear. I'm not saying that, that's not, I use it as an illustration because it is real. There's a lot of woo-woo stuff out there that, that's what actually took me 6 years to write is that trying to figure out what's real, what's validated by studies. I'm not woo-woo. I like, I— Right, you're a science guy, here you come. There's 30 pages of citations in the back of the book to peer-reviewed studies, including ones about hypnosedation, and it is real, people can do this. And what Daniel told me, and what other people who have learned hypnosedation tell me, is that you still feel the signal. He told me that he could feel the tugging and the pulling. He could feel stuff happening there, but it wasn't registered as excruciating suffering that most of us would think if we had to go under the knife during a procedure like that, except until the end. It was fascinating. So to demonstrate this point, actually, this is a perfect illustration of how this works. Daniel told me that the only time he felt suffering, the kind of intense signal that most of us would think of if we underwent surgery with anesthesia, was when he heard the doctor say, "I'm almost done." And when that happened, he started to move his keyhole of attention away from where it was during hypnosedation when he was under this, this hypnotic trance, he moved it back into reality, back into the present moment.

Right, into what was being done to him.

And it was too soon, because he had thought, "Okay, almost done, like a few more seconds." But really, the doctor made a mistake, and he said, "I'm almost done with the surgery, not with the sutures." And so the whole, the most painful part of the procedure, Daniel said, was when he had already exited the trance, the meditation that he had put himself into, and he could feel the sutures. So his lesson was, don't go out of hypnocedation until it's really, really, really over. But it just demonstrates, and it's, you know, it's not him lying, it's not him gritting his teeth. You can actually see on the blood pressure monitor, on the heart rate monitor, his heart rate was perfectly stable, his blood pressure stayed stable. So it wasn't just that he was faking it. Physiologically, he wasn't experiencing the kind of stress response you would expect from that kind of pain.

I'm fascinated by this.

Pretty cool, right?

You brought up the creator angle and the work that we do, right? And it's so, Creativity is so mindset-based in the stories that you can tell yourself and everything else. You can get into these incredible creative flows where you're just like, wow, I can't believe I created all this. And I was gonna say just as easily, far more easily than that, you can get yourself into the creative funk where you can't even, you can't do anything. And it's such a vicious cycle. What I'm curious about is how you bring the ideas from Beyond Belief into your creative process to be able to show up and create consistently?

This was the greatest gift I got from writing this book is that how it changed my life. So I don't suffer anymore in the creative process. It's still hard.

Yeah.

It's not easy, but my mindset has completely shifted. So I've written 3 books, thousands of articles. I've been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic and all over the place. And It's always hard. All I want to do when I'm writing is check sports scores or stock prices or Instagram or do anything but—

I wrote 4 sentences. I think that justifies an Instagram scroll.

You laugh. That's exactly what I used to say because I would say, this is hard. I'm bored. Is anybody going to like this? I'm feeling a little tired. What I was doing was judging the signal, right? I was judging the data that was entering my brain as suffering, as bad, right? So what changed my life in terms of my creative work is the story I was telling, is the belief around what I expected that that signal meant. So when I was feeling bored, fatigued, uncertain, stressed, and all I wanted to do while I was writing was go check email or the news or stock price or sports scores was I changed my limiting belief of, "If this is hard, I need to take a break," to, "This is what it feels like to get better." That's my liberating belief. So what we need to do, this process involves identifying those limiting beliefs, and we all have them. We all have limiting beliefs. I've interviewed billionaires and I interviewed people who are broke. Everybody has limiting beliefs. We just can't see them, but they're there. So it's identifying those limiting beliefs, doing what's called a turnaround on those limiting beliefs, and then having a new liberating belief that you are going to collect evidence that is also true. So my new liberating belief, and I say this to myself 10 times a day, this is what it feels like to get better. So what that is doing is reinterpreting that same exact signal. So I'm separating the pain, the signal, the data, from the suffering. And when you do that, you unlock your hidden potential.

Yeah. This is what it feels like to get better. That's such an interesting reframe. You can apply it to so many other places, right? I'm sitting there at the gym. I really don't want to do rep 8 of 10. There's nobody, there's nobody watching. You know, I can, I can set down these dumbbells right now and go away. You know, I don't want to I don't want to suffer. But that reframe of like, well, this is what it feels like to get better. Is that something you've been able to apply all across the board?

All over the place. And I have different liberating beliefs that I apply in various areas of my life. Like things that— it was funny, I did a webinar the other day for people who read the book. And thankfully, I'm very fortunate. I have a lot of people who read my past books and came. And one of the questions was, Nir, you look so much happier. Are you happier? And yeah, I am, but that's not the goal. Like, I don't want to be happier because happiness, if you think about it, is a fleeting sensation. We're not evolved to be happy. And I think the chasing of happiness— and this is, I think this applies to anybody with goals and ambitions, especially creators— of when I get my YouTube plaque, when I reach a million followers, when I get this, then I'll be happy. And that chasing of happiness, I think, is really toxic because we're not meant to be happy. You know, if you think about it, if there was a tribe of Homo sapiens who was totally contented, you know, totally chilled out, they were happy all the time, if our ancestors would have come across them, what would they have done?

Killed them, taken their stuff.

That's right. They would have killed them and probably eaten them, right?

Right.

Because we need that that relentless ambition. We need that fire in the belly. That's what helps us find diseases, cures for diseases, build great companies, overturn dictators, right? We need that disquietude to get us to do stuff. So it's not the chasing of happiness that should be the goal. It's the decreasing of suffering.

Okay.

That's my goal, is that I still want that ambition. I still want the drive. I still want that mission to make the world better. But it doesn't have to be suffering. And when you can do that differently, when you can look at that same signal that I used to think was the reason to quit and now becomes the reason to persist, the game completely changes. And that is, turns out, in our control. That many people think, well, that's just my personality. That's how I see things. That's what I can do. And I can only do what I can do. Every single thing I just said is another example of a limiting belief. It's not a fact of nature. It's not one of Newton's laws of physics. It's all up here. It's just a limitation.

So I've known you for, what, 8 years now, probably? We met at an Inc. 5000 event where you were speaking on your book Hooked, and you're talking about, you know, the science of attention and all of these things and retention. And you're the most like science-backed. Here's the research, all of that. So I think a lot of people would expect the things that you're saying to come from someone who's like, you know, I just went and meditated and this is what I feel now, you know? And like to come from that angle. And instead it's coming from the person who's like, this is, you know, like all the hard science on it. And it actually works. And so I think that's the thing where I guess what I'm thinking about is how you're applying this in other areas in your life? 'Cause there's gotta be so many things. It's like, it's far, it's so far-reaching.

Every area of life. And it's funny you should say that 'cause my, like, I think of my ideal customer profile as ambitious skeptics. So I don't know, like, if you're really into the quantum healing vibration fields, like, don't read my book. You're not gonna like it. Because it turns out that a lot of that positive thinking stuff actually is harmful. Do you know that? That like manifesting and visualizing, the research is not so good on that stuff.

Wait, it's harm— I would expect from everything that you're saying before that that would be helpful.

This is not positive thinking.

Okay.

This is not magical thinking. It's very, very—

What's the difference between these?

So positive thinking, magical thinking, manifesting, visioning, it's all about outcomes.

Okay.

That's the focus. So I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna manifest abundance. I'm gonna manifest a beautiful house and I'm gonna have that—

New York Times bestseller list.

The outcomes, exactly. And there was some fascinating research. Gabrielle Oetjen did this research where she took people and asked them to do these exercises, these manifesting, the vision boarding, the outcome-focused exercises. And what she found was when she connected them to blood pressure monitors, that their blood pressure dropped, they became more relaxed, and then in follow-up studies when she surveyed them, they not only were less likely to achieve their goals, they were less likely to take the steps to achieve their goals, because their brain was registering, "Hey, this is on autopilot. I'm vibrating, and now the universe is gonna vibrate back the things I want." So it's not that necessarily those tactics are wrong.

Abdicated responsibility.

A big part of it, right. Now, for some things that can be helpful. For things that are truly outside your control, you know, there's a saying, "Let go and let God." For things that you cannot control, not a bad idea. But your financial outcome, just praying for abundance and God, give me this, and vibrations, give me that. No, you know, God helps those who help themselves. There's a lot of wisdom there. So you don't want to short circuit that. So what you want to do, you want to do what athletes do, right? I'm saying visualization doesn't work, it's that it's incomplete. What do athletes do? Right? That's where this is a great example of how the self-help industry took something that's true and made it false. Athletes do in fact visualize, but what are they visualizing? They're not visualizing getting the trophy and the medal. They're visualizing, what am I going to do physically and most importantly psychologically when something gets in my way? And this is where people don't— where they miss on a huge opportunity. So as a creator, if you can sit down and not think, oh, I have a goal to get this many emails and this many followers and I'm going to be famous and I'm going to write a New York Times bestseller. That's all outcomes driven. What you should be visualizing is what am I going to do Monday morning, when I really want to go check my phone and scroll, instead I'm gonna go sit at my desk and create and do that hard work of making stuff. How am I gonna deal with I don't wanna? That's what you should be visualizing. How would— like, literally, how will you do that? So for me, you know, I used to be clinically obese, and the way I lost the weight, a big part of it was I didn't sit there and meditate on I can't wait to have a six-pack. No, that's not gonna get me any closer to my goal. What I did was visualize, what am I gonna do when I go to a party and someone offers me a piece of chocolate cake that I really want? What am I gonna do with that craving, with that desire? What am I gonna do when I feel bad saying no when someone's offered it? That's what you wanna visualize. Dealing with that discomfort is the right way to accomplish these goals.

So you're visualizing, when I encounter the circumstance where my goals are going to be challenged and my identity is gonna be challenged and all that, what am I going to do?

Right, what am I gonna believe in that moment? That's gonna change what I see, what I feel, and what I do. Those are the three powers of belief, the power of attention, anticipation, and agency. So if you can literally practice in your mind, what's causing me suffering in that moment? And is that necessarily a bad thing? So something that, like I said, you know, this is what it feels like to get better, that applies still today. I still have to manage my weight, right? Like I still have to take care of myself. And so, yeah, you know what? If I'm a little hungry, but I want that thing, but I need to, you know, I need to watch, I don't wanna eat that junk food, Now I have a different relationship with that discomfort. Yeah, I'm a little hungry. You know what? That's what it feels like to get better. It's not— it used to be, "Oh my God, I'm hungry. And if I'm hungry, well then that's terrible." And I would start spiraling with anxiety around what's just data, what's just information, as opposed to, "Okay, just information. How will I interpret in a way that serves me rather than hurts me?" Where else do you apply that in the creative process and in your business? In my business, I think the best examples with relationships that I used to kind of think that people are annoying, that like, right, that like, why don't people see things my way? And I know I'm right. So like, what, now I have to like negotiate with you to tell you I'm right and like prove it to you and all that? Like, and that's a, that's a limiting belief that, that people are annoying or that like, why don't people see things my way or that people issues are hard, or that, you know, that Janice in accounting is giving me a hard time, or whatever it might be. Those are all limiting beliefs because it's just data. It's just data. So I'll give you a family example, not from a business example, but I think it relates. You can substitute anybody who causes you suffering in a business context as well. This is what happened with my mom a few years ago. I was— it was her 74th birthday, and I wanted to buy her some flowers. The problem was I was in Singapore, and she was on the other side of the planet in Central Florida where I grew up. And so I wanted to get her some flowers, but I had to call the florist there and figure out how to get them delivered on time. And I stayed up till 1 in the morning, and I finally did it. I ordered the flowers. I thought, "Okay, she's gonna love it." I went to sleep that night. I patted myself on the back and said, "Good job. You're a good son." And I called her up the next morning, and I said, "Hey, Mom. Happy birthday. Did you get my flowers?" And she says, "Yes, I did. I got the flowers. But just so you know, the flowers that you sent, they showed up half dead. So don't order from them anymore." To which I said something like, "Well, that's the last time I buy you flowers." And that went over about as well as you'd expect. Not so good. And after the call, my wife was on the call as well, and she heard this whole conversation. And she turned to me and she said, "Nir, would you like to do a turnaround on this?" To which I said, "No, I do not wanna do your touchy-feely, hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo. I need to vent." 'Cause that's what we're supposed to do, right? When someone upsets us, we're supposed to get it off our chest. We're supposed to tell 'em how we feel. We're supposed to, you know, we're not supposed to keep our feelings inside, right? But that's not what the research shows at all. That in fact, the research shows that when you vent, you're doing nothing but reinforcing an effigy of somebody. You're just reinforcing their beliefs. Tell someone off to, you know, somebody else if they're around or not around, you're just reinforcing your beliefs, 'cause we don't see people as they are, we see people as we believe they are. And so I had enough good sense to not do that. And instead I use this technique called inquiry-based stress reduction. It's a technique developed by Byron Katie several decades ago, but she was really challenging, channeling a technique that's thousands of years old that comes all the way from Aristotle. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna, turn around your beliefs. And so this is what I do every day, that I do this process. It becomes easier the more you practice it, and here's how it goes. The first step is you write down your belief. What's this belief that I think is causing me suffering? So why was I upset at my mom? Why was my mom causing me suffering? Well, clearly, she was being too judgmental and hard to please, right? That's what I believed as a fact, that she was clearly being too judgmental and hard to please. So then you have to ask yourself 4 questions. The first question is, is this true? Is this belief true? Yeah, of course it's true, Nathan. I just told you what happened, right? Obviously my mom, right? You're on my side of this.

No, 100%.

Totally. She was being way too judgmental. The second question sounds like the first, it's a little different. Is it absolutely true? So first question, is it true? Second question, is it absolutely true? Absolutely meaning there is no other possible explanation. She was— it could only be that she was being judgmental. Well, when you put that absolute part on it, okay, maybe, maybe not. Maybe, maybe there's another explanation. I don't know what it is, but maybe there's another explanation. So we'll put that away for a second. The third question is, who am I when I hold on to that belief? How do I feel? Who do I become? I become short-tempered. I become not that nice. I kind of become this 13-year-old version of myself, which I don't really like. Fourth question is, who would I be without that belief? If I had a magic wand and poof, that belief disappeared forever, how would I feel? Who would I be? I instantly felt lighter just at the thought of that. I realized that I could be more myself without that belief, right? So in 4 questions in about 30 seconds, I realized that the thing that I thought was a fact wasn't a fact. It's just a belief, that it wasn't really serving me, and that I could be better off without it. Now, most people hearing this would say, "Yeah, but you haven't met my mom," or, "You haven't met my coworkers. You haven't met my boss, right? That wouldn't work for me because of X, Y, Z." That is your brain doing what it has evolved to do, which is that your brain hates changing its mind. Your brain hates changing its mind. Why? Because it served you in the past, right? These limiting beliefs, you keep them around even though they're limiting your potential because your brain doesn't care about you being happy. Your brain doesn't care about you flourishing. Your brain doesn't care about you getting a million subscribers. It doesn't care about any of that. Your brain has evolved to keep you alive. That's its number one priority. And so if this belief worked for you before, just keep believing it, keep doing it. So what this— the next step of this process asks you to do is not necessarily to change your mind, it's to collect what I call a portfolio of perspectives. And you can do this about anything and any situation in your life, whatever is causing you suffering. That, "I've been meaning to start that channel that hasn't happened. I've been meaning to try this, that workout program I haven't started. That goal that keeps coming back year after year on my New Year's resolution that isn't getting done." There's always a limiting belief there. So here's what you do. You take that belief of why something is causing you suffering. "I don't have enough time. People like me don't do this kind of thing. I'm not creative enough. It's too late." I mean, the list goes on and on about all the reasons we give ourselves, all these limiting beliefs. So you take that limiting belief, which I had was, "My mother's too judgmental and hard to please," and you turn it around. You ask yourself, could the exact opposite also be true? So what's the exact opposite of, "My mother's too judgmental and hard to please"? "My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please." How could that be true? Well, she did thank me for the flowers. And she was just saying a statement of fact, right? That the flowers weren't so nice. Does it have to be that it was judgmental? No, it could be that maybe she was just trying to protect me from not getting scammed by this florist. So now I have two beliefs. Let's see if there's a third. Another opposite of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please is I am too judgmental and hard to please. So how could that be true? Well, I had rehearsed in my brain that if I was gonna do something nice for her, I deserved this effusive praise that when I didn't get—

For staying up late at night.

Yeah. Here I did this nice thing and she was supposed to tell me that I was a very good son and I had done a very nice thing.

You had visualized what was supposed to happen.

I had an expectation that didn't materialize. And so when that didn't happen, I lost it.

Right?

So who was being judgmental? I kind of was, wasn't I? Yeah. Okay. There's a fourth one. I am too judgmental and hard to please Towards myself.

Ooh.

That one actually turned out to be the most true, because what happened when I had put all this time, money, and effort into doing something nice and it didn't work out the way I'd wanted, I felt incompetent. I felt crappy. And this is what's called a misattribution of emotion. That when we feel bad inside, we look for the first person we can find to blame it on. And that's exactly what I did. We do this all the time. So now I have 4 beliefs. Now, which one's true, Nathan? Which one's false?

I mean, there's truth in all of them.

Exactly. They're all kind of true, perhaps. But more importantly, who cares?

Who cares?

One of those beliefs, in order for me to be happy, my mom had to change. And you can substitute anyone you want. My boss has to change, my coworker, my client, my— the market, the economy, whatever. That has to change so I can be happy.

Right.

You don't know my mom, Nathan Barry, but let me tell you, that's not gonna happen. She's not gonna change for me to be happy. That's not how it works. So I didn't have to keep that belief anymore. That one kept me trapped in a cage that I had built myself, this belief cage that she has to change, she has to apologize so that I won't feel bad. The other 3 beliefs, I could do something with those. I could relieve my suffering in that relationship and increase my motivation to work on that relationship. So that's what is the difference between a limiting and a liberating belief. A limiting belief saps your motivation and increases your suffering. A liberating belief gives you more motivation and decreases your suffering. So with that first belief, I didn't want to have anything to do with my mom until she apologized. With those other 3 beliefs, I could have the motivation to keep working on that relationship, and I didn't have to suffer through it.

Right.

Same relationship, same data, same history of what had happened. Doesn't mean I need to be her best friend. Doesn't mean we have to, like, play in the park every day. But I don't have to suffer anymore.

Right.

And so when you ask what has affected my day-to-day life more than anything, it's that there's no more people problems because we don't have people problems. We don't have relationship problems. We have belief problems.

Hmm. So if we apply that, I'm thinking about the limiting beliefs that we heard over the last day and a half of running this mastermind. You know, we've got 15, 16 of the top authors in the world. And it was so— everyone was so open and vulnerable sharing what they were working on, the wins in their businesses, the struggles that they're having and all that. And you heard a lot of limiting beliefs. What were some of those that maybe the themes that came out that you're like, oh man, you know, you want to just take them like, oh, if I could help you reprogram that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think this is so important for people to hear. That we think that successful people don't have these limiting beliefs. And I'm telling you, I've met some of the most successful people on Earth and they have just as many limiting beliefs as the rest of us because limiting beliefs are like your face. You can't see your face. We all have a face, but you can't see your own face. You can see your hands, you can see your feet. You can't see your own face. Interestingly, you can see other people's faces, right? You can look at them and you know all their limiting beliefs. It's easy to judge others for their limiting beliefs because you can see them. But you can't see your own limiting beliefs. They're always hidden to you.

Why?

Because they feel like facts, right? The most common limiting belief I hear from high performers is, "I'm behind." How many times did we hear it over the past few days when we're meeting with people who have millions upon millions of followers? They're in the top 0.00001% of creators. "Ah, I'm behind. Somebody's doing better than I am." And what's implicit in that?

That's bad.

I should suffer because of that. Ugh. Why do we need that? We don't. And I think part of it is that another limiting belief, a limiting belief stacked on another limiting belief, is that unless I'm suffering, I can't be productive.

Okay.

Right? That I hear this sometimes.

Yup.

Probably the most common limiting belief is there's no time. I don't have enough time to do that. After that, it's I'm—

I have that one all the time.

We all feel it. We all feel it. By the way, I still have these. Why do you think I wrote this book? I'm full of these limiting beliefs. But if you can systematically have a response to that limiting belief, you know, okay, I hear you there, that voice in your head that tells you there's no time, it's too late, you're behind, whatever. To hear it, acknowledge it, and say, okay, it's just signal, it's just data, and I don't have to act on that. I can interpret it differently. That's up to me whether that pain causes suffering. To have that toolkit is super powerful. So to have— to see it in other people that I feel like I'm behind. And they keep that fire stoking thinking that it causes them motivation, that it makes them more likely to persist. And I think that's the recipe for burnout because we have a formula for burnout. Like, there are studies that have now found how do you— what type of jobs make someone burn out? And it's not what I thought. I thought that burnout is caused because, you know, you work in a sad job, you're a mortician or you're a veterinarian, you have to put cute puppies to sleep or something. It has nothing to do with your job. It has to do with the environment you work in. The formula for burnout is two factors: high expectations coupled with low control. That is literally the formula for burnout. Now, what's interesting, high expectations with high control, no problem. People rise to the occasion. That's when we're actually doing our best. It's when we have high expectations and low control that we have higher rates of anxiety disorder, depression, and burnout. So when you have that mentality of, "I'm always behind, I'm always behind, I'm always behind," you can't control who's in front, ever.

Right.

It's uncontrollable. So you have higher and higher expectations with less and less control. Same goes with our time, right? If you're working in an environment where people are constantly pinging and dinging you, and you have no control over your time, it feels miserable. This is why people burn out, because they have no control over the most basic part of our day-to-day living. How we spend our attention and time.

Yeah, I'm thinking about that all across the board because, well, those, the expectations that you have. So you're saying high expectations, low control. Is that when someone else is placing those on you? Is that yourself?

Both. Great question. That's exactly right. This is the thing. We think that we're controlled by external circumstances. And the psychology literature is amazing on this. So there's what's called an external locus of control and an internal locus of control. So external locus of control is, Things happen to me. My life is determined by the economy, and AI's taking all the jobs, and there's a war, and all this stuff. That's an external locus of control. An internal locus of control is someone who believes that they can affect their circumstances. What's fascinating is that, one, people with an internal locus of control do better in just about every metric. They make more money, they have more friends, they contribute more to their community, they have fewer instances of mental health issues. All the good things happen to people with an internal locus of control. What's even more interesting is that even when you have every right to say that you are downtrodden, discriminated against, that your circumstances put you at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, even then, when it's a fact that you are in circumstances that externally have put you where you are, it still behooves you to believe you have an internal locus of control. You still do better in life when you have that, even if it's false, even if it's at fault. Because the key here, if you were gonna summarize my work over the past 6 years, it's this. Beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. So we have to have a certain level of evidence for fact, but beliefs are not facts. Right. Facts are things that are objectively true. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. So this goes back to our placebo discussion. It behooves you to find all the agency you possibly have in a situation. But also to acknowledge, okay, here's the things that aren't in my control. You can't control geopolitics, you can't control, you know, the weather. There's a lot of things you can't control. So to have that accurate assessment of here's what I can control and I'm not going to worry about it. I can't worry about who's in front of me on subscriber count, but I can worry about here's what I can control. I can put my butt in my chair and do the work. Like, that's the first place to start.

Something that comes up a lot in these conversations is what are you optimizing for. And you know, you get in a mastermind setting and everyone's saying you should do this, you should do that, and you realize, oh, the people giving advice are optimizing for completely different things. And there's nothing wrong, like, with what each of them are doing. But I'm really curious, for you in your creative business, what are you optimizing for? And then what decisions has that led to as far as, you know, team, how you spend your time, uh, how you make your money, all of that?

The most important thing to optimize for is not money, it's not fame, certainly not fame. I think it's persistence. Because if the number one reason that we don't meet our goals is that we quit, the antidote to quitting is persistence. And that turns out to be the most important trait. There was a great study that just blew my mind where they, this biologist, Kurt Richter, in the 1950s, he took a rat, he actually took many rats, and he put it in a cylinder of water, much, much larger than this one. And he wanted to see how long the rat could swim for. So he sat there with a timer and he timed, okay, how long can the rat swim before it gives up? Turns out about 15 minutes. Then he wanted to do another study to see, could he increase the rat's persistence? So he took a new group of rats, the old ones had died, obviously, took a new group of rats, He put them in these cylinders. This time, he stood there with a stopwatch, and when the 15-minute mark approached and he saw that the rats were starting to struggle, he reached in, pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunked back into the— into the cylinder it went. Now, he did in fact increase the rat's persistence, but by how much is absolutely incredible. The rats started at 15 minutes, and after that intervention where the rat was shown that salvation might be possible if the rat just kept swimming. If it didn't quit, if it persisted, something might save it. Something good might happen to save it from this situation, from this dire situation. The rat didn't swim twice as long. The rat didn't swim 3 times or 4 times as long. The rat swam 240 times longer. It went from 15 minutes to 60 hours. Hours of nonstop swimming. Wow. Unbelievable, right? Yeah. Just crazy. I mean, that's mind-blowing that that kind of intervention could do that. So what's the lesson for us? What changed in the rat's behavior? Like, well, how did that happen? The experiment was the same. Nothing changed in the environment. Nothing changed in the rat's body. The rat suddenly didn't become a super rat and become stronger. The only variable left is that something changed in the rat's mind. That's something that was always there. The rat could always swim for 60 hours, but suddenly their mind, something in their mind flipped, and now they became suddenly way, way more persistent. Well, what changed? A belief. They had a belief that if I keep swimming, I might get saved. That's what we need. As creators, we are quitting, most of us, at that 15-minute mark. It's too hard. There's no time. I'll never catch up. I missed my window. Right? That's quitting at the 15-minute mark. But each and every one of us have locked inside of us, we just don't realize, we have that 60 hours. And we unlock it through deciding what our beliefs will be, the ones that serve us and the ones that hurt us, the limiting ones versus the liberating ones.

When I see that time and again, where I— a creator will, or a want-to-be creator will say, "I'm gonna build an audience. I have something to teach the world," and all of that.

And it—

"I tried and it didn't work out." Yeah. I'm like, "Oh, tell me about how you tried." And it's like, I worked on it every weekend for 2 months in a row. And you're like, and then what did you do?

No, that's what I did.

Yeah, it's so true. But they're, you know, 'cause they're feeling like it's a total failure. You know, at that point they might've spent 100 hours doing this. And the thing is, I have yet to meet someone who showed up and worked on their creative pursuit every day for at least a half hour or an hour for 2 years and did not find some level of success beyond what they expected.

That's such a great point. And successful people, you know, are losers in a way, if you think about it. Because successful people lose more than unsuccessful people. Unsuccessful people, they try something, it doesn't work, I'm done.

I lost once.

Right. No big deal.

They lost once.

Successful people, the most successful people I know, the billionaires that I know, They can give you 1,000 ways that they have tried and failed, because they keep trying again and again. So again, the key is persistence. It's not intelligence. I know a lot of very successful people. You know a lot of successful people. They're not the smartest people in the world. I mean, they're smart. They're not dummies. But I know professors who are way, way smarter on raw intelligence who are less successful in business. In fact, you know, there's kind of a joke in Silicon Valley that, you know, Silicon Valley will never hire the smart kids who were A students in college who went to go to McKinsey and BCG. They tend to make actually terrible entrepreneurs. Why? Because they're almost too smart, right? Like, if you've worked at McKinsey or Bain or BCG or Goldman Sachs, you think in probabilities. You're thinking about, this is probably not gonna work out, and then you don't do it because you can't see those opportunities. Whereas the B and C students, if they have what's called entrepreneurial alertness, they can see things that the rest of us can't see, right? That in a way, you don't wanna be too smart in that way.

I love that the thing you're optimizing for is persistence and perseverance, because that is the missing ingredient in all of these creators. And so many people reach the point where they're at, you know, a quarter million a year in revenue, half a million a year, or they've got enough of an audience and they hit that plateau and they don't push through. And so this is completely different. What's the next thing that you're working on? Where are you going from here?

Right now I want to tell the world about what I, what's changed my life when it came to changing my limiting beliefs. I mean, it's made me so much better off, because I can now persist in areas that cause me suffering. I have better relationships with my family and my friends and my business colleagues. I'm in better shape physically, 'cause I go exercise when I say I will. I can stay more consistent with my work. So there's no area of my life that hasn't been touched by these behavioral, these belief shifts. So that's what I'm working on next. And then at some point I'll probably write another book. I have a ton of ideas still.

What I love, that idea, and the thing that's gonna be stuck in my head after this interview, and I hope it's stuck in every listener's head, is when you feel that pain, especially if it's towards the pursuit of getting better, you say, "Ah, this is what it feels like to get better." Right.

Or whatever mantra is meaningful to you. And I have many, right? Because there's, I have a dozen that I've created over the years that do that turnaround and give me a more liberating belief. So another one I use all the time is, "It doesn't get easier, I get stronger." Right. That's a big one because I kept expecting that if I was really good at this, it'd be easy, right? Like it's not supposed to be hard. No, it's always gonna be chaos. It's always gonna be difficult. You're just gonna get stronger and stronger.

Yeah, that sounds so good. Nir, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone should go check out the book Beyond Belief everywhere books are sold. You hit the New York Times list. It's incredible.

Thank you.

Uh, it's been fun to watch your journey over the years and I'm excited to get to talk to you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you so much. If you enjoyed hearing how belief can help you keep going when most people quit, check out episode 55 with Mark Manson, where he gets into how he spent years building his blog before his book The Subtle Art came out and sold 16 million copies. Like the video if you enjoyed it, hit subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening, and I'll see you next week.