Four Questions That Will Change Your World - An Exploration of “The Work” with Byron Katie

In this episode, we take a journey into the inquiry know as “The Work’ and uncover the 4 question framework that you can use to break down negative thoughts and limiting beliefs. We examine what happens when we argue with reality, look at the difference between being right and being free, explore the causes of suffering, and much more with our guest Byron Katie. 

Byron Katie is an American speaker, author, and founder of the method of self-inquiry known as “The Work”. She has worked with millions of individuals at both private and public events in prisons, hospitals, treatment centers, universities, and schools. She is the author of three bestselling books and her work has been featured in TIME, The Huffington Post, Oprah, and much more!
 

• What happens when you don’t accept reality?

• Do you like it when you scrape your knee?

• How should you deal with negative experience?

• Missing the miracle of life by arguing with it

• What happens when we get caught up in having to be right?

• Why it’s painful to “believe your own thoughts” and why you should question your own thinking

• The Four Questions of “The Work” that can allow you to challenge your negative thoughts and limiting beliefs

• Using the “Four Questions” to meditate on and reflect on challenges in your life

• How to become a better listener, listening is powerful

• When you argue with someone else, you miss valuable information and become disconnected with that person

• We are often looking outside for the answers to our questions - we should instead look inside

• The only way to change the world is to question what you believe about the world?

• How to be open and fearless

• What you think that causes your suffering - it's only what you’re thinking and believing that causes your suffering

• Test it for yourself

• What we think and believe create our identities

• What you THINK causes your suffering - it's not the external world. The events of the

• People don’t need to change - what you think and believe about them could use some work

• Be aware of your life right here, right now - the value and the gift of life and how to take care of it.

• The Four Questions of the Work and how you can apply each of them

  • Is it true?

  • Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

  • Who am I when I believe this to be true?

  • Who would I be without this thought?

• Turnaround

  • You can never change others but you can always change yourself

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This week's Mindset Monday is brought to you by a product we've been personally using and are LOVING - Ample K!

Have you been looking to take your diet to the next level using superfoods and science backed research? Have you ever wanted to learn more about Ketosis? Perhaps you've tried the "Keto" diet but find it impossible to eat the same foods each day and are looking for something quick, tasty, and easy?

Then Ample K is for you!

Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficient healthy fats in a powdered, mix-on-the-go format! Their formula includes 10x more probiotics than a serving of yogurt and over four types of fiber to promote a healthy gut! If you're a long time fan of the show you know how important gut health is for mental health as well!

For a limited time Ample is offering our listeners 15% off their first order of Ample! That's an incredible value and it's only for Science of Success listeners! Just click here and use the promo code "SUCCESS15" at checkout to claim your 15% off discount on your first order. 

We use it, we love it, you will too.

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners TWO MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for two months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of two whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] The Work

• [Book] Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell

• [Instagram] Byron Katie

• [Facebook] The Work of Byron Katie

• [Blog] The Work of Byron Katie

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode we take a journey into the inquiry, known as The Work, and uncover the four-question framework that you can use to break down negative thoughts and limiting beliefs. We examine what happens when we argue with reality. Look at the difference between being right and being free. Explore the causes of suffering, and much more with our guest, Byron Katie. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

There're some amazing stuff that's only available to your email subscribers, so be sure you sign up and join. The next thing you're going to get, you’re going to get curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, short, simple articles and stories that we've loved or enjoyed over the last week. Listeners have been loving that email. We get a ton of positive feedback on it, and if you're on the email list, you're going to get it every Monday. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guess. You can help us change parts of the show, like our interim music. You can even submit your own questions to guests that we often ask during the interview, and you can enter into special listener only giveaways that we do very frequently for our email list. So be sure to sign up, join the email list today. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're out and about, if you’re driving around, if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”. That's “smarter” to the number 44222. Text “smarter" to 44222 to sign up and join the email list today. 

In our previous episode we discussed the danger of getting addicted to your screens. We looked at how technology is designed to be as addictive as possible and how those addictions specifically make you spend more time on things like social media and news that make you less happy. We discussed how screens rob us of time and attention and why it's so hard to break away from them. We also looked at how you can structure your environment to spend more time away from your phone and create ways to get out of these addictive behavior loops with our guest, Adam Alter. If you want to know the real dangers that Silicon Valley insiders have been trying to hide from you about using technology, listen to that episode. 

Now, before we dig into the show I want to kind of to tell you about two things. One; I really want to note the audio quality of this episode. We had some audio issues, partly my fault. I had my mic set on the wrong setting, so it sounds pretty bad. I'll be honest with you. But I think there's value in this interview and I still wanted to share it with you. That's completely my fault for botching the audio on my end. 

We also had some issues with Katie, as she is known, her audio and some background noise, but we soldiered through it and I just wanted to give you kind of full transparency about the audio of this episode so that you know going into it that the audio quality is not our best. 

The second thing, I wanted to tell you a little bit about Byron Katie's work and sort of what she does and what she works on to give you some context going in this conversation, because we really kind of jumped into things in medias res, and I want to make sure that you have the right tools and the right context to understand what's going on and what we’re talking about. 

The Work, as it's called, is a method of inquiry. It's essentially a series of questions that you can use to break down negative thoughts and limiting beliefs and it's a framework that I’ve personally used many, many times. It's really impactful and really powerful and it's a simple four-question framework. The first question you ask yourself, and then then there's what she calls at turnaround at the end of that. The first question is; when you have a limiting belief or a negative thought, let's say, “I'm not good enough,” or “I can't sell,” or “That person doesn't like me,” etc. We’ll use I can't sell as this example. 

So the first question you have to ask yourself with the inquiry is, ”Is this true?” and I'll give you the four questions and then we'll go briefly into them and then we'll talk to Katie. So the first question is, “Is this true?” and that's kind of your gut reaction. The second question is, “Can I absolutely know that this is true?” That's a much deeper question. It's really hard to absolutely know really anything, and in many ways our perception of reality is often very skewed and limited and kind of low resolution, to borrow a phrase. 

The third question is, “Who do I become, or who am I when I believe that thought to be true?” When you're going through these questions, often the best thing to do is to kind of take some time, journal about this belief or this limiting belief or this negative thought and spend some time on each of these questions. So who do I become when I believe that thought to be true? 

Then the last question is, “Who would I be without that thought?” and this is an opportunity to create an image of your life, your experiences without that negative belief. Then finally, you have what she calls, what Katie calls a turnaround, and this is essentially a new belief or a new thought or sort of a reverse of the negative thought that you had before. So if your belief was, “I can't sell,” for example. You’d start with, “Is that true?” and your gut reaction might be, “Yes. It's true. I'm never been successful at sales.” 

Then the question, “Can I absolutely know that that's true?” Well, absolutely knowing that something is true is very different then thinking that it might be true. So do you absolutely know for a certain that you're not good at sales? Can you prove that scientifically, or is that just been your experience so far? Would it be possible that maybe with some changes in your behavior or the right coaching or the right strategies or a change in your mindset that you could be good at sales? Is it possible that other people that have a similar personality or background have succeeded at some point in the past at selling? It's definitely possible, and so it's much harder to know absolutely if that's a true belief or not. 

The third thing; start to look at what is your life look like when you believe you can't sell or when you believe that negative belief really create a vivid scenario how much suffering, how many problems? What does it cost? What does that stop you from achieving and doing? And then working with that last question, “Who would I be without this belief.” Who would you be without the belief that you couldn't sell? You would be out there hustling, making your dreams come true, achieving the things you want to happen, being successful, building your life. 

Again, sales is just an example. You can do this with any limiting belief, but that's a really simple one and a lot of people have the belief. So it's a good example. Then the turnaround of that would be something as simple as, “I'm an amazing salesperson.” So that's kind of an example of the four questions. Now we’re going to segue into the interview. 

I just wanted to give you a little bit of context, because, again, we kind of jumped in right in the middle of things, and I wanted you to know what the four questions are, what a turnaround is and how that all feeds into this conversation with Katie. 

I also wanted to point out briefly that this episode, much like occasional episodes we do, like Robert Thurman and others, is less grounded in science and research, but, again, I think this framework is really powerful and impactful. Certainly made a big impact on my life, and so I still found it valuable to share it with you. 

So, now for the episode. Remember, the audio quality, not the best. I apologize profusely for that. But I still think there is value in this conversation, and so I wanted to share it with you today. 

[0:07:51.0] MB: Today we have another amazing guest on the show, Byron Katie. Katie, as she’s affectionately called, is an American speaker, author and founder of the method of self-inquiry known as The Work. She's worked with millions of individuals at both private and public events, at prisons, hospitals, treatment centers, universities and schools. She's the author of three bestselling book and her work has been featured in Time, The Huffington Post, Oprah and much more. 

Katie, welcome to The Science of Science. 

[0:08:16.2] BK: Thank you, Matt. Thank you for having me on. 

[0:08:19.5] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. So I’d love to start out with and really kind of explore some of the fundamental premises of The Work. Starting out, and this is something that I think about a lot. We talked a lot about in the show, is what happens when people argue with reality or don’t accept things kind of as they are?

[0:08:43.2] BK: Well, it’s like war breaks out in those moments. If I believe — For me, I’ll just talk about myself and my own experience. If I fall down and scraped my knee, to me, it’s like some kind of amazing, awesome experience, because it’s not about me scraping my knee. It’s about the experience of actually noticing what I tripped on. Noticing the falling in real-time, and it’s like in slow motion even though it appears to other people as happening quickly. 

Then scraping my knee is an experience. As I understand after years of inquiry, that all pain is either remembered or anticipated. I get to be in that experience and I don’t miss it and it would be — I have experience of falling down, like — I don’t know, maybe 50 steps, and in that slow motion, because I’m not anticipating where I’m going to land or where I’ve been. It’s like I don’t miss the miracle of life, and all these years I cannot find anything to argue with. 

Now, if I fall down prior to me discovering this inquiry in myself, if I would argue with someone, I had to be right. And I say one thing, they say something else that contradicts it, then I have to argue my point. But today I say something, let’s say my husband says something else, an entirely different point of view, I have some something to contemplate, because more often than not, people are right. Even if they’re not, it gives me another point of view. It gets me in touch with who they are. 

There’s so much there that I could go on and on and on about that people are here to educate me, not the other way around. So I love listening and thinking for myself, because ourselves are all we’re ever going to deal with. 

[0:11:09.1] MB: There’s a lot of different things that I want to unpack from that. Let’s start with the concept of having to be right. For someone who’s not familiar with you and your work, what happens on why do people get caught up in having to be right? 

[0:11:24.8] BK: It’s ego-based. It forms our identity, and if I can hang on to what I believe, then I am right, and that is always an I-ego that’s right, that there’s an argument. But if someone has another point of view, even if it directly contradicts mine, even if they’re appear to even be angry in it, am I listening beyond what I’m believing about their anger? Am I listening? Am I open? Am I growing and expanding this mind of mine? Is it something I haven’t considered before? I just don’t have to be right. I’d rather be free. We get stuck in that. 

If someone says, for example, “Katie, you’re wrong,” then my response would be, “I haven’t even considered that.” Maybe I might say that or I might just cut to the chase and say, “Tell me more. Tell me where I’m wrong.” So now I have my point of view and I have someone else’s point of view that can move me forward and even more with a mind that’s even more open and educated. 

Why do people get caught up and having to be right? Because we’re believing our thoughts. But what if we questioned what we were believing? If we have an open mind, that’s where the freedom lies. Moving out of a stuck place and to a place that is more informed, a more enlightened point of view and free, free to grow. 

[0:13:17.1] MB: I think that’s a great point. I want to dig in and circle back. Can you share again and just talk briefly about sort of the importance of each of the different questions and sort of the four questions of the work? We’ve talked a lot and had some examples of about how you can apply it in a context. But just for listeners who want to have sort of each of them as a tool that they can use, will you share each of the questions and sort of how that question functions and works?

[0:13:42.3] BK: Yes. Is what I’m believing true? Now, the ego will take that inquiry over if we don’t write — Read through it as a one liner, like he doesn’t care about me. If I don’t write it down, and I have a worksheet for that on [inaudible 0:14:01.5].com. It’s always free, of course. I write it down. So there it is, my thoughts on paper. Another way of saying that is my mind is stopped. It may be running radically in my head, but that portion I want to question is written down and it’s clear. So he doesn’t care about me. There it is in writing. 

Okay. Now the mind is going to try to shift all over the place and I’m going to keep coming back to what I’ve written. Just simple assumption, and the mind would say, “No. It’s true.” So I won’t call it assumption here. Just a concept, judgment. So he doesn’t care about me. 

So I want to know for myself if that’s true, if what I’m believing about him is true. I want to know, because a person can say, “I care about you,” and we don’t believe them anyway. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’, but we don’t necessarily believe them anyway when they say, “I do like you.” So I’m questioning, he doesn’t care about me. So it is true?

So now I’m going to contemplate that and I’m going to anchor on that situation, last night at that social event, where I was standing, where he was standing, I’m going to contemplate as I witness that situation again in my mind. So I’m going to anchor there, he doesn’t care about me. Is it true? And I’m going to witness and I’m going to listen, and I’m not going to — If it’s a yes, it’s true. If I’ve really witnessed that, and that’s what I come up with, then that’s my answer. If I come up with a no and I’ve really witnessed the situation from last night again and in my mind’s eye. As I meditate on that moment, if I come up with a no, then that’s my answer. 

Then the next question I would move to, there are only four questions, is, “Can I absolutely know that it’s true he doesn’t care about me?” And I’m going to contemplate that. If the answer was no, I just move on to three. If the answer was yes, I’m going to give it some more time, and I absolutely know that it’s true, he doesn’t care about me. 

Now I’m not going to guess just no, because the word absolutely is there. I’m going to really meditate on that moment in time until I’m listening. So my answer can still be yes. That’s okay too. I’m going to continue with the next question and notice how I react, notice in my mind’s eye witnessing last night’s event, that situation in my mind’s eye now as I sit this morning meditating on that moment in time how I reacted when I believed the thought, how it felt, what I said, what I did. I’m going to silently witness how I reacted last night. I’m going to be shown in my mind’s eye this morning witnessing how I reacted when I believed the thought he doesn’t care about me. I’m going to witness it this morning in real-time, then I’m going to be shown, and a lot of emotions come up.  

So I can see how I reacted, and when I feel educated there, like I really am aware of how I reacted and what happened and how it felt, what I said, what I did, then I’m going to move, “Would I be in that same situation if I didn’t believe the thought he doesn’t care about me?” Really, I’m just taking that PostIt off of him and I’m witnessing him and I’m witnessing me and I’m listening to what he said [inaudible 0:18:05.6] doesn’t care about me. My mind is very open, extremely open, because I’m not at that social gathering now. I’m at home along sitting in my chair meditating in that moment in time. So I can see without the thought he doesn’t care about me. I experience clearly that when I believed the thought, that was because of my suffering. It wasn’t him. What I would be without the thought? I’m listening, I’m at ease. Who am I when I believed the thought? How do I react? Very stressed out. So is what I’m believing about him, that is the cause of my suffering. 

Then I turn it around, he doesn’t care about me. I don’t care about him. Then I witnessed, I continued to stay anchored in that last night event, that moment in time, he does care about me and open my mind and see if I can find any clues. I’m not going to concoct something. I’m not making nice. I’m not using positive affirmation. I really want to know and to know I have to get really still and listen and be shown what I missed last night, because my mind was so — I was so believing he doesn’t care about me. He does care about me. I’m going to sit there until I can see just try on like that new pair of shoes or boots that I’m trying on. Just witness maybe the least of all thing, he does care about. It has to be the real deal. I really got to know. 

When I have said in that, meditated there, I’m going to see if I can find another opposite to he doesn’t care about me. I don’t care about him. That’s an opposite. So where is it that I was uncaring last night? Now I’m going to witness again. If I was, again, anything against my most intelligent self, my wisest self, my kindest self. Those are terms for kind, true nature. It’s a match to the heart, to kindness. I don’t care about him. 

So I’m going to see things here in my situation. Things that I need to admit to him in our next conversation, and things I need to apologize for. I going to get that job down, because peace is another word for wise. Peace is what I’m about, because I know there’s a way from experience, and that’s my invitation, and I do this by invitation. He doesn’t care about me. I don’t care about him. Then I make that right. [inaudible 0:21:13.2] right. He doesn’t care about me. 

Then there’s another one; I don’t care about him. He doesn’t care about me turned around, I don’t care about him. Where is it that I was uncaring about myself in that situation? Then I witness the ways that I really did, that I really was out of order, and that’s not carrying about me. Anytime something like that shows up, it shows me I’m doing the right things sitting in this inquiry. It’s a beautiful thing, this unending circle, this love affair with the self. 

When one loves themselves or care about themselves we’ll see in this situation, then we begin to care about others. I don’t like me, I don’t like you. If I like me, I like you. So there’s only one person to ever work with in this world, and it’s always one self. I can’t change you. It’s difficult enough to change me, and only enlightenment changes me. I can’t pretend change. It’s going to catch up with me. It’s the truth that sets me free. To care about me, is to care about you. 

That’s the just 20 minutes every morning, sitting in one’s self. Just that inquiring mind. I’m great. I think Socrates said, if I’m not mistaken, an unquestioned life is not worth living, and that certainly is my experience.

[0:22:59.6] MB: So just to clarify and make sure listeners understand. The example you’ve been using kind of throughout this is if you ran into somebody at a dinner party and you got the impression that they didn’t like or kind of rub you the wrong way, this is a way that you could use the questions of The Work to break down that belief and decide, is that really true, and sort of get at the root and sort of the underpinnings of your thoughts and around that and the negative emotions that you experienced bout that. 

[0:23:27.5] BK: Yes. Just to see what’s true and what’s not. We’re guessing, and we walk around with these minds that are just — How do we react with these thoughts running on our head. Notice the energy it takes. It brings us up. We could be living wiser, kinder lives and really taking care of what needs to be taken care of with it not being all about me. 

[0:23:59.0] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our loyal and amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography and you get unlimited to all of these classes for a single low monthly price. So you never have to pay per class again. 

They have some awesome courses on there that I personally love, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to draw, or if you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare. 

Skillshare is offering something incredible to our listeners. Two months for just 99 cents. You can get that by going to skillshare.com/success. That’s skillshare.com/success for two months of courses for just 99 cents. Be sure to check that out. 

I want to tell you a funny quick story about our second sponsor for this episode, Ample K. Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficient healthy fats in a powdered mix on-the-go format. In fact, Ample sent me some free samples of their product a couple of months ago and I was skeptical at first. In fact, the sample basically sat in my pantry for a month and a half and my producer, Austin, and I were joking about, “Oh, this sent us this protein shake in a bottle, blah-blah-blah. It probably tastes really bad,” and don’t really have much desire to try it. 

But I’m going to be completely honest with you. One day, I was out of time and I needed a protein shake, and I just grabbed a bottle, filled it with water, shook it up and started drinking it. First of all, it tasted delicious. Great taste, and the nutritional content is awesome. It has like 30 grams of protein, almost 30 grams of healthy fats. It’s only 400 calories in one of the servings and you can literally mix it up and drink it in 10 seconds. I now probably drink three or four them a week. I just ordered like a massive order with my producer, Austin, and I split it because we ordered one of the largest orders you can possibly make. 

I’m a huge fan, personal user of the product, and I wanted to share that story with you, but they’re offering something special for listeners of the show. Anybody who’s listening can get 15% off of their first order of Ample, and this is exclusively for The Science of Success listeners. All you have to do is when you’re checking out at amplemeal.com, just use the promo code success15 to check out to get your 15% discount on your first order of Ample. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re looking for something simple, easy and on-the-go. 

I also wanted to tell you about our second sponsor for this episode, Ample K. Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficient healthy fats in a powdered and mix on-the-go format. I’m a huge Ample user as well. In fact I’m having an Ample for breakfast today, and they sent us a couple of free samples. It took me forever to actually try one, and once I did I was completely hooked. There’s like 400 calories, almost 30 grams of protein. A great balance of healthy nutritious fats. It’s really exactly what you could look for in a sort of a meal, powdered meal on-the-go shake, and I have probably three or four Amples a week. Great. 

I just ordered along with the producer of the show, Austin, who’s also a big fan of Ample. We just ordered a huge — Like whatever the biggest boxes. We have these giant boxes of Ample just come in. I’m a huge fan of Ample as well. So I’m really excited to have them be a sponsor. 

For a limited time, they’re offering our listeners 15% off of your first order of Ample K. So to get this exclusive offer only for Science of Success listeners, you can go to amplemeal.com and use the promo code success15 at your check out to claim a 15% discount of your first order of Ample K. 

Back to the show. 

[0:27:56.2] MB: So tell me a little bit more about this notion of believing our thoughts. If somebody is listening to this and they’d never really kind of woken up to the fact that getting caught up in your own world and not accepting reality and believing your thoughts can cause so much pain and suffering in your life. What does that mean to believe our own thoughts? Why shouldn’t we do that?

[0:28:19.1] BK: Well, we do, but it can really painful. If someone contradicts what I believe, then if I’m ego’s in play, I’m going to stay stuck and that’s going to look like argument. So after the argument, let’s say I argue with that person. I’m right, and they say, “No. I’m right. Here is why.” “Well, I’m right, and here is why.” We have that going back and forth. Later I can sit down and question it. For example, they say I was wrong. 

So I invite people to contemplate, and what they’re believing that causes stress and to question it. So I’m wrong that person says, and so I see them as wrong. I’m going to sit down later and I’m going to just consider that they’re wrong. That’s what I’m believing. That person is wrong in what they say. The first question, there are only four; is it true? Can I absolutely know that it’s true that that person is wrong at what they say? And I’m going to contemplate that out of my own personal experience, because that’s all I have. This is inner work. So I’m meditating on that moment in time in that argument and I’m going to anchor there in this meditation and then I’m going to contemplate and witness in my mind’s eye with my eyes closed how I reacted when I believed the thought that he’s wrong. 

So now I’m going to the first thing that we usually are in touch with, our feelings and emotions. So he’s wrong. How do I react when I think that thought? I can witness that moment in time and actually feel it as I see it in my mind’s eye. I’m sitting in a chair on the phone and he was so, so, so wrong. How did I react when I believed that, the emotions? So I’m going to take my time as I continue to meditate on that moment in time when I believed he was wrong. 

Then I’m going to witness the argument. What I said and how my voice would rise and fall and the indignation maybe, that righteous indignation of, “I know,” and I’m going to witness that very stressful moment in time. Then I’m going to move to that last question of the four and witness who would I be without the thought he’s wrong? 

So that allows me in real-time now to really listen and hear and contemplate what he was actually saying. So now I’m in a place where I can hear him. There’s no one to argue with, so I’m listening to his voice, the voice of then now, and now my mind is starting to open. It’s as though I’m taking that post-it off of him. Those stick post-it, he’s wrong, he’s not listening, he is stuck, he is trying to hurt my feelings, etc. Who would I be without those post-it’s that I’ve put on him in that experience? Who would I be without my story? Who would I be without the thought he’s wrong? 

Again, this is meditation, and it takes an open mind. A mind that would rather be free than right, and it doesn’t mean I’m not right. But where am in in opposition to anything that would confound what I believe, that’s ridiculous. It’s crazy. Everyone has a lie to what they think and believe and say, and I’m at war with another human being. So I just notice all of that. Then I find opposites. I just experience opposites, like he’s wrong with what he’s believing. I’m might turn it around to; he’s right in what he’s believing. That can feel really stunning at first, even confrontational at first, because the ego is at play here. It needs to be right to exist, to apparently exist. 

So he’s right in what he says. So now I have to get really still and I have to consider with an open mind, is it possible that he’s right about that? Now that taps me into a whole other world, a whole other world that I was blind to as I was defending my own identity. I am the one who knows. I’m right. 

So after contemplating that turnaround, that opposite, I’m wrong in what I believe. I’m wrong in what I believed to be true. Now after listening to him in this silence, hearing now what I couldn’t hear then, I could be wrong, I believed. So I have his information now that I’ve taken in, because now it’s always a safe place to listen again. So my entire mind is being shifted, and I’m ending the war with him, a disagreement with him and I’m doing nothing, but sitting in these questions and experience and what I was believing then that caused me more the disturbance and me to be so small-minded. It still doesn’t mean that I’m wrong when I said that I am wrong in what I believe. It can certainly flow over to what I pointed to earlier, I began to realize that he has a right to his opinion and I feel closer to him, because I know his internal and where he’s coming from. So I’m more connected. I’m closer. I’m more respectful when I run into this human being again, because all these post-its I had on him have dropped. I’m a better listener with everyone. I understand without having to plan it, that listening is powerful. I understand that I’m more connected when I am not overwriting another human being’s belief system. I’m more aware that when I will stay at war, arguing with someone, that I miss what they have to say. I’m missing valuable points, and it disconnects me from that person. I’m learning so much, I can go on and on and on. It becomes a way of mind. 

There’s nothing we cannot apply — I call it The Work. It’s inquiry. But four questions [inaudible 0:35:33.0]. And there’s nothing we cannot apply this to in our lives. It’s a way to end our own ignorance, and war is ignorance, and it would be if you imagine you at breakfast this morning, then would see you, let’s say, at your kitchen table or grabbing a piece of toast on your way out the door. Whatever it was for you. Then if you imagine yourself at dinner tonight, then you have that self of that past in your mind’s eye, that self of the future in your mind’s eye, and then the self listening now. So who are you? You know the question; who am I? It really is not a tough question. I am not that self at breakfast. That is a me in my mind’s eye and that is not me at dinner tonight. How do I know I’m not there? How do I know that’s not my self at breakfast? I’m not there. 

But that’s where we live. We live in past future. But what if we were just aware, and it’s not to stop these images and what we believe on to these images. That’s not the trick. The trick is to be aware. To be awake to what is reality and what is fantasy. So we can do the work that we are here to do, and it’s not a stupid way to live or ethereal thing that I’m pointing to here. It is you, that wise self that isn’t diluted or spread all over the place. If you want to little guilt, give it past. If you want a little wear and tear, get a future, or just the difference. 

For me, it’s not enough to just see these images. We have to question what we’re believing on to these images of past future to get free of those selves, to wake ourselves up to the self and live this selfless life and which we found a little strange to some ears. 

[0:38:06.5] MB: What’s one kind of short, simple piece of homework or actionable advice you could give to somebody listening so they could start implementing the work in their lives? 

[0:38:16.3] BK: To go to thework.com and the simple directions are there, and if you need a little help, there is a free help line on thework.com, and there are facilitators there to support you in how to fill in the worksheet. There’s also a one belief at a time worksheet. There’s also an app online. Just go to the app store, The Work, and the directions are there. I have a nine-day school for The Work coming up in March that I just can’t recommend strongly enough for people who can afford those nine days out of their lives and the money it would take to get to the school for The Work, and that’s why it’s free on thework.com for people who cannot afford those two things; the time and the money. It’s nine days of just stepping out of the world and identifying what we’re thinking and believing about sexuality and fear and terror and relationships and money and ourselves and others and — What else, James? 

[0:39:36.4] J: Oh! About our attendance and technology and the government. The whole world, really. 

[0:39:44.3] BK: Whatever we encounter in life just as a usual. It’s nine days just to sit in that with my guidance there. A lot of experience. Nine days, when we step out of those nine days, the work, this inquiry. It’s just a part of our mind. It is like everything I think ends in a question mark, and those nine days — This happens for everyone. It’s like he doesn’t care about me. Oh! He doesn’t care about me. When inquiry is alive in us, it’s like he doesn’t care about me? It’s a whole different thing. It’s like, “Oh! I did it wrong.” “Oh, I did it wrong?” It feels like that. The whole mind shift literally turns around. 

So, of course, my job is to make sure that people know these questions exist and that anyone with an open mind can do this. It’s stepping into another world. The world that I came from was one of more than a decade of serious depression, and my world now is — It shifted so radically, that even my children didn’t recognize me. Same body, different mind. It’s radical. 

[0:41:13.1] MB: Katie, where can listeners find you and The Work online?

[0:41:17.7] BK: Instagram, Facebook, thework.com, byronkatie.com, and my books are on Amazon, or you can find those on thework.com as well. People can — It may sound a little strange, but they can always find me inside themselves as I, like you, Matt, we can only be no more and no less than people believe us to be. The bottom line is who do I believe me to be and who do I believe you to be? That’s the world I love.

[0:41:52.5] MB: Katie, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdoms. The questions from The Work have been tremendously impactful in my life and really help me deal with a lot of limiting beliefs and negative thoughts. I really personally thank you for creating that framework and thank you for coming on the show and sharing your stories and experiences with our listeners. 

[0:42:11.0] BK: Oh! You’re so welcome, Matt. Again, thank you for your good work and for having me on. 

[0:42:16.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for email list today by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, that the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe in iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com. Just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

The Secret That Silicon Valley Giants Don’t Want You To Know with Dr. Adam Alter

In this episode we discuss the danger of getting addicted to your screens. We look at how technology is designed to be as addictive as possible, and how those addictions specifically make you spend more time on things like social media and news that make you less happy. We discuss how screens rob us of time and attention and why it’s so hard to break away from them. We also look at how how you can structure your environment to spend more time away from your phone and create ways to get out of these addictive behavior loops with our guest Dr. Adam Alter. 

Dr. Adam Alter is an Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department. His research focuses on judgement, decision making, and social psychology. He is the bestselling author of Drunk Tank Pink, and Irresistible, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, and much more!

• Technology programs like Facebook are not designed to make you happy - their designed to be as addictive as possible and consume you

• Steve Jobs didn't let his children use iPads

• Why technology giants in Silicon Valley often don’t let their children use technology (and why that’s important for you)

• The four negative affects of being addicted to your screens

• Your psychological wellbeing

  1. Your threshold for boredom declines dramatically

     1. Bordem is good, it creates creative and divergent thinking

  2. Negatively impacts your social wellbeing

  3. Lowers your emotional intelligence and your ability to read the emotions of others

  4. Negatively impacts you financially

  5. In app purchases

  6. Negatively impacts you in a physical way

  7. Too much time in front of screens

• Screens rob you of time and attention

• Can’t get into Deep Work

  1. Get less sleep

  2. Not spending time being present, enjoying time with loved one and friends

• The Drug of Choice Today is the PHONE

• There’s a huge rise in behavioral addictions today

• Social media and news make you LESS HAPPY when you use them - leaving you hollow and unfulfilled

• People spend 3x time on average on apps that make them unhappy

• Is Adam a luddite for hating on smartphones?

• AR and VR will make it even more difficult to break away from technology addiction

• Apps today are built like slot machines - they are intentionally designed to hook you and not let you go

• The same strategies used to keep people gambling are used in apps and technology to keep you addicted

• Humans don’t like open loops - goals help close them

• “Email is a lot like zombies” - you can kill them all and they just keep coming

• The abscence of stopping queues makes technology keep you addicted

• How can we mindfully create stopping queues in our own lives?

• You must become the architect of your own environment to control your own stopping queues

• How to break your phone addiciton?

• Set alarms to get off technology

  1. Make your phone as physically far away from you as possible

• You can engineer experiences that encournage positive outcomes, just like you can engineer negative outcomes

• Games can treat pain - playing a game during a physically painful experiecne takes your pain away

• Actively introduce a rule that physically distances you form your device - that’s the best way to do it

• It’s not easy or desirable to live in a tech free universe

• Propinquity - the things that are close to your physical space have the biggest impact on your psychological experience

• The story of “Drunk Tank Pink” and how subtle changes in your environment can create huge changes in your behavior

• Homework - create as much distance as possible between yourself and your phone every single day

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can get started for free right now!

If you enjoy learning these incredibly important skills, Brilliant is offering THE FIRST 200 Science of Success listeners 20% off their Annual Premium Subscription. Simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to claim your discount!

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Why You Shouldn’t Follow Your Passion & The Rare Value of Deep Work with Cal Newport

• [SoS Episode] Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

• [Article] Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? By Jean M. Twenge

• [App] Moment

• [Article] B.F. Skinner: The Man Who Taught Pigeons to Play Ping-Pong and Rats to Pull Levers By Marina Koren

• [Twitter] Adam Alter

• [Author Site] Adam Alter

• [TEDTalk] Why our screens make us less happy - Adam Alter at TED2017

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.1] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode we discuss the danger of getting addicted to your screens. We look at how technology is designed to be as addictive as possible and how those addictions specifically make you spend more time on things like social media and news that make you less happy. 

We also look at how screens rob us of time and attention and why it's so hard to break away from them. We also look at how you can structure your environment to spend more time away from your phone and create ways to get out of these addictive behavior loops with our guest, Adam Alter. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to go there, subscribe and sign up. There are some incredible stuff, including an awesome free guide that we created based on the listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining our email list today. 

Next, you get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. It’s short, simple, filled with articles, videos, stories, things that we found interesting or exciting in the last week. Listeners have been absolutely loving Mindset Monday, by the way. 

Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, help us change parts about the show, like our intro music, or even submit your own personal questions to our guests. Again, there are some incredible stuff, but you have to sign up and join the email list to get access to these things. So go sign up. You can sign up at successpodcast.com right on the homepage, or if you're out and about, if you're on the go, if you're driving around, just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter”, to the number 44222. That's “smarter” to 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed how to become a super connector. We looked at the idea that networking is not about tactics. It's about a fundamental shift in how you think about interacting with people. We examine how to break free from the lazy and shallow networking that social media often creates. Discussed why you should never ask how can I help. Looked at the power of curiosity and asking better questions and much more with our guest, Scott Gerber. If you want to learn why you should throw out networking and start focusing on building real human relationships, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the show. 

[0:02:59.4] MB: Today we have another exciting guests on the show, Adam Alter. Adam is an associate professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business and as an affiliate appointment in New York University psychology department. His research focuses on judgment, decision-making and social psychology. He’s the best-selling author of Dunk Tank Pink and Irresistible. His work has been featured in New York Times, Washington Post, Wired and much more. Adam, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:03:21.2] AA: Thanks, Matt. Good to be here. 

[0:03:22.8] MB: We’re excited to have you on here today. So something that we were talking about kind of before we started recording, which I think is a great starting point. There's been a lot of revelations in kind of the technology world in the last few months about the core thesis of your book, Irresistible. I’d love to start out with Sean Parker came out recently and talk about how Facebook is essentially designed to sort of make you addicted to it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about both kind of what's been going on recently and also that idea more broadly. 

[0:03:50.7] AA: Yeah. It's one of the big questions people ask me whenever I speak about this work and the question I have is; are these companies just making the best product possible, which happens to be hard to resist because that's part of what makes a product good, it’s something you want to keep using, or is there an explicit call when they’re creating the product to get you to use it for as long as possible irrespective of whether that's good for you? For a long time I had to hitch, because it's hard to get behind the curtain of these companies. 

Then I think it was November, Sean Parker came out and said, “Well, actually, Facebook from its very early days was focused much less on the consumer well-being and much more on ensuring that you spend as many minutes as possible on, first, on the program online and then on the app.” That basically validated what I assumed to be true, and it certainly true at other companies. We've heard from other tech giants at other companies, early investors, people who are quite seniors in these companies saying the same thing, that essentially they’re in the attention economy. There’s a hot wall for your attention. There are a lot of different companies that are vying for your attention at all times. So every company in this arms race has to use every tool at its disposal, and as a result, they’re all trying their very best to tweak even very small features that they think will capture an extra minute or two here or there from everyone who uses the platform. 

Yeah, this is something that I’ve been focused on, and it's also — It's been great, because now when people ask the question, I actually have people that I can point to. I can say, “Yes. These companies admit, or the people who’ve invested in these companies admit that the companies are founded on the principle that we need to get you to use these products for as many minutes as possible, and actually, to be totally honest, your well-being as a consumer is a secondary concern.” 

[0:05:26.7] MB: It's interesting. I think you mentioned in your TED talk as well that, for example, Steve Jobs didn't let his children use iPads. 

[0:05:35.7] AA: Yeah. That was very surprising to me. It was quite early on in the research for the book and it’s one of the nuggets I discovered that led me to really pursue the book. What I basically found was that a number of tech giants were very, very careful about their own personal use and the use by their kids of the same products they were touting publicly. Publicly they’d get up on stage and say, “This is the greatest product of all time. You should all earn one. Your kids should earn one. You should use it a lot.” But then when you look at the way they approach the same products privately, behind closed doors, they were much more wary about their use. 

It’s, I wouldn't say, quite universal, but the number of tech giants in this position is pretty staggering. There’s a school in Silicon Valley that doesn't allow kids to use screens, like iPads. It's a private school. They don’t allow kids to use iPads until they’re in 8th grade, so roughly 13 or 14 years old, and 75% of the kids there have parents who work in fairly senior positions in Silicon Valley. So these are parents in the tech world who are choosing to send their kids to school that explicitly forbids the use of screens until age 13 or 14, which is staggering, I think. The idea that these are tech evangelists who are being very careful about how much tech they expose their kids to. 

I guess what that suggested to me early on was there was some digging to be done. What is it exactly that these people know that we don't know, the rest of us don’t know, and what should we be concerned about? If they’re not letting their kids near the same products they’re promoting publicly, should we also be concerned in the same way? What exactly is it we should be concerned about? And that's why I have spent so much time on this topic. 

[0:07:06.5] MB: So let's dig into that a little bit. Why exactly is it dangerous or bad to be addicted to our phones and our screens?

[0:07:14.7] AA: Yeah, it's a good question. So there are four main effects that spending too much time, not just on screens, but in general, in anyone behavior can have on your well-being. The four main areas, they can affect your psychological will being. So for example we know that when you spend a lot of time with screens your threshold for boredom declines pretty dramatically. This is what you see when you get in an elevator and people are using their phones even when they go in between two floors for three seconds in the elevator. No one is capable of dealing with boredom today. We all pull out our phones instinctively. It's important to be bored occasionally, because what boredom does is it pushes you to think a little bit different, be a little bit more divergently, a little bit more creatively. Otherwise, you keep thinking down exactly the same well-trodden paths over and over and over again. It's boredom that acts as a roadblock that pushes you into new territory. So that's one effect; psychological. 

Second effect is social. So we know that people who spend a lot of time on screens, especially kids but also adults, are less capable of distinguishing emotions, subtle emotions that other people are sending off to them or giving off to them. Especially kids again, are less capable generally as social beings. It becomes more difficult for them to interact with others. 

So for example, we take for granted that if humans are empathetic as a species. So we care about the well-being of others. Of course there were exceptions to that rule, but most of us don't like to be in the presence of someone whom we've hurt or whose upset or unhappy. That comes to some extent over time, you learn how your behavior affects other people. A child needs to sit in front of another child and take a toy from that child and see that other kid’s face crinkling and the tears start to flow to learn that taking someone else's things is not a good idea. But if that same child never gets that experience because most of his or her time is spent in front of screens for many of his or her first few years, that's obviously a problem. You never really developed those same capacities. 

Now, that the kids who were born into the smartphone and tablet ear now are now only about 7 to 10, maybe 11 years old, some of them. We don't know what they’ll look like when they’re teens, when they’re entering the workforce, when they run in government and so on, and there’s a chance that, in some sense, this generation that’s growing up with screens will look socially quite different from other generations that came before, and that I think is a big concern. 

We’ve got the psychological, the social, the financial. So a lot of the screen experiences we have can be quite costly for us. This applies especially to games, where you start playing a game, you end up deep down the rabbit hole and you spend many hours playing the game and then you hit a roadblock where the producer of the game says to you to continue playing now or to level up so that you are a stronger character in this game so that you can beat the next boss and continue, you’ll need to pay $10. Things like that, and a lot of people say that play these games with in-app purchases, these premium games where they end up spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars that they don't have. So a lot of these addictive experiences are designed to capitalize on the idea that once you spend a lot of time immersed in them, you will end up spending a lot of money to continue, and so they can be financially quite damaging. 

Then the final consequence is physical, that some of us are spending a lot of time without exercise, without spending time outdoors, because we’re spending so much time in front of screens. So that's another fairly major concern. That, again, this whole generation is spending so much time sedentary in front of screens that we just aren’t exercising in the same way, we’re not moving around, and that's obviously bad for us. 

[0:10:40.5] MB: So let's dig in, I’d love to talk a little bit more about kind of the psychological aspect and some of the negative psychological consequences of screen addiction.

[0:10:49.1] AA: I think the main thing is how we develop socially and how we perceive the world socially. So if you spend a lot of time in front of screens, anything you do gets very delayed feedback, if it gets any feedback at all. This is one of the reasons why YouTube comments are so incredibly nasty, and a way that most people would never be face-to-face. We would never say most of the things that you see people on YouTube saying. It's not that everyone who is on YouTube is a horrible person or the people making these comments are horrible people, it’s that the platform allows you to distance yourself from the consequences of the things you’re doing. So if you're saying things that are critical, you can do that without accountability and without having to expose yourself to the negative feedback that you’d get as you obviously make the person who's posted the content upset or unhappy. It’s one of the consequences. 

I mentioned also that this tendency to boredom, to struggle with boredom in a way that we as a species haven’t been really had to struggle before, and again I think it's quite important that we caught boredom, that we accept it, that we deal with it, that we work our way through it so that we can get the other side where really interesting things start to happen. I think those are the two biggest consequences psychologically for us. 

But obviously when people say, “Why is this bad?” This is a personal question. The question is what exactly is your screen time encroaching on? So what is it taking away from? And for a lot of us it takes away from sleep, which is obviously psychologically very damaging. A lot of us it takes away from our ability to work an efficient way. So every time you check your email, which happens constantly for most of us throughout the day, depending on which statistics you look at, it can take a number of minutes for you to delve back into the task you are in before you check your email. As a result, you’re never really in the zone of maximum productivity. Email just keeps distracting. It keeps removing you from that zone. So you end up spending much longer, eating up many more hours doing much less good work. That seems like a problem as well. 

Of course, something that's very personal for many of us is the idea that spending a lot of time on screens means you're not spending time with loved ones, with friends. Even my wife and I a number of years ago noticed that we were sitting on the sofa together and we were both on our screens for sometimes hours at a time not speaking. The room was completely silent. And obviously that wasn't good for our relationship. And so we vowed to change the way we were using our screens in each other's company. So I think that there a lot of consequences, but the biggest thing that screens do, broadly speaking, is they eat up the time that you would spend doing things that I think can be for a lot of us very enriching and important throughout our lives. 

[0:13:16.4] MB: Those are great examples. It's funny, we've had a couple of previous guests who’ve touched on the importance of some of these different things. For example, talking about attention and having your attention being robbed. We had a previous interview with Cal Newport where he talked about deep work and how getting into that state of distraction-free work is such a highly valuable place to be. For listeners who interested, that’s definitely something you can check out. Or we had another one about how important sleep is, Dr. Matthew Walker. It’s incredibly important. It is amazing how few people actually get enough sleep and how important sleep really is for you. So I think that those are really, really key lessons. 

[0:13:52.4] AA: Yeah, I think so. I think this idea of deep work, of having time that's not fragmented during the day where you can really delve into a task. All of us take a little bit of time to get deeply embedded in the task to enter that state known as flow that's become so popular recently that’s proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychologist. This idea that when you're in a flow state you really are embedded in the task, you stop noticing time passing. That requires a level of engagement that we don't really have very easily anymore. You have to actively turn off your emails, put your phone on airplane mode. Otherwise, you’re constantly interrupted. You’re removed from that flow state. 

Obviously, sleep, again is a massive thing. The fact that our ability to sleep is declining. The depth of our sleep is declining. What's most staggering for me about smartphones is that for the hour and a half before bed, if you happen to be exposed to the light that is emitted from a smartphone, your body effectively interprets that as a queue that it's daytime. So you’re inducing jetlag. Basically, by looking at your phone in the hour and a half before bed, you may as well be traveling across the world and subjecting yourself to the same effects that you'd have if you were jetlagged, which is not good for us, and a lot of us do that every single day. 

[0:15:03.4] MB: I'm curious, have you seen or read — There’s an article in the Atlantic in, I think, September of 2017. It’s called; Has Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? And it was all about how teenagers today are physically the safest teenagers in history; automobile accident, racer down, not getting into as much trouble, crime, etc. They’re very physically safe, but there are also sort of from a psychological standpoint experiencing record levels of anxiety and depression and negative psychological states and it’s because, essentially, they're just not leaving the house. They just sit in their bedrooms on their phones all the time. 

[0:15:40.3] AA: Yeah, it's a sort of staggering, depending on how you look at it, the staggering upside, is that the accident rate has declined. The other thing that's declined is teen drug addiction and drug use, and that's because the drug of choice today is the phone. It's the screen. So what usually happens is if there is a psychological deficit, if there's something that needs to be treated, you're unhappy or depressed, you're lonely or anxious, whatever it may be, some people turn to drugs in those cases. But what we usually do is we turn to the path of least resistance. 

Now, for those of us who have strong social networks and strong relationships, often the path of least resistance is to get social support, but if drugs are the path of least resistance, a lot of people turn to drugs. Today, for a lot of teens though, easier than drugs is just pick up your phone. Go and talk to someone. Go check Instagram for the 78th time that day. That is soothing in its own right, and it ends up being an alternative to drug use, which is a sort of perverse, but positive effect of this huge use of screens among teens and among other generations as well. 

But it also shows, I think, how powerful these screen experiences are, that they’ve become a substitute for drug use. It shows you that they have many of the same effects on us. They are effectively like drugs without the substance. So the thesis of the book, of Irresistible, is that there's been a huge rise in behavioral addictions. Behavioral addictions began with gambling. Gambling is not particularly new, but now you find many of the same mechanics that make gambling and slot machine so addictive in a lot of the experiences that we all have access to from birth. So there's been this huge rise of behavioral addictions that have replaced substance addictions to some extent and certainly replaced going out of the home, and so you do see a drop in accident rates as a result. 

[0:17:22.7] MB: I want to dig in to the science of behavioral addiction, but before we do, one of the other things I found fascinating was — There are a few apps that are kind of beneficial from the sense that they leave users happier before they started, but many of the apps that people spend the most time on, things like news, social media, etc., were actually some of the biggest culprits for making people unhappy. 

[0:17:45.5] AA: Yeah. This is something that I found very surprising, that the creator of an app called moment, this is a tracking app that basically measures how long you spend on your smartphone screen and what you're doing during that time. His name is Kevin Halasz, and he's in Pittsburgh, and I spoke to him and I asked him about some of the data which he shared with me, and what he does is he basically asks people a couple of questions as they’re using the app during the course of the day. He'll say, “What are you using now and how happy are you?” 

He finds that some things routinely make us happy and some things routinely make us less happy. Social media makes us less happy. We fill sort of hollow and unfulfilled. The same is true of spending hours trolling through the news. The same is true of a number of other things like spending a lot of time on games. We just feel a little hollow and unfulfilled when we do that. 

What he found looking through the data was that people spend about three times longer on the apps that make the most unhappy than on the apps that make them most happy. So we’re spending a huge amount of time doing things that are actively making us unhappy. Part of the reason for that is the things that make us unhappy are the things that are easiest to get hooked to or hooked on. It’s easiest to bake these hooks into those particular platforms, things like social media and games in particular. That's less true of the things that make us happy. The things that make us happy are educational tools, meditation tools, mindfulness tools. Those make us happy, but by nature they tend not to have those hooks built into them. They’re not designed to exploit you in the same way, and as a result we spend much less time on them. 

That I think really encapsulates the problem here that the screen itself is just a vehicle for content. It itself is kind of neutral and it can be used for the good of for the bad, and that's true of almost all tech. What we happened to be seeing today is that most of the things we do on our screens happen to be bad for us, happen to make us unhappy. That doesn't necessarily need to be true. There could be a world in which the things we do on our screens are good for us, that we do them in moderation, that the things on the screens that we interact with are not designed with maximum use in mind, but rather with maximum consumer well-being, and that’s what people like me, like a number of others, what we’re trying to suggest, that that is an alternative that's really appealing that I think we should work towards. 

[0:19:57.4] MB: So what you say to someone who hears this and sort of accuses you of being a Luddite?

[0:20:02.4] AA: Yeah. I mean, I think a sort of lazy description of what I'm saying and what people like me is saying. I think tech is absolutely miraculous. When I first moved to the United States in 2004 I had to talk to my family on the phone but could never really see them. The capacity of the web cams in those days wasn’t great. Now I have FaceTime, I have Skype I have incredible tools to expose my kids who are under the age of two, I have two children under two, to their grandparents who live in Australia. I think technology is a wonderful thing. I just think we need to be more mindful about how we use it. In fact we wouldn't be having these discussions if technology were bad, because no one would want to go near it. 

So I don't think tech is bad. I'm certainly not a Luddite. I don't think we should roll back the curtain to the 50s. I just think we should be more mindful going forward about how we use tech, and part of the reason why I think we need to be mindful is because we aren’t at some destination. The world we’re in right now is not the end point. We’re still moving forward, and we’ll look back in 10 years at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and we’ll think of them as curiosities to some extent as early versions of what we’ll be doing in 10 years. We don't even know what that will look like. 

One thing we know, though, is virtual and augmented reality will become a bigger part of our lives as general consumers, that we already got a place, that we got a niche place in the world now, but if you speak to people in AR, in VR, in those tech worlds, they'll say to you that in the next few years we will all our own personal AR and VR devices. We’ll have goggles, possibly haptic vests that give us feedback as though we we’re actually immersed in that world, and when everyone owns those devices in the same way as they on the screens that we use today, on our phones and things like that, imagine how difficult it will be to immerse yourself in the real world, because what you’ll effectively be doing at any moment in time is trying to decide between this perfect idealized game universe and the complex, messy, real- world, and if we can't spend time in that real-world when we just have these small rectangular devices nearby, imagine how much more difficult it will be when we have whole rich phenomenal worlds in front of us that we can turn to. That's my concern, and I think we need to deal with this today and consider it today, because tech is marching forward as it should, but our ability to deal with it, to use it in a way that's good for us, I think is going to be compromised unless we are very careful about how we engage with tech and how much we allow it to take over our lives. 

[0:22:24.4] MB: I think this is a good point to kind of dig into a little bit more concretely, the biology of behavioral addiction and kind of what happens behind the scenes when we get addicted to these devices. Can you tell me little bit about that? 

[0:22:36.2] AA: Yeah. I think people are very focused on what's going on inside the brain during these experiences, and to me that's to some extent a red herring. It's not really the right question to be asking on its own. People will publish papers saying things like; when a teenager checks Instagram then sees a like, the brain will look much like the brain of a heroin addict. That's sounds really interesting. It sounds fascinating, and I think the public, when it hears things like that, freaks out, because that makes it sound like looking at a like when you’re a teenager as much like taking heroin, like taking a drug, and that sounds very concerning and alarmist. 

The thing is when kids eat ice cream, the brain also looks that way. When people who are being treated in hospital after surgery, when they’re getting very, very pure opioids, drugs that are treating the pain, their brains look the same way. The thing is when most people leave hospital after they've had that treatment, after they've had those pain drugs, they don't develop an addiction. Some people certainly do, but the people who leave a hospital who don't develop an addiction tend not to, because they have social support networks, they tend to have jobs that they return to, and it's not just about the fact that the brain is experiencing this great flush of pleasure, although that is certainly part of the biology here. It’s about that being paired with some psychological deficit with the thing that needs to be soothed, and that can be a lot of different things. For a lot of us it’s things like anxiety, or depression, or loneliness, and those things are certainly major concerns and they can be soothed by, for example, checking Instagram one more time. People, when they’re nervous and anxious, will do that. They will use their phones as a way of soothing those nerves, those concerns. But you need both of those things. You need that experience, that flush of pleasure that you get from the release of dopamine in the brain, but you also need to have that psychological deficit that that that experience is treating, that it's soothing. 

If you don't have that deficit, if you have strong social networks and social support and you have all of the frameworks that protect most people from those kinds of addictions. You won’t see these sorts of behavioral addiction. So you need pairing of those two things; the deficit and that flush of pleasure that comes from experiencing these rewards. 

Much of it really rests on unpredictable rewards. For example, if you look the way we play slot machines, we play and mostly lose, but when we win, there’s this huge flush of pleasure, this little spritz of dopamine that our body and brain interprets as pleasure, and that obviously feels very good to us in that moment, that unpredictable reward that comes through from time to time. That's true of how we experience a lot of social networking. We might post something, and every so often a post will catch fire and it will be shared widely, re-tweeted, re-gramed, shared, liked and so on. Many comments will be made in response to it, things like that. 

So this unpredictability, these unpredictable awards are a really big part of what drives us to pursue these experiences, and companies will bake them in, these unpredictable rewards. They are huge part of what they're trying to do. 

[0:25:36.9] MB: One of the things we talk a lot about on the show is the importance of mental models, building a toolkit of mental models so that you can better understand reality and achieve your goals, and that’s why I'm excited to tell you about our sponsor this week; brilliant.work. Brilliant is in math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. 

You can learn the concepts by solving fascinating and challenging problems. Brilliant explores everything from probability, to computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more. You can master these skills in exciting and interactive experiences enjoyed by over five million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. 

As Charlie Munger, one of my personal heroes said, “The models that come from the hard sciences and engineering are the most reliable models on this earth.” brilliant is a great place to build your STEM skills and really start mastering the fundamentals of the hard sciences, which are the cornerstones of any toolkit of mental models. 

Right now, brilliant.org is offering our listeners 20% off of their annual premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Success listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Sign up today and get started on building a powerful toolkit of mental models for yourself. 

Back to the show. 

[0:27:06.5] MB: So, in essence, these apps are being designed to function like a slot machine where you're getting kind of a variable reward that constantly keeps you addicted to it. 

[0:27:16.5] AA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, basically if you follow the money, all of these begins with the gambling world, with the casino world, with the design of slot machines. Slot machines today am much more sophisticated than they ever were 20, 30. 40 years ago and they continue to become more and more sophisticated over time. There are very smart people who devote all their time to building a slot machine that gets you to sit down and play for as long as possible. 

Now a lot of the mechanics that go into that were then borrowed by game designers. If you're designing a videogame, you could take some of the elements of that slot machine experience and put them into your game. More recently still, people who are designing social networks and other apps in the online platforms are borrowing from those videogame designers who in turn borrowed from the gambling world. So the same tools that were being used to encourage people to gamble are being used to create irresistible behaviors and in domains like social networking, like app usage, like email, like texts, things like that, they use a lot of the same mechanisms. 

We've already mentioned one of them, which is this unpredictable or variable reward feature that humans find, and actually all animals find very, very attractive, and appealing, and interesting, and engaging. You even see this in pigeons, in rats, in monkeys, they will do the same thing. If you put some of them in a cage where if they push a button they will get predictable rewards. Say, every time they push a button 10 times, they get food. They will do that for a while and when they’re no longer hungry, they’ll stop. But if you put them in a cage where pushing a button is unpredictable, sometimes they'll push it three times and get a reward. Sometimes they’ll push it a hundred times and then the reward will only come then. The ones who are playing in that casino environment with uncertainty built-in, they will keep pushing that button long past the point when they’re hungry just because it's fun to see whether they’re going to win. And so these mechanics have very low level evolutionary roots, and they’re a big part of what's going on. 

Another thing a lot of these companies do is they are building goals, artificial goals. Humans don't like open loops. We like to close loops. We like things to be tied in a neat bow. What a goal is, essentially, is the opening up of the loop that isn't closed until the goal is reached. And so you see people with smart watches, with Fitbits, things like that who’ll say, Today, and in fact every day, I need to walk a certain number of steps, and the loop is open until I've hit that number.” 

So it may start out being 10,000 steps and you’ll do that for a few days. Your watch will beep to say you’ve hit 10,000 steps, and that's that little burst of positive reinforcement. But eventually what you find, and this again borrows from some of the terminology in the drug world, is you develop a tolerance. So 10,000 doesn't really do for you what it used to do. You hear that ding, but after 10,000, that's not really enough, and so you'll see people escalate. You typically see that people after they’ve walked a certain of number of steps for certain amount time will go to 11,000, or 12,000, or 14,000 steps, and so they escalate from there. 

This creation of goals that escalate over time also encourages engagement and increasing engagement across time. So those are just two of the mechanisms, but there are a whole lot of these little hooks that can be baked into products and experiences, all of which together make those experiences quite hard to resist. 

[0:30:18.5] MB: It's funny to see some of the lessons of B.F. Skinner’s work with pigeons many, many years ago. It’s some of the foundational work in kind of modern psychology. Has so many modern-day applications. 

[0:30:29.3] AA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the basic principles of behaviorism, stimulus and response of doing something and receiving a reward for doing that thing. Those principles are very powerful. There’s a reason why they work in animals and why they work in humans. There are elemental parts of human psychology and of animal psychology as well. And so if you can find a way to weaponize them, to turn them into tools that get people to continue doing something that they might otherwise not do for their own well-being, they might turn to some other experience. 

That's when you start to see these kinds of outcomes, and that begins in the gambling world, but it obviously doesn't end there. We’ve now seen the same thing happening in social networking and use of email as a culture, and in fact almost entirely as a planet all rests on, basically, the same principle, the same set of principles that Skinner and then his successes discovered, that the way you present these pairings of stimulus and response of behavior, and the reward can guide people and animals behave in a certain way, sometimes many days or even months at a time. 

[0:31:30.1] MB: One of the other things that I find interesting with kind of modern-day applications and how they become addictive is the absence of stopping cues. Can you talk a little bit about that and why those are important?

[0:31:39.4] AA: Yeah. If you think about media in the 20th century, there was stopping cues everywhere. Stopping cues were little signals that say to you, “It's probably time to at least consider moving on to a new task.” If you think about the way we used to read books, you’d get to the end of a section or chapter. If you think about the way we used to watch longform TV where you'd have, say 12, or 13, or 22 episodes in a season, you’d get to the end of an episode, the episode would end and you would know that it would be another week before the next episode would come on the TV. So you knew that for that intervening period you had to do something else. The stopping cue was the end of one episode and then you had a week between that time and the next one. 

The same is true of the way we consume written material; newspapers, magazines, everything has a natural endpoint. You can either complete the whole newspaper or the whole magazine or you can just complete an article or a section of an article. Everything had these built-in stopping cues, these moments when you were led to believe, “Hey, it's time to move on now.” 

I think what the tech world, and in fact what the business world broadly is trying to do now is to remove as many of the stopping cues as possible. Again, going back to casinos, they’ve been doing this for a long time. There's a reason why casinos are dark. You can’t see what time of day it is. There were no clocks anywhere. They don't want you to have a cue that says, “Oh! 6 PM. It's time for me to stop.” They want you to just keep going, to lose track of time. 

The same thing happens on social networks. There’s a bottomlessness to feeds that we troll through. They automatically repopulate with new information. The same is true of news sites. The news just rolls on. You can find a million different interpretations of pretty much every event that occurs and you can keep reading endlessly. The same is true of email. Email just keeps coming. There’s one comment that email is a lot like zombies. You can kill them all one day and when you wake up in the morning there’ll be more waiting for you. 

And so this tendency for things to just roll on is really what's happening, the systematic eradication of the stopping cues, and that's made it harder for us to know internally that it's time to move on to do something new, and so we just perseverate. We spend much more time doing the same thing over and over and over again in the absence of these cues. 

You even see now this removal of friction from experiences happening in the way we shop. So Amazon Go, for example, the idea you can shop without needing to check out. That is the removal of a barrier. That's the removal of a friction point or a pain point that might have discouraged people from shopping for longer or shopping as often as they otherwise might. 

Big companies know the best way to encourage people to spend is to remove those friction points and to ensure that the point, the line between, “I think I need that thing,” to actually paying for the thing is as direct as possible, as straight as possible with as few barriers as possible. 

[0:34:20.8] MB: Is there a way that we can artificially create stopping cues in our lives?

[0:34:25.3] AA: Yeah. I mean, I think we have to be very mindful as consumers. You set your own stopping cues or your own stopping rules. You could set an alarm if there's something you want to be doing at a certain time. You need to set your own alarm because of this cycle, the platform itself may not do that for you. You see some people have 50 alarms programmed on their phones or even more alarms. Create one. Say something like, “In an hour, I’m going to watch this one episode of TV,” and with Netflix, for example, the next episode will automatically roll on. So there is no stopping cue there. But what I'm going to do is I know that in 47 minutes this episode will end. I'm in a set my alarm on my phone to ring at the 47 minute mark and I'm going to put my phone at the other end of my home, my apartment, whatever it is. The only way I’m going to be able to shut it off is to get up and walk over and turn it off. It's going to be annoying to keep watching while that alarm goes off constantly. So I’m going to be forced to get up and move. That is the stopping cue that you introduce yourself. 

There are lots of little things we can do. We become the architect of our own environments, or our own local environments. And that's the sort of thing you can do if you know that your self-control alone is not going to guide you to behave the way you'd like to behave your long term will be. So setting alarms is just an easy one. 

Another thing that a lot of people do is they’ll say, at a certain time of the day, “Every day, I will make sure that my phone is far away as physically possible.” Some people will start with dinner, for example, and they’ll say, “No matter where I am, who I'm with, what I'm doing, I'm going to take my phone and put it in the next room. It's going be either in a bag under the table or it's going to be in my bedroom locked in a drawer, and for the entire time I'm having dinner there will be no screens, no tech around whatsoever.” Things like that. I think these natural stopping rules that we have that when dinnertime begins, tech time ends. Those things become habits over time just through repetition, and I think the more mindful we are about how we’re using tech, the better equipped we are to create the stopping cues and to adhere to them. 

[0:36:21.7] MB: And what about more probably, are there opportunities to use some of the kind of the strategies that this technologist is using to make us addicted? Can we use those same tactics to break our addictions or even sort of, conversely, to create positive habits?

[0:36:37.5] AA: Yeah. It's an interesting question. I was grappling with this, and when I was writing the book I kept thinking about that. If these experiences are very hard for us to resist, truly, there are things we should be doing more of where it would be good for us to struggle to resist at least to some extent. Now, it's a slippery slope, right? If you think about the Fitbit, which I mentioned earlier, it's great that a lot of Americans who used to be sedentary are now moving around more, and that's one really positive effect of this smartwatch or fitness watch industry. 

The problem is that it can go too far. A lot of people go to the point of injury and then beyond. They’ll sustained major stress fractures and injuries. So even good things, you can have too many of those good things, and that's a concern. But having said that, I think you can think of a lot of outcomes that people struggle to achieve, things like exercising more, eating better, saving more money spending more time learning rather than procrastinating, things like that. I think you can engineer experiences that encourage those positive outcomes in the same way as you engineer experiences that are not great for you, that just suck up a lot of your time, and you can use many of those same tools, things like setting goals that open up a particular loop for you. That's one approach. 

Obviously, the variable reward you get. There are some companies where you never really know what you're going to get from there the app or the platform, but as you use the platform, you may get positive rewards. It may be a case where you don't get positive rewards and it’s unpredictable. There’s a variable reward feature built-in, and some people keep doing the thing over and over hoping that they'll get positive outcome. You can certainly use that to encourage people to save. So maybe you could create a little finance app where every time you take a little bit of money from your bank account to the app, every, say — There’s a randomizer built-in and occasionally the app itself will double the amount that you’ve just invested, which encourages you to invest more and also means that you're going to be encouraged to do it just because we know people like to find out if they’re winning, if they’ve won.

So you could imagine a lot of ways to bake these experiences into more positive contexts. We also know for example that games and other experiences can treat pain. There’s fascinating study showing that people who are being treated for burns, for very serious burns, when they’re having the dressing changed, which is very, very painful, they actually do better when they play certain virtual-reality games. They feel better, they feel less pain than when they’re given morphine. The reason is these Virtual-reality game experiences are so immersive that a lot of the cues that they normally spend so much time attending to, watching the burns being removed and anticipating the pain. Those are replaced by the subversive world they’re in the virtual-reality context. 

The immersive properties of virtual-reality might remove you from the here and now for the bad. That might mean that don't spend time with loved ones and doing work. But if you're having dressing changed of the burns, that's obviously a great thing to have, to have the option to be removed from the here and now. I think all of these is context based, and certainly a lot of the same tools can be used for the good. 

[0:39:34.2] MB: I know we touched on a couple of them, but are there any other strategies for breaking a phone addiction that you’ve found to be really effective?

[0:39:43.4] AA: I mean, I think always the best strategy is to actively introduce a rule that distances you as much as possible from the device. That sounds really simple, but it's easily the most effective and that's the easiest one. You want to pick a strategy that's not hard for people to follow and that they tend to adhere to. So the thing that's been most successful in my experience is people saying, “I'm going to pick at time and a space each day that is tech free,” and it may be dinner. It may be between the hours of five and seven. It may be the hour and a half before bed at the hour and a half after waking up. Those kinds of rules are very effective. 

I don’t think it's easy or desirable to live in a tech-free universe. Since the book came out, it's almost a year now, I've had maybe half a dozen emails from people who say to me, “I don't use tech at all. I’m tech-free,” which makes me wonder why they're emailing. Anyway, that aside, let's imagine the email is the only form of tech they’re using. That seems undesirable to me. It's very hard to be exist in the mainstream world when you are completely tech free. You can't really work easily. You can't interact with other people very easily to a large extent, especially people who aren’t nearby. It's hard to travel and so on. 

So I don't think what we’re trying to do here is say that people shouldn’t use tech at all, but just that they should use less of it and use it more carefully. We know that in the last two years, from 2015 to late 2017, the average time spent by an adult on screens went from three hours to four hours a day. Now three hours is staggering, because we don't have that many free hours in the day. It's now four hours. So in the space of just two years it went up in a whole hour, so an increase of 33%. Not much changed about the infrastructure. We’re still using smartphones. We’re still using tablets. VR and AR had not gone mainstream. So I this is, I think, in a bit of a concern. So what we can do is just roll that back a little bit. Look at your feedback, download a tracking app. Try to implement these strategies like not using your phone at certain times and then look at whether your usage goes down over the course of weeks and months, and it should. If you’re using the strategy and adhering to it, it certainly should go down and you should find that you have more time to do other useful important enriching things with your time. 

[0:41:59.7] MB: It's funny, that reminds me of kind of one of the simplest or easiest strategies to lose weight or stop snacking, which is basically just don't have snacks in your house. And that’s something that kind of we do at our house. I’ll often find myself two or three times a day sometimes going and looking in the pantry, looking in the fridge. There's no snacks to eat of any kind, but I keep doing it, but then there’s nothing that I end up eating. So in many ways it’s kind of the same strategy. As long as you sort of physically remove your phone and make it hard to access, you’re changing your environment enough that you can actually create behavioral change. 

[0:42:32.9] AA: Yeah. I mean, it seems simplistic, but it actually works. We know that very old principle in psychology known his propinquity. It’s basically the idea that the things that are occupying your physical space. The things that are closest to you in physical space have the biggest effect on your psychological experience of the world. 

It’s not surprising. It makes sense, surround yourself with people who are productive, you will be productive. Surround yourself with people who eat well and you will eat well. The same is true of the objects we surround ourselves with. If you keep your phone on you all the time, and we know that 75% of American adults can reach their phones 24 hours a day without moving their feet. They sleep next to their phones in addition to being with them during the day. You will use your phone more if that's your approach. 

So just as a very, very small step, try to make sure that for at least an hour or two, or 3, or 4 a day, and maybe when you're asleep as well, you would have to move your feet to get to your phone. Even that for many of us is an improvement. We keep our phones near us, they’re mobile for a reason. They’re basically almost implanted the way we use them. 

So the extent to which you resist that, I think, predicts whether you will be able to spend less time on your phone, and that seems like — For most people it's an admirable goal. When I speak to big audiences about this, I get a range of responses. Not everyone wants to change. Some people are quite happy with how much they’re using screens and tech, and that's fine. I think there should be a range. But the vast majority of people say they’d like to change either something bigger or something small, and I think a lot of the first steps are small steps that any of us is capable of making. So I think it’s something that certainly we could do better on. 

[0:44:06.8] MB: Getting into kind of the discussion of how environment shapes behavior reminds me of some of the core ideas from your first book, Drunk Tank Pink. I know we don't have a ton of time to go into it, but I’d love to just hear kind of a short synopsis or at least tell the story of Drug Tank Pink and kind of what that is and how it came about. 

[0:44:25.5] AA: Yeah. I've always been very interested in how very subtle changes in the world around us. As I mentioned, propinquity; this idea that things that are close to us have the big effect on us. I've always been curious about how subtle changes in the environment where in the people we surround ourselves with, the colors around us, the weather, all these different factors can have outsized effects on how we experience the world. So Drunk Tank Pink is basically a compendium of these effects. It looks at a whole range, from very small to very large cues and how they influence us. 

Starting very small with the things like the names we give each other, the names we give our children, the names we give companies, how that influences outcomes. All the way to very big physical cues, like the weather, the colors we paint rooms with. Drunk Tank Pink, the title, is based on an anecdote from the late 70s, early 80s. There was a couple of psychologists in Canada who decided they were going to test whether certain colors improve the behavior of students in schools, and the Canadian government allowed them to paint a whole lot of different classrooms across Canada, and they used a whole lot of different colors from blues, to greens, to yellows, and one of the colors they used was this bright pink. 

I found that the students in the bright pink rooms behave the best. The ones who were badly behaved before behaved better. They were more engaged. They became curious about the properties of this bright pink color and they found — They argued, at least, that bright pink tranquilized people. It was a nondrug tranquilizer that calmed people down and it made them more engaged. They started to use it in other place as well. They used it in jail cells, in a naval prison. This is where it gets the term Drunk Tank Pink, it was the idea that you would take someone who is badly behaved, or drunk, or aggressive and put them in a drunk tank that was painted pink just briefly, and they would emerge 15 minutes later bitter behaved, more compliant, and that's what these researchers reported. 

Some football coaches started to use it as well. They paint the visiting locker room drunk tank pink colored where they wouldn’t do that for the home locker room. So, in theory, the visiting team would be tranquilized weaker. 

Even very recently, there were reports that some of the players of the Australian Open Tennis tournament has grand slam tennis tournament were wearing pink, because they thought they could tranquilize their opponents. They could weaken their opponents. It's a fascinating anecdote. 

The science behind Drunk Tank Pink is a little shaky, and may be more than a little shaky. We don't know how strong the effect is. It replicates on occasion, but not all the time. It’s not the most robust effect, but it's very interesting, and I thought it was a nice emblem for what I was discussing in the book, which is this idea that you could make changes to a feature in the world and that would then have big effects on how people engage with that world. And so that's what Drunk Tank Pink is. 

Then Irresistible is the natural flow on from there. After writing Drunk Tank Pink I started to wonder, “What is the biggest thing right now? The biggest cue that is shaping us?” I think, to a large extent, for many of us, by time and by its effect on our psychological experience of the world, it is the screens. It’s the technology we’re interacting with. 

[0:47:22.5] MB: What would one kind of piece of homework be that you would give somebody listening to this interview if they wanted to concretely implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today? What do you think would kind of be one simple action step that you would recommend for them? 

[0:47:35.2] AA: I think it would go back to this idea of creating as much distance between yourself and your phone as possible for as much time of the day as possible. So I would say to everyone, it usually works better when you don't focus on time of day, because we’re doing different things at different times every day, but all of us eat dinner every day pretty much, most of us at least. Say, tonight, or if you don't want to start tonight, say, tomorrow night. Whatever you’re doing for dinner, your phone will not be within reach of the table. 

Ideally it should be in a different room. It should be on silent and it shouldn't be vibrating in a way that makes it noticeable. You should put it as far away from you as possible, and you may have a [inaudible 0:48:12.3]. You may experience, basically, withdrawal in the first day or two as you do this, but you will find that over time you enjoy dinner more. You’re more engaged with the people around you. If you're alone, it'll give you a chance to think. You don't have to be with other people obviously when you’re having dinner. But even if you're having dinner alone, maybe read a book. Just think. Sit and think. We do that so rarely now that it's a real luxury to have a chance to just sit and think. So that would be the first step, I think, is just to carve out this time in the day where every day you will be tech free, you will be free of your screens. 

I think in my experience working with a lot of people, almost everyone, it's almost universal that people feel better over time doing this. It makes the rest of the day a little bit brighter, a little richer, a little more interesting, and it certainly makes that moment, that screen free, more interesting and more enriching. 

[0:48:59.7] MB: Where can listeners find you and your books and your work online?

[0:49:03.4] AA: I have a homepage, adamalterauthor.com. I'm on Twitter, @AdamLeeAlter. The books, available wherever books are sold pretty widely, and so those, I think, are the best places to begin. 

[0:49:16.1] MB: Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show for sharing all these wisdom. Some really practical and powerful advice about how we can break our phone addictions, and I think it's really something that personally I’m going to take into account and change some of my own behavior. So thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing all these wisdom. 

[0:49:32.5] AA: Thanks so much, and thanks for having me, Matt. 

[0:49:34.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for email list today by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoy this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm. That helps us move up the iTunes rankings and it helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talk about in the show, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How You Can Become A Superconnector with Scott Gerber

In this episode we discuss how to become a “superconnector." We look at the idea that networking is not about tactics, it’s about a fundamental shift in how you think about interacting with people. We examine how to break free from the lazy and shallow networking that social media often creates, discuss why you should never ask “how can I help?”, look at the power of curiosity and asking better questions and much more with our guest Scott Gerber. 

Scott Gerber is CEO of The Community Company and founder of Young Entrepeneur’s Council. He is also an internationally syndicated columnist, the co-author of Superconnector and the author of Never Get a “Real” Job. Scott has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg and has even been honored by White House.

• How do we cut through the quagmire of endless linked-in connections, twitter followers and more?

• Self awareness is one of the key attributes of super connectors

• Rather than being authentic, we are being internet authentic - social media conscious

• We have to reverse course away from the lazy networking of social media

• Providing real signal, being human, allowing your humanity to show through - amplify your humanity

• We have conflated the idea of connection with being connected

• We live under the illusion that vanity metrics determine social status

• Step one is the cultivation of emotional intelligence

• Focus on being of service to others

• Networking is not about tactics, its about a fundamental shift in how you think about interacting with people

• One of the key principles to networking is that you have to be a real, authentic human

• What kind of service / value do you want to bring to a community of peers?

• Failure is often a result of not building your relationships and communities

• Come from a true place of wanting to help others first

• Don’t be a “networker":

• A taker

  1. Out for yourself

  2. Wolf in sheeps clothing

• We don’t live in a tactics world - we’ve created one

• Get back down to the basics - guru nonsense, marketing hucksters etc are full of it

• A connector thinks about - what questions / context do I need to ask that this person is not giving me, so that I can figure out how to play a role to help them in succeeding in life or business - where I can be helpful?

• Focus on actually being helpful instead of just asking “how can I help you?”

• Why asking “How Can I Help” is the Worst Question

• You put the onus on the other person to tell a stranger how they can help

  1. Directionally it provides no guidance

  2. It shows you don’t care - because if you actually wanted to help, you would be curious, keep asking questions, to come up with a thesis and then say “here are some ways I CAN help, proactively”

  3. Offer actual assistance, not the platitude that you can help

  4. It’s the new social script - but it has no meaning or value

• You MUST ask better questions. The best connectors are curious.

• Most people like to talk about how obvious things are, but they never actually implement it.

• Great question - “what does success look like for you?” “what are the steps you need to take to get there”

• How to cultivate curiosity and ask better questions

• Start with auditing your conversations

  1. Be curious about the other person

  2. Figure out questions that you want to ask people

• Most introverts are better connectors in many cases

• Listen!! Sometimes shutting up is the best thing you can do as a connector

• Should you go to networking events? Before you do, you need to “select your pond” more effectively

• Great questions to figure out context for how to talk to people

• What are challenges your facing right now in your business / life?

  1. What’s a major strength or major win you’ve had recently?

• Put yourself into a space where you're comfortable is a key component of effective networking

• A lot of content today is “thought leadership garbage” - metric driven traffic with a goal in mind

• You can’t force a personal brand - if you suck at creating content or your content is “networker-esq” - you have to figure out if you’re a creator of content or a curator

• Place yourself at the center - building walled-off access to the people and things that matter will eventually be the “keys to the kingdom”

• Those who are able to curate the right people together, to create thriving communities beyond just the founder are going to be the most powerful from a social capital, profitabilabilty, etc level

• Technology is meant to amplify humanity and not cheat it

• Create a safe space, creative collective value not just 1 on 1 value

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Pssssssstt. Hey, we want to give you a free audiobook...

This week's Episode and Mindset Monday is brought to you by Audible. Audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook and a 30-Day Free Trial Membership! Just go to audible.com/success and browse their unmatched selection of audio programs then download your FREE title and start listening!

Listening Is The New Reading - Claim your free audiobook from our partners at Audible now!!

Audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more from the leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazines and newspapers, business information providers and more!

This week's Mindset Monday is brought to you by a product we've been personally using and are LOVING - Ample K!

Have you been looking to take your diet to the next level using superfoods and science backed research? Have you ever wanted to learn more about Ketosis? Perhaps you've tried the "Keto" diet but find it impossible to eat the same foods each day and are looking for something quick, tasty, and easy?

Then Ample K is for you!

Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficient healthy fats in a powdered, mix-on-the-go format! Their formula includes 10x more probiotics than a serving of yogurt and over four types of fiber to promote a healthy gut! If you're a long time fan of the show you know how important gut health is for mental health as well!

For a limited time Ample is offering our listeners 15% off their first order of Ample! That's an incredible value and it's only for Science of Success listeners! Just click here and use the promo code "SUCCESS15" at checkout to claim your 15% off discount on your first order. 

We use it, we love it, you will too.

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] FollowUp

• [Book] Superconnector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships that Matter by Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh

• [Book Site] Superconnector Book

• [Twitter] Ryan Paugh

• [Twitter] Scott Gerber

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.7] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcasts on the internet with more than one million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss how to become a super connector. We look at the idea that networking is not about tactics. It's about a fundamental shift in how you think about interacting with people. We examine how to break free from the lazy and shallow networking that social media often creates. Discuss why you should never ask, “How can I help?” Look at the power of curiosity and the importance of asking better questions and much more with our guest, Scott Gerber. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure you sign up and join the email list. This includes an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday which our listeners have been absolutely loving. It’s short, simple, filled with actionable and valuable insights, videos and articles that we found interesting within the last week. Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, you can help us change parts of the show. You can even submit your own personal questions to our guests, and much more by becoming part of our community and joining the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter”. That's “smarter” to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed becoming a super learner. We dug into questions that I've pondered for a long time. Does speed-reading work? Can we actually speed read and improve our reading comprehension? Are there strategies that you can use to improve your memory, and most importantly, how can we align the way we think, learn and remember with the way our brains actually operate? We go into this and much more with our previous guest, Jonathan Levi. If you want to learn the secrets of the world's memory champions, be sure to listen to that episode. 

This episode is sponsored by Audible. That's right, we’ve made it to the big leagues. But seriously, I'm a huge fan of Audible. I listen to it in an almost daily basis. Right now I've been really enjoying the book Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. It’s a fascinating story and I am particularly enjoy listening to biographies on Audible. They really have a great narrative flow, and even when you're driving around or on the go, you can still capture the core essence of the book. Right now, Audible is offering something special for our listeners. You can get a free Audiobook along with a 30-day free membership to Audible. All you have to do is go to audible.com/success or text the word “success” to the number 500500. That’s audible.com/success or just text the word “success” to 500500. 

Now for the show today. 

[0:03:42.6] MB: Today, we have another great guest on the show, Scott Gerber. Scott is the CEO of the Community Company and founder of Young Entrepreneurs Council. He's also an internationally syndicated columnist and co-author of the books Super Connector as well as the book Never Get a Real Job. He's been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg and he's even been honored by the White House. 

Scott, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:04:05.9] SG: Thanks for having me, man. 

[0:04:06.9] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you here today. 

[0:04:08.8] SG: Let’s share some awesome stuff. Shall we? 

[0:04:10.5] MB: Yeah, for sure, for sure. So I’d love to start out, I’m really fascinated with the book Super Connector and all of the work you've done. In today's world where we’re flooded with tons and tons of LinkedIn connections, Twitter followers and all of these kind of superficial relationships, how do we work our way through that quagmire? 

[0:04:29.6] SG: Yeah. I think it's first understanding we’re all guilty. That's the reality. I think self-awareness is what we consider to be one of the key attributes of successful connectors. People who actually accept faults, understand who they are, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are and then build upon the proper foundation. 

Today, we have been sort of led to believe that our personal brand social media presence is the definitive reason for being in a lot of ways. It's who we are. It’s how people see us. The reality is that has leaked sadly into this network-y style personality that a lot of us have created for ourselves. Rather than being truly authentic, we are being internet authentic. We are being social media conscious before human conscious, and it's really sad because, again, it's not just like the newer generations that are stuck on their phones all day. It is the generation of people who are getting lazier that don't want to go to that event and go meet more people or think that sending a LinkedIn connection to someone is a real connection. 

So I think we have to reverse course. I think that the people that will be the most successful in the social media age as noise continues to proliferate are those that actually can provide real signal and be human and allow their humanity to show and allow the technologies and media platforms they use to amplify their humanity and not their messaging or their networking speak or their guru personalities. I think those are the ways forward for this generation. 

[0:06:06.2] MB: I think that's really well said, and the lack of authenticity, this almost [inaudible 0:06:09.7] in the year of these kind of fake social media profiles, I think is really a problem today.

[0:06:15.6] SG: I just think at the end of the day, we have been put into this incredible ecosystem of what we believe to be communities that we can tap into. The problem is is that we have conflated the idea of connection with connect poor or connect it, and I think that these terms are not semantics. It is not semantics to say, “I enjoy connecting with people,” versus “I am very connected.” Those are two fundamentally different principles. Yet we turn them into this idea that vanity metrics determine social status. It’s very Black Mirror if you're a watcher of the Netflix series in a lot of ways. It's this sort of idea now that vanity project has become the real project. Whereas if you ask any real connectors, again, whether in business or the personal lives of those that just live by these core principles that we think are the right ways to go about relationship building, they'll tell you that, “Yeah, social media is great and it’s a wonderful way to message. It’s a wonderful way to connect with those you already have relationships with,” but these people that are using it for, frankly, the bastardization of the original intent, which is to amplify a persona I think are going to find themselves very alone in the world when they’re 15 minutes of fame have ended and realized that those that they are connected to are not actually connections. 

[0:07:37.7] MB: So where do we go from here?

[0:07:39.6] SG: I think we first have to take step one and say are we emotionally intelligent in our daily lives to actually realize empathetically that we can be of service to others and not just share content, not just look at how do we position ourselves or strategically create the right mood, feel and look of what we are and who we are to the outside world, but actually be of meaningful service. Not to look at a lot of the things we talk about in the book are not tactics. It is a framework for fundamentally changing your life. It is the idea of saying, “Hey, I'm not going to go on nutrisystem for five weeks and lose some weight if I'm going to actually change my lifestyle to lose the weight and live a better life. That's what we’re suggesting here. There is no five steps to success of relationship building. It is fundamentally understanding a couple key principles. Number one; humanity is not going anywhere. You can't automate out humans. You can’t vanity metric your way to building meaningful, long-lasting relationships that are going to be there for you and you for them. 

So I think it's about looking at yourself and saying who do you want to surround yourself by? How do you want to live your life? What kind of service and value do you want to bring to a community of peers or what community do you even want to create for yourself and around yourself? 

I mean, I take this back to 2010 where I had been just out of a business after really hard knocks learnings around failing because I had no one around me of real value, and I don't mean value in the sense of money or connections. I mean, just people that could’ve help me in the rough times in my first business that failed miserably and almost bankrupted me. That's why I found it YEC. It wasn't to create a sphere of influence around young entrepreneurs or crayon platform. It was because I genuinely wanted to have real conversations with people that had had similar experiences to me that together we could've masterminded our way to find mutual success, and I had not built those fundamental steps and therefore I failed as a result. 

So in correcting course admitting that I could not be a team of one, I could not be a success powerhouse of one and realizing that bringing a community around me and me around them we could be more powerful as a collective. My next business was ultimately a much bigger success and that allowed me to now create the kinds of communities around that ethos that really came from a true place of wanting to help others so that others could also help me in times good and bad and everything in between. I think we are forgetting the fundamentals of what a relationship is, because we've been told that a like and a share is the equivalent. That is a mistake. 

[0:10:18.9] MB: There are so many things I want to dig into in that. Just the idea that networking or relationship building or whatever kind of term you want to use, it's not about tactics. It's about a fundamental shift in how you interact with people. 

[0:10:32.0] SG: It’s so true. I mean, I have people that have come up to me and say, “Wow! I really love how you run your events. I’m going to run my events exactly like you run them.” They asked me advice on that and I'll say, “Look, you could take every single step of what we do, but come off as a networker,” and our definition of a networker, again, is someone who is out for one’s self, a taker, someone that is sort of the wolf in sheep's clothing of trying to be helpful, but really out for themselves, “and [inaudible 0:11:05.9] the entire idea of what you're doing.” Great! You serve the food one way and you created an atmosphere that seemed wonderful, but at the end you handed out the business card and said the wrong thing or gave the wrong feeling or just room the entire room, because it was a charade for your own good. 

These are the things that I think people don't realize. We do not live in a tactics world. We've created one. The five steps to this. Three tips to do that. Again, sometimes that’s meaningful. I'm not going to say that I'm not going to offer tips and strategies on what's worked for us, But it comes with a fundamental understanding that you could put a lot of bolts on a really big piece of crap, and those bolts that you're adding on aren’t going to make it stronger.

So I think that this shift in mindset, this de-masking, this idea that we’re getting back down to the basics because we’ve so strayed from those basics because of market speak and MLM hucksters and Guru nonsense that has been blasted in our face and then amplified through social media from people who are out for themselves, trying to come off as people that are actually in it to help us, has distorted us, they’ve created the distortion field. We’ve got to realize, if you can't look someone in the face and have an actual conversation that doesn't in 30 seconds make you think, “What can I get from this?” You don't get, and I think too many people think they get it and will say, “Oh! I’ll do these three things,” but still in the first 30 seconds of a conversation their immediate thing is, “Oh! I can eventually get this from this person.” 

If that's what you think, you're going to lose in the end, because a connector doesn't think like that. The first 30 seconds in their mindset, they’re thinking, “What questions and contacts do I need to ask that this person is not giving me that I can extract from them to figure out where I can play a role in their developmental or business success? Where I can actually be helpful instead of just simply saying, “How can I help you?” So that the person thinks somehow that that social script means I care.” That, I think, is something people aren’t doing right now. They're still taking the paint job, but they're not building the house. This has to change if we’re actually going to have a society worth having conversations in, worth building communities for and worth playing a meaningful role in. 

[0:13:37.2] MB: That's a great distinction, and I think the idea of coming from a place of truly wanting to help people is one of the cornerstones of networking. Obviously, Keith Ferrazzi talks a lot about that. He was a previous guest on the show. But I love your distinction there. It's not just about saying, “How can I help?” Because that’s sort of platitude that doesn't really actually do anything. It's about digging in and trying to get the context or the right questions to figure out how you can actually help. 

[0:14:04.1] SG: So I’m going to tell you. I’m don’t tell many people, and so maybe your audience realizes that there is a human on this side that can admit when he’s wrong too. I used to be a person that would ask that question at ad nauseam. The difference was is that in my mind it wasn't the social script that others used on me, right? I actually was coming from an authentic place with it. I truly was. But in listening to myself and having people talk to me about the kinds of help they were asking for, I realized I’ve gotten lazy. It was wrong, and I finally corrected course. 

I remember I went on MSNBC and, of course, they ask you for your top tips and what's your advice, and I said, “Asking how can I help you to actually be of service,” and then a couple weeks later I was with a connector friend of mine, he says to me, “So, Scott, I'm sort of embarrassed for you.” I love this guy. So it's totally cool that he could call me out, and sometimes you need those people, a true community. That should be the reaction.

He goes to me and he says, “Scott. How could you ask how can I help you as your question?” I thought about it for a minute — Now this goes back a couple of years, obviously. Go back and I'm thinking, “Wow! That truly is the worst question, and why is it the worst question?” And that’s I wasn’t asking myself. 

So I thought about it — And let's just talk about why. Number one; you're putting the onus on the other person to actually tell someone who, in most cases, you've met for the first time, like this monster thing that they can do to help you as if that is even reasonable. That's number one. Number two; directionally, it provides no guidance. It’s very much not only putting the onus, but directionally it’s coming off as, “Oh! No matter what you asked me to help you, I’m your guy,” which makes no sense. Number three; it shows you don't care, because if you actually wanted to help the person, what are you going to do? You’re going to listen, be more curious. When you don't understand something, ask more questions, then more questions, then smarter questions on top of those questions to come up with a thesis and then you’re going to actually say, “Well, here are some ways I can help you.” proactively offering the actual assistance rather than the lazy thing of, “Oh, great! I’m glad we talked for 45 minutes. I've clearly got nothing from you. So I’m just going to ask this thing to make you feel like I'm totally listening, “How can I help you?” You’ve gotten lazy. 

So all of these things together on top of the final nail in the coffin for me, which is it is like every other marketing ask, speak or platform. The first people that I ask, “How can I help you?” umpteen decades ago were probably very wholesome, not out for themselves, not networking authentic people. The second generation, it started to tweak a little bit. By generation and iteration 100, it is the new social script, because if you don't ask that question, you're a horrible person. When you ask that question — Oh, “even if you can help”, you're still a good guy. I argue that people now are still realizing that as a garbage, not listening, not personal nonsense question, that it gives you that bad taste in your mouth like, “Oh! I’m so glad I just wasted 15 minutes of my life talking about all these things,” but actually you didn't give a damn. 

So what I tell people is the cure, anecdotally, and I could can speak to this in a number of ways, is you've got to ask better questions. The best connectors are curious. Now, I'm sure someone on your show is going to listen to this and they’re going to say, “Oh! But Scott, that’s so obvious. What an obvious tip. You have to be curious. Oh, man! Thanks for the tip.” You know what? I would then push back and say, “Relive your last five conversations and tell me how curious you were.” 

Most people love to talk about how obvious stuff is, but they don't actually do it. They won't actually deep dive more than surface level or one step below surface level. If you end up in a conversation where the answer on the other side is yes no or a phrase or a sentence, you stink at what you do. You should be able to have conversations with anyone, anytime, anywhere by basically — Whether you know the subject matter not, by the way, just by consistently asking questions or better questions to start a conversation. So instead of like, “Hey! What are you working on these days?” How about, “What are you working on right now that makes you wake up in the morning excited?” People love talk about that. Then all of a sudden it's, “Oh, great! Tell me, like what are goals for that? What is success look like for you? In a year from now if we talk again, what makes it so that that thing you did was a winner or a loser? What are the steps you need to do to get there?” 

In that five or six question series, there is no question that any good connector is in their mind is thinking, “Who do I know? What resource do I have? What five people can I connect for more knowledge here for this person and then in the end be able to actually facilitate it?” Even if the help at the end of the day didn't get them over to the goal line, by actually going that level of methodical series of steps, you will have a relationship in place with a continuing conversation over time that shows you care.

[0:19:08.7] MB: There's a lot of stuff I want to unpack from that as well. I love, first of all, just the insight that most people talk about how obvious things are, but never actually just do it even though it's really simple. I think that's a great just observation in general. Not just about kind of relationship building, but I think more broadly really, really applicable. 

I'm curious, I want to dig in on this idea of asking better questions and cultivating curiosity. Tell me more about how we can get better at that. 

[0:19:32.6] SG: Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, like anything else, you got to do an audit of yourself. You have to actually look at conversations you've done, and this takes some thinking. Again, this is an intellectual exercise. Or it's catching yourself as you’re starting to retrain your brain of how you want to be. Bottom line is, Matt, I mean, at the end of the day, if you are someone who really wants to be more authentic in your relationships and you don't care about people or care about what they have to say or selectively care or only care when it is applicable to what you do every day or only care when you see a benefit for you in it, you don't get it. 

So you need to actually start patching yourself. Again, I don’t think the people are awful people if they do these things. I think is how they’ve been built bill or how they’ve been trained, like any bad thing, biting your fingernails, doing horrible — Spitting, whatever you're thing is. Your thing that you got to do to get over, to get over the hill, it takes training and petition and constantly checking yourself and improving incrementally to get better. 

I think that in order to be a curious person you first have to figure out, could you sit in a room with someone that you share no commonalities with, that you don't understand anything about what they do, that in a room where you were with that person, you would ever even want to read a book, let alone a blog or anything on the subject matter of relevance to them. Could you take all that and then say, “Okay. I’m going to have a conversation and by the end not be a subject matter expert on this person,” but have a fundamental series of at least understanding, points in the sky that you could aim towards to actually make it so you learn something, and not just learn something necessarily to help that person. I mean, the one clear offshoot in value and there’s going to be a lot of people you can’t help or people you shouldn't help or people, frankly, that you are not going to provide enough value to, so you shouldn’t just try. 

But I think that there's something to be said about just being okay with great conversation. You’ve got to be okay with that. Even if you're introverted, right? My partner and I, the reason we wrote this book together is I'm an extreme extrovert. He's an incredibly extreme introvert. So the perspectives in this book aren't like, “Well, if you’re not a type A, you shouldn't be a connector.” That's nonsense. Most introverts are actually better connectors in many cases and extroverts could learn a lot from that. But either way, peripherally, you need to understand that regardless of who you are, you need to actually, whatever environment you're in, be able to pull in that context and understanding. Not to be a major on the subject, but to care. So I think that's what you need to do. 

Asking better questions, it's more of just forward thinking, conversational questions that actually continue your curiosity, that don't just lead to, “Oh! Do you like today's weather?” or small talk. Small talk is horrible. What is small talk? Small talks is another version of how can I help you. It’s that lazy thing that a networker does when they're shaking your hand with one hand, handing you a business card with the other, talking to you about themselves while looking over your shoulder, who else is in the room that they should be meeting after they're done with the social scripts of you. 

So anything that comes up is lazy is probably not correct. So audit yourself. Determine ultimately, are you guilty of some of these things? Start figuring out questions that you feel you want to ask people. There's no set of correct once. Again, along the lines of what are you working on right now that excites you? Something that is in the moment, something that has a series of steps that can go up, something that is meaningful to the other person that helps them to talk about themselves which most people don't. 

Then I’m going to give you the fourth one, which most extroverts are going to be like, “Oh my God! This is crazy. I’ll never do this.” Listen. We are so bad at listening type As, because we’re always like, “Our minds works so fast. We want to get the next word out.” Sometimes — You know what? Shutting up is the best thing you can do as a connector, and then listening to take in that context. So you could build a profile of someone that actually allows you to figure out what next words you should say, because typically if you think too fast on your feet as a type A, the next word you're always going to say without listening are the wrong words or is about you or sets up something that the other person’s going to be sort of taken aback by or eyes glazed over, because it shows you were just waiting to get the words out. So these are the kinds of things that you just be okay with and learn from and adapt to that new reality of conversational tone.

[0:23:58.5] MB: I want to dig in a little more broadly too about kind of the art of conversation. Let's say you meet somebody at an event or a cocktail party or something like that. How can listeners learn how to sort of communicate with anyone about anything? 

[0:24:12.4] SG: It’s interesting. So I am going to argue against the premise, but not to say you're wrong, obviously, but to give you a sense of what a connector is going to do before they even put themselves in the room. So the difference is is that people look at things like networking events as, “Oh! I go to a networking event, because I want to meet people,” but they often don't ask themselves a lot of questions before they go into that room. 

Number one; should I be attending this event? Number two; if I am, is there anybody with me? Am I sort of going with anchors that already have a built-in series of relationships or foundational understanding in the room? Are they already a connector in that space? So there's a lot of things that go into selecting your pond, if you will, because, again, connectors are methodical, productivity hackers, people who are very methodical about the time and the place and the surroundings, not just environmentally, but the physical space, the intimacy of a room versus the large-scale room. It's knowing the kind of connector you are, because that's how your conversational tone will be effective. 

As an example, if you’re introvert, you probably don't want to just go to some random networking event, and you're not wrong for thinking that. What an introvert might do is say, “Okay. I know there's this big conference that's coming to town. There's no way I'm going to put myself in a room with 2,000 people. I’ll have a panic attack. But it's a subject matter area that is incredibly relevant to me. So what can I do?” Well, maybe you could go and reach out to 15 or 16 people that are going to be at that event that you found on social media, or that your friends know that are going to attend, or you have two or three of the 16 that are really fundamental members of your community or your world that they can invite the top people in the space that matter, and you bring them to an oasis, a private space that’s intimates, that takes them away from the action, that makes it a very highly valuable experience not just for you, but for them. People that are also attending these kinds of activities with the intent of the goal of meeting great people, but you're doing the work. You're curating the experience. 

How do you first communicate with anyone? You put them in an environment that's a safe space for you. The second is you figure out the key areas that those people bring to a conversation before they come in the room. For example, in our events in YEC, if you go to an event in any of our communities, in YEC in particular, we’re going to survey on what are two challenges you're facing right now in your business and what is a major strength or a major win you've had in learning something big that helps your businessman in last year? Then, of course, we’re going to give you the CV LinkedIn style details. We’re going to put a digest together. We’re going to send that to every person, and then we’re going to make suggestions of who should make sure they talk by the end of the event, because we know what both sides of the challenges and the strengths are. All that work allows people to come in, especially you as the connector with a whole lot of conversations you can have right off the bat. 

So I think the way you communicate with anyone about anything, it starts with the curiosity. It goes with the selectivity and curation of creating that safe space or that environment whenever you can. Putting in yourself at least in the space that you're comfortable in. I mean, an extrovert. There are people like myself that could walk into a thousand person conference room or a conference center rather and create great relationships, but I still want to take those folks back to a safe space, because you might want to pick the right people you want to keep in touch with at a big room like that, but still bringing them back to something intimate, and small, and meaningful, and then deliver on an experience that’s highly valuable where you're not the only one that is having the conversation, but you’ve brought in a lot of stakeholders that see you as the sphere of influence, the reason that these great conversations occurred, but not necessarily the person that even has to speak. 

Now you’re the sphere of influence, the center of these conversations of many different conversations. You’re seen as the ringmaster, if you will, of the whole thing, and you might not have even spoken all 16 people, but all 16 people, because of the value that they’ve created based on your creation of this safe space is going to be the person that walks away probably with the most fundamental relationships and foundations for those relationships established. 

[0:28:25.1] MB: I wanted to stop and once again let you guys know that this episode today is sponsored by Audible. We’re really excited to have Audible as a sponsor. As I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of Audible and I listen to it on an almost daily basis. I did more than 10 audiobooks last year on Audible and I've really been enjoying a number of books recently, and I mentioned Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and the Intro, and another book that I recently finished on Audible that was fascinating, and I think listeners of this show in particular will really enjoy, was the Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. I found the book to be fascinating. It's about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, to the founders of behavioral economics and thinkers that had a tremendous impact on psychology as a whole and me as an individual and really shaping in many ways what the show has become. 

Michael Lewis, incredible author, a really great story, compelling, gripping. You’ll find yourself laughing. You'll find yourself stunned by some the conclusions, but that was a great audiobook. like I said, I really listen to Audible all the time. Being podcast host, somebody who listens to podcasts and audio, Audible in particular is something that I really care about and use nearly daily. So I'm really excited they're sponsoring this episode and they're offering a free audiobook and a 30-day free membership for our listeners. So you can get that by going to audible.com/success. That’s audible.com/success or by texting the word SUCCESS to 500500. That’s SUCCESS to 500500. 

Guys, check out that offer. If you haven't, be sure to check out Audible. You can get it at audible.com/success. I would love to continue having them be a sponsor of the show. 

Also, I wanted to tell you about our second sponsor for this episode, Ample K. Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficiently healthy fats in a powdered and mixed on-the-go format. I'm a huge Ample user as well. In fact I'm having Ample for breakfast today, and they sent us a couple free samples. It took me forever to actually try one, and once I did, I was completely hooked. There's like 400 calories, almost 30 grams of protein, a great balance of healthy nutritious fats. It's really exactly what you could look for in a sort of a meal, powdered meal on-the-go shake, and I have probably three or four Amples a week. Great! I just ordered along with the producer of the show, Austin, who's also a big fan of Ample. We just ordered a huge, like whatever the biggest boxes. We had these giant boxes of Ample just come in, and I'm a huge fan of Ample as well. So I'm really excited to have them be a sponsor. 

For a limited time, they're offering our listeners 15% off of your first order of Ample K. So to get this exclusive offer only for Science of Success listeners, you can go to amplemeal.com and use the promo code SUCCESS15 at your check out to claim a 15% discount off your first order of Ample K. 

Back to the show. 

[0:31:23.4] MB: You touched on this a little bit, but I think in Super Connector you dig more deeply and talk sort about related concept. But the idea of sort of being a curators versus being a creator. Tell me a little bit more about that. 

[0:31:36.2] SG: Yeah. I mean, look, some people are wonderful at writing content and some people are wonderful at curating content. Just as a basic example, a lot of content today is thought leadership garbage. It is advertorial, click bait, funnel metric-driven traffic with a goal in mind. Now, I don't want to make it sound like connectors can't profit at some point in their lives. These folks can't be nonprofit only zealots that only care about others. Clearly, you have to be able to create value for yourself in order to create value for others, or what value ultimately do you provide. 

But at the end of the day, creators are people that, let's say, in the form of content, could put out really valuable content that brings people together and creates dialogue and conversation, which is ironic, because right now that's sort of the big thing with Facebook and all these major social media outlets now that realize how much garbage is on their sites and they’re trying to now make it back to the original founder’s intent, creating conversation around the high-value content initially driven by individuals, not brands, not media companies. This is very much in line with where I think the world's going in general. 

But those creators can create tribes because the content and the value they’re creating is so impactful that they can create. Some people can't do that or shouldn't do that, but they can create highly valuable curated pieces, pulling the best minds together that have created really thought-provoking pieces of content that on a newsletter, let's say, could spark massive dialogue amongst the top intellectuals or the top professionals in a certain field. So I think you can't force — Again, going back to the tactic discussion. You can't say, “Oh! I read a blog that talks about content marketing, and so I have to put a personal brand out there,” because — You know what? If you suck at creating content or you are, again, networker-esk in your content approach, out for yourself, icky transactional oriented, it’s not going to work anyway. 

So I think you need to — Just like you need to figure out are you an introvert or an extroverted, I think you have to determine, are you someone that could gather people together to inspire dialogue, and the gathering is based on the creation of very valuable and raw information that people will really have deep conversations about again? That puts you in the sphere of influence, because you are the curator of that experience? Or are you someone that does have something very relevant to say that can create dialogue around the words, thoughts, insights that you are bringing to the world yourself Neither of those is right or wrong. It's just a fit for you or not. 

[0:34:16.4] MB: So it seems like both of these strategies, and also kind of circling back to the idea of when you're going to an event, creating sort of your own safe space, revolve around the key principle of placing yourself at sort of the center of what's going on. 

[0:34:32.3] SG: Absolutely. Community today and the ability to build walled-off access to the people and things that matter will be eventually what is the keys to the kingdom? Because, at some point, the noise is just going to get so loud that the people that matter — And I don't mean that in the sense of it's just the C-suite or just the intellectual set. The people that matter to you are going to need that, say, space, because they’re going to flock from these overcrowded, oversaturated platforms in the real-world and in the online one. Those that are able to curate the right people together that can basically allow for these thriving communities to sustain beyond the founder, him or herself, are going to be the ones that ultimately are the most powerful from a social capital level, from a he potential profitability level, from just the reality of where I believe and where my coauthor, Ryan, believes, the real relationships that change the world, your world, the big world, whatever you want to call it, are going to come from. 

So people need to invest in others to surround themselves with amazing people, because amazing people do what? They bring in other amazing people. When you put a thesis together, Let's again take, say, the YEC, Young Entrepreneur Council. That ethos was initially we really care about youth entrepreneurship, and the idea of building the next generation of young entrepreneurs and inspiring them through our actions. As a direct corollary, if we combine our efforts to do, not only could we create impact, but by connecting together in general we can also help one another to ensure mutual success where we can continue to give back to that original message, that original thesis. What brought us together initially? 

So it builds and builds and builds, but it doesn't mean that Scott Gerber or Ryan Paul have to drive every initiative, every conversation, everything that matters, because the group is built so much on to that fundamental principal and they all so buy into it. It's about helping young entrepreneurs succeed that they want to be a part of that conversation proactively and reactively. 
But YEC has grown far beyond the original intent. It was not meant to necessarily be in the thousands of people, but those thousands of people are all incredibly curated, amazing and vetted because of the initial foundation we put out. So not only is it created, obviously, a business. I don't want to be coy about it. It’s created a business, but it’s also created a mastermind and a hive for people that also like me, when I started it, felt alone. They couldn't talk to anybody else. There was no one else that understood them or they didn't just have enough, what I'll call, general knowledge outside of their subject matter expertise, or their specific location, or their specific industry, and they wanted to become more worldly, and what better place to become more worldly than the smartest people in our generation in various different other market sectors, countries, and so on? But at the end of the day, the direct and indirect access that Ryan and myself now have because of not just the people we’ve brought to that community and our team has brought to the community, but the community has brought to the community, allows for it to have an exponential value to us and to the company as a whole while simultaneously providing exponential indirect and direct opportunity to the members themselves. And that is a real win-win. That was based on a wholesome intent. That started with a smart foundation. That almost in the movie, Inception, is an idea that once it's planted you can't “buy that real estate”. It's an idea you own. It's an idea that is implanted in you. It's something you believe in with her for heart and mind, and that is something that no marketer, no MLM person, no one, can go and just buy their way into. 

[0:38:29.6] MB: How does somebody who’s a super connector — And I think the community answers here just talking about kind of addresses in some way, but I'm curious specifically maybe from your perspective, but how is someone who’s a super connector kind of manage or stay on top of such a huge amount of connections in a way that's authentic but also kind of — It can still be executed and sort of managed in a meaning way?

[0:38:54.4] SG: Absolutely. It's funny. There are some secrets of the trade, just like any other mindset shift. I think people have to realize that technology is meant to amplify humanity and not cheat it. I think, today, a lot of people view technology or these platforms that can help you systemize and create value for others as a means to convert or have a funnel click or get a like or a share. Again, just like everything else, you got to take it back and you have say to yourself, “Okay. What works for me so I can remember this information that I just learned about John Smith at the bar tonight that he likes this kind of drink, that he's changing jobs and looking for this position, that he likes the Caipirinha, that his son is an all-star basketball player.” So on and so forth. How do I just keep that treasure trove of information that only I have that is not on a LinkedIn profile so that I can keep in touch in a meaningful way with that person? 

So some people, like me, keep it be very simple. I put a contact information in the notes section of my contacts in my iPhone, and then I will put just a reminder, “Hey, check in with him in X-number of weeks or X-number of months or X-number of days depending on what we talked about,” and in the follow-up CC, which is what I use. Some people use Boomerang or other scheduling tools or reminder tools, but in my follow-up CC, I’ll and myself an email that says, “Hey, talk about these couple of things. Check in on this. See if you could provide value here, here, based on what happened from what we talked about at this time.” Simple as that. 

It is not cheating for me to send myself a reminder, but then no offense to the person I was talking to or anyone else, forget about it until it comes back in my circle, because either I'm helping other folks or I have to, again, be successful myself in order to help others and dedicate the time that is necessary. So it’s finding the cheats to your time that are not cheating the person or cheating the goals of the communication of the person, but simply cheating your productivity and hours in a day that I think is really about the mindset. 

There are some connectors we talked about, like this wonderful man named Michael Roderick. He's in the book in Super Connector, and wonderful, wonderful connector. He is just the salt of the earth. But he has literally developed a multi-level documents that is just this monster spreadsheet online that not only has all this contextual data about all these conversations with relevant points and relevant things about a person. But he has different scores for people, and not scoring them as, “Is this a good person or a bad person?” but does this person fit in this category of how I deem someone or that category. Again, just helping him instantly be able to search in a document based on his own rubric a series of keywords and then be able to basically sort those keywords by how he has graded these individuals by type of person to try to find the right people when he doesn't think a connection makes sense to someone. Introduce an extrovert with an extrovert in this specific subject area. I need someone that was having this challenge solved with this expertise in this period of time. 

It’s a series of creating, again, whether it's high-end CRMs or low-end SaaS tech that help cheat productivity but not people, but that's most of it. I think a lot of things also comes down to how well you schedule yourself the best connectors also are people that care about the minutes of the day, and I think that comes down to ensuring that you’re providing the proper amount of time to yourself and creating a series of things that you just won't do. You have to be able to say no also. A lot of people say yes to everything, “I’ll help you with this. Let me take time for that,” and then by the end of the day you realized, “Oh, man. I didn’t actually moved myself forward. So what does that do?” 

I think there does come a point where you need to be able to develop systems around your own efficiencies so that you can remain efficient to other people. That could be blocking time. It could be using virtual assistance or in-person assistance. It can be scheduling meetings that are about like, “Hey, let’s go grab a coffee in clusters,” like if 10 people want to meet you for coffee. Don’t go 10 meetings. Bring 10 people together for one coffee meeting. Again, create a safe space, curate people together, create value that is collective, not just one-on-one. But these kinds of systems in real estate that you need to create are personal, and that’s why in the book, in Super Connector, none of these things are if you do this you will be successful, but rather here's a series of traits, anecdotes and value-add frameworks that work for certain people. Take from what you will these different things to make them your own. I think that's sort of my final message to everyone. No one, no one, myself, my partner, any of the best connectors on planet Earth can give you that step-by-step guide. There is no five-minute abs formula here. 

But we can share with you the best practices that we've made our own, that we feel in our hearts are true, that are wholesome and that create value for all involved, including ourselves, but in a way that makes us go to bed at night and say, “You know what? We’re good people with good intentions that truly want to change and help people’s lives, but with the understandings and frameworks that are going to help us be efficient at doing just that.”

If you could take away one thing from anything in this interview, if you are amazing enough to buy the book, which I would love and I appreciate every person that could buy this book not because I'm looking to be a rich author, but because I believe these practices will lead to better human interaction. If I can leave you with one thing, it's that. It's don't try to cheat real-time. Relationships take real-time and real effort. Cheat your own time, but not the time it takes to build relationships with others. 

[0:44:43.2] MB: I think that’s great advice and it makes a ton of sense applying technology in the right context, but not necessarily in a way that’s sort of magnifies that social media noise that we talked about before. 

I’m curious, what’s kind of one actionable piece of homework be that you would give to somebody listening to this interview that they could kind of start to concretely implement the ideas we’ve talked about today?

[0:45:05.3] SG: I think first and foremost I go back to the idea of really having some introspection and audit yourself to see where you really are. Have a moment where you actually are not trying to be on stage, whether that is a real-world stage or a digital stage platform if you will and just ask yourself some basic questions. Am I someone that can see beyond transactional value? Not showing off for anybody. If you say, “No, I'm not.” Well, at least you have an answer. 

Then you ask yourself, “Okay. If I am beyond transactional value, if I can get beyond this and I can create a series of methodologies and systems that work for me to create value for others, how would I start that process? Do I have a community currently? Do I have a group of people that I believe, fundamentally, are my anchors, the people that are around me in a meaningful way that can begin this foundation of something I care about and build that community around me?” But just asking yourself a lot of questions, deep thought and being honest with yourself. Getting your back down to you’re being naked. Getting rid of that paint and that arrogance that we've been putting on, whether you're an introvert or extrovert, for years of always potentially trying to be the belle of the ball on a public stage. Instead just really asking yourself some fundamentals and not lying to yourself, and then when you figure all that out and if you find yourself to be someone that you feel you want to be a connector, tracking in the back your mind without like scripting yourself. Just doing what you've always done in your next couple of conversations and seeing if you catch yourself. 

Are you really being honest with yourself or did you just trick yourself into believing you are honest with yourself. Do you really have that transactional mindset? Because John's dad runs a carwash when you met him at an event and he wasn't really valuable to you. Did you say to yourself, “You know, I really need to get away from this person, because he doesn't help me.” Did you even have that instinct in your head? If you did, it doesn't mean you’re a horrible person. But just being honest with yourself. That is to be the best way to help rebuild yourself. I think those small steps, assessing who you are, will be the foundational understanding if you can be the emotionally, intelligent, self-aware curious person that it will take to be a super connector. 

[0:47:21.3] MB: It's amazing. The notions of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, probably the two most recurrent themes on our show regardless of what kind of skillset we’re talking about developing. Those are some of the fundamental cornerstones of developing nearly anything. 

Scott, where listeners find you and your books online?

[0:47:40.8] SG: Absolutely. Well, thank you everyone. I really appreciate the platform and the time, Matt. This is a subject matter we really care about. If you want to check out the book, obviously it will be available everywhere books are sold. It goes on sale February 27th, 2018 with preorders available now. You can go to superconnectorbook.com to check out the book, some of the connectors, and you could follow my partner and I, @ryanpaugh or me, @scottgerber on Twitter. We’re very active and love to engage in conversation around these types topics, so feel free to check us out there. 

[0:48:17.1] MB: Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom. Great strategies really solid principles for building authentic relationships in today's environment. 

[0:48:27.3] SG: Thanks for having me. 

[0:48:28.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that's only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right of the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us as a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm. That helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

Brain Scans Reveal The Powerful Memory Techniques of Memory Champions, Greek Philosophers, and SuperLearners with Jonathan Levi

In this episode we discuss becoming a SuperLearner. We dig into questions that I’ve pondered for a long time - does speed reading work? Can we actually speed read and increase our reading comprehension? Are there strategies you can use to improve your memory? And perhaps most importantly - how can we align the way we think, learn, and remember with the way our brains actually operate? We go into this and more with our guest Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi is an author, learning expert, and founder of Super Human Enterprises. He is the author of the book Become a SuperLearner and has helped over 120,000 students improve their learning methodology through his online courses. He has been featured on the TED Stage and his work has been published in Inc. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and more.

• How Jonathan went from a “troubled student” to a learning and memory expert

• Memory strategies from greek philosophers to current day experts - what actually works?

• What to do if speed reading doesn’t work?

• You average college graduate reads about 250 wpm, at Jonathan’s peak he was reading 750-800 wpm with 80-90% comprehension

• Its vital to distinguish between rote memorization and how the memory actually works

• Most people have no concept of how powerful and effective memory techniques actually are

• By doing memory work you can change the physical structure and neurochemistry of your brain

• "Paleo Learning” - Get back to what actually works, from an evolutionary standpoint, with learning strategies

• Using our brains in the way they are intended to use - aligning our learning with our evolutionary design - creates an huge impact on your learning

• The framework of 40 day study with 30 minute sessions per day

• Strategic memory techniques you can use to improve your memory

• What FMRI scans reveal about the brains of world memory champions

• How these two specific memory techniques could more improve your memory by 135%

• Short amount of training can impact your brain in a big way

• Pygmalion effect and the golem effect - people typically conform to the expectations of teachers and leaders

• The same thing happens with your ego and your perception of yourself

  1. Even if these techniques don’t work for you, they still work for you

  2. Your ego’s incentive is always trying to prove you right

• Lessons from both the hard and soft sciences on how you can improve your memory

• Our brains are built in clusters / neural networks

• There are more neurons in your brain than stars in the known universe

• The human brain is the most complex object known to man

• The 3 primary strategies for improving your memory

• Strongest memory effect are SMELL and TASTE - very deeply rooted in your brain

  1. Second most effective memory sense is sight - the "Picture superiority effect”

  2. Next most powerful is location-based memory

• Visual memory and location based memory are deeply ingrained in your brain and the keys to unlocking super learning

• Can you remember what was on your mom’s nightstand when you were a child?

• Connecting all of your knowledge to preexisting knowledge

• “Hebb's Law” - Neurons that fire together, wire together

• Our brains thrive on novelty and newness - our brains are amazing at recognizing patterns and connections

• Always think of novel and creative imagery to remember things

• Learning how to use the memory palace technique

• Create strange / novel / unique visualizations

• Imagining that I get stabbed!?

• Create a visualization you already have and then connect them - even if they don’t make sense

• Memory palaces can get jumbled, but they are free, and you will effectively never run out of places / physical spaces

• You need a different memory palace for each thing you want to plant in there

  1. What if you get it wrong?

  2. Doesn’t matter as long as its wrong consistently

  3. You can use the levels of your favorite video games

  4. You can use fictional places / structures - as long as they are the same

• Create artificial logic and connections -

• Memory palace - go along the outside walls of the room - go clockwise or counter clockwise - up to you

• LeVeShel - to cook, in Hebrew

• What are visual markers and how can you use them to memorize literally anything?

• How has Jonathan been able to improve retention with speed reading?

• How does speed reading work and is it actually a hoax?

• How you can read at 600-800 words per minute and actually increase your retention and comprehension

• Crash course in speed reading in 30 seconds

• Minimize back-skipping

  1. Minimize Subvocalization

  2. You can only listen at 300-400 wpm

• Jonathan rejects the notion of being an auditory learner -you may get even more out of visual learning strategies

• Spaced repetition is a key component of boosting retention

• Review

  1. Pre-reading chapters

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can get started for free right now!

If you enjoy learning these incredibly important skills, Brilliant is offering THE FIRST 200 Science of Success listeners 20% off their Annual Premium Subscription. Simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to claim your discount!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Tony Buzan

• [Wiki Page] Harry Lorayne

• [Wiki Page] Malcolm Knowles

• [Wiki Page] Pygmalion effect

• [YouTube Channel] Jonathan Levi

• [Website] SuperLearner Academy

• [Website] Becoming SuperHuman

• [Radboud Univ Article] “Super-sized memory is trainable and long lasting”

• [NCBI Article] “So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help?” by Rayner K, Schotter ER, Masson ME, Potter MC, and Treiman R.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss becoming a super learner. We dig into questions that I pondered for a long time; does speed reading work? Can we actually speed read and increase our reading comprehension? Are there strategies you can use to improve your memory? Perhaps, most importantly, how can you align the way you think, learn and remember with the way your brain actually operates? We go into this and much more with our guest, Jonathan Levi.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today, by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There is some amazing stuff that’s only available to our e-mail subscribers, so be sure to sign up, join the e-mail list. There’s so much cool stuff on there that only subscribers are going to get, including a free guide that we created based on listener demand. A guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free, along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the e-mail list today.

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly e-mail from us every week including our Mindset Monday e-mail, which listeners have been absolutely loving. It’s short, it’s simple, videos, articles, things we found fascinating within the last week.

You’re going to get an exclusive access and ways to change the show. You can vote on guests, you can help us change our intro music, you can even submit your own personal questions to our guests and much more.

Be sure to sign up and join the e-mail list, become part of our community.  You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you’re on the go, if you’re out and about, if you’re driving around, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. That’s “smarter” to 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how money messes with your brain. We look into the obvious traps we fall into when we think about money. Examine how cultural influences shape our financial choices and explore the key biases that underpin the most common and dangerous financial mistakes that you are most likely to make, with our guest Jeff Kreisler. If you want to understand how you often misunderstand money, listen to that episode.

[0:02:49.1] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Jonathan Levi. Jonathan is an Author, Learning Expert and Founder of SuperHuman Enterprises. He is the author of the book Become a SuperLearner and has helped over a 120,000 students improve their learning methodology through his online courses. He’s been featured on the Ted stage and his work have been published in Ink, The Wall Street Journal and much more.

Jonathan, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:13.7] JL: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

[0:03:16.1] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to start out, but I’ve got a ton of questions and fascinated with memory and speed reading and all these things. I’m curious, how did your own personal journey with becoming a memory expert begin?

[0:03:31.2] JL: Yeah, that’s a great question Matt. See, the way I always tell the story is I don’t think you devote your career to becoming an expert in memory and improved learning, because you’re seen as a bright student growing up. I think it takes a certain amount of coming home with tears streaming down your face. That was certainly my case. I was always a problem student.

I was a bright kid, to hear my parents tell the story, but I had a lot of difficulties with learning in an institutional environment. By the time I was eight, it was no longer acute anymore that I couldn’t sit still and my parents had me tested for ADD. Rather than condemning me and having it put on my record, they had me tested very quietly and privately and then dealt with it on their own.

I spent a lot of my youth and student career just drugged out on real and which to my parents’ defense turn out to be a really, really good thing, because it was the only way that I got through high school, university and graduate school. That was basically the way that I thought that I had to learn. I thought that I needed drugs to learn. I thought that I was never going to be an exceptional student, except for in English essentially. I thought that in order to succeed in the framework that we’re all forced to learn in the school system, that’s what it would take.

I was very fortunate that I – before going into my master’s degree, which was going to be very condensed one-year program, or 10-month program, where you do two years’ worth of course work, I was very, very fortunate that I met someone who I would later call a super learner. The story goes that he had done a couple of PhDs in machine learning and information systems and coincidentally had gotten married to a woman who was working with special needs children, specifically children with dyslexia, memory issues.

The two of them sat down when they had kids and said, “Can we build a methodology to ensure that our kids are able to learn effectively?” They studied a lot of the greats, the Tony Buzan’s, all the way back to the Greeks, and the memory techniques that even Aristotle was doing. They started teaching them not only to their kids, but to other children that  were in their lives, in their professional background and career.

I was very, very lucky that I managed to run into this person while doing an unpaid internship before my MBA. I immediately said, “Well, you know what? I don’t believe in all that stuff. I tried the Evelyn Wood speed reading program. I tried the PX method and none of the stuff actually works.” They said, “What do you have to lose?” Well, they gave me a money-back guarantee and I sat down with them for six weeks and did intensive one-on-one tutoring.

Then I went off to my MBA and I was just a totally changed animal. I won’t say that I was able to sit through 12 hours of course work with Ritalin, but I was able to actually for the first time in my life do all the reading material, keep up with other students and enjoy what I was learning and memorize things much faster.

To make a long story short, after finishing my MBA, I didn’t know what I would do, where I would go and what kind of entrepreneurial opportunity I would pursue. I decided to try and see if I could take their lessons and put them online, apply the things that I had learned, such as speed reading and memory to learning more about this field.

I did more research. I did more studies. I picked up more techniques and obviously did a good bit of learning about online courses and how to run an online business and many, many other things. We’re very blessed to have success right out of the gate, because I think this is something that so many people want to learn and need to learn.

Also, I think that the proofs and the pudding I sat down and over the course of a weekend read everything I could about how these marketplace websites work and how online courses work, and how do you record videos and how do you edit videos and all the stuff. The results don’t lie, I suppose. From then until now over the last four years as you’ve said, we’ve gotten about a 120,000 students through the program. We have courses at every different level and a book and a weekly podcast. Yeah, that’s our mission is to help people learn anything and everything faster and with more ease.

[0:07:47.5] MB: I remember you sharing an interesting anecdote in your Ted Talk, where you talked about a friend of yours who could read I think 2,000 words a minute?

[0:07:57.5] JL: Yeah, that was the gentleman who introduced me to his wife. Now 2,000 words per minute I do want to say is not a 100% retention. It’s a peak speed, of course. Probably his every day reading speed is more like 900 to 1,200 words a minute. Yeah, to give people a little bit of context, your average college graduate in their native language reads about 250 words per minute.

I at my fastest ever when I was reading reams of paper every day and I was really in my best shape, I was reading about 750 to 800 words a minute with 80% to 90% comprehension. You’re talking about on average about a 3X improvement in reading speed.

[0:08:38.2] MB: That’s staggering. I want to dig into really concretely is how you did that and how specially you maintained the comprehension, because that’s been one of my biggest struggles with speed reading is how that impacts comprehension. Before we do, I wanted to underscore one of the things you said that I thought was really interesting, which is your struggle through the current education system and more broadly how science has taught us a lot of things about how the brain learns. Yet, it seems like our society really hasn’t actually implemented any of those or taken any of them into account when crafting our educational curriculum.

[0:09:15.9] JL: Yeah. It’s a really incredible thing. I had the very  blessed opportunity to sit down with Harry Lorayne, who started – I mean, if you think about Tony Buzan as the father of mind maps, or the modern father of mind maps and speed reading, Harry Lorayne is the father of mnemonic techniques. He used to go on the Johnny Carson show in the 50s and 60s, memorize everybody in the audience 1,500 names and then recite them on-air.

Talk about just someone who brought these techniques and who actually rediscovered them in many ways from the ancient Greeks who were using them. I asked him, I said, “Harry, I’ve been at this three, four years. You’ve been at this 55 years. Why is this not in schools?” He said, “Schools seem to have – they try to be progressive and they seem to have this phobia around the word memorization.”

He told me the story of how he went in to a superintendent and said, “Well, I’m an expert in memorization,” and the immediate response was, “We don’t teach memorization. Memorization is the enemy.” He goes, “Okay, well you’re teaching kids the grammatical rules of a language, you’re teaching kids how to use formulas in Algebra, how do you think those things are getting into their minds?”

I think we need to distinguish between rote memorization and actual memory. I think there is a huge problem in schools today where they shy away rightfully so from memorization, but they throw the baby out with the bath water. What we’re doing is we’re not using memory techniques, mnemonics because we’re afraid of this idea of rote memorization. When in fact, there are certain things – Pythagorean theorem you need to memorize, multiplication tables, you probably need to memorize even though every student has an iPhone in their hand at this point. Vocabulary words we need to be memorizing.

I think that’s part of the big problem. I think the other part is people just – they have no concept of how powerful and effective these tools are. Only recently have we started seeing studies that are actually testing, not drugs to enhance concentration, but actually what happens in the brain when we sit someone down, we teach them the method of loci, we teach them visual mnemonic strategies and the results have been staggering.

I think it’s really starting to become a renaissance in understanding how the brain works, and I guess we have to credit a lot of the research that’s been done around meditation over the last couple decades, because it’s really led the way in saying, “Oh, my God. The brain is so incredibly plastic.” Who would’ve thought that you can actually upgrade your brain? You can change in structure of the prefrontal cortex, you can cortical gyrification, you can change all these incredible things just by using your brain differently, in the case of meditation by concentrating on your breath for 10 minutes a day, you can actually change the physical structure of the brain and the neuro-chemistry.

I think what’s happened is once that research started to become accepted and started to become legitimate, people could then say, “Hey, we’re going to sit down 30 people and 15 of them we’re going to teach how to use a memory palace and 15 of them we’re just going to give a list of numbers to memorize and let’s see what actually happens to their brains.”

[0:12:23.2] MB: It’s funny, evolution obviously crafted our brains to learn at certain ways, and yet most of the strategies and tactics that we use both in and sort of public education, but also just in our own lives trying to learn and memorize things are almost at odds with that.

[0:12:41.0] JL: Yeah, it’s beautiful what you just said, because I like to – I joke around. A friend of mine is Robb Wolf who I also met through podcasting, and I really admire his work and I always like to tell him that what he does for diet and nutrition, I want to do for memory. I want to talk about paleo-learning, because it’s really exactly the same learning.

If you’re familiar with Robb and his work and Dr. Lauren Cordain it’s all about, let’s just – what we did with our bodies and our digestive tracts before the agricultural revolution, let’s just go back to that, because everything was a lot better when we were all eating natural, healthy, unprocessed food from nature. It’s the exact same thing with the super learning technique.

We weren’t learning in these boring rigid textbooks, we were learning in very visual and very graphic ways. We were learning around spatial awareness, which is what the memory palace technique does and why it works. We’re reconnecting everything to our pre-existing knowledge, and if you go even as far as 1955, you look at the works of Dr. Malcolm Knowles. People are starting to discover like, “Wait a minute. Adults need this connection to pre-existing knowledge. They need to understand pressing applicability to the things that they’re learning.”

It’s exactly as you said. It’s going back and it’s using our brains the way that they’re intended to be used, as opposed to the way that the industrial revolution intended, which is how do we turn out workers as fast as possible and in the most efficient way as possible for limited tasks that have limited creativity?

If you look, I mean I’m the product of great schooling and so I don’t want to completely bash the school system. It was designed very intentionally around an industrial economy that turns out worker bees. It’s rare that you find someone who develops their creativity and their entrepreneurial spirit and all these things that we today in our service economy value and prioritize and reward.

It’s very rare that someone learns that in school. They learn it at ballet practice. They learn it with mentors. They learn it with their parents at home. They learn it even with the teacher after school. Wrestling practice is where they learn that discipline and that charisma. They’re not learning it in the classroom, which was designed around a totally different set of ends that are no longer valuable to us, I think.

[0:15:08.1] MB: I’d love to hear a little bit about maybe some examples or some specific studies that talk about how the brain actually learns and what the science says about it.

[0:15:19.0] JL: Yeah, absolutely. Not too long ago, a little under a year ago, we got in our Google alerts just to get – you would think if you looked at this piece of research, that we funded it or something like that, but it was just a gift that fell into our laps. It turns out that researchers at Radboud University in the University of Netherlands had basically decided to do this study that we’ve been trying to fund on our own for quite some time.

What they did is basically they took a bunch of people, and they did a 40-day long study, with 30-minute training sessions, which is actually coincidentally exactly what’s in our market materials is study for this long for 30 minutes a day.
What they did is they taught a group of people strategic memory techniques, specifically the memory palace technique. If anyone isn’t familiar with the memory palace technique, we can go into that in more depth. If you’ve seen Sherlock, that’s the technique. It’s actually a real thing. Then they had people do rote memorization and then they gave people no memory training, whatsoever.

They gave them lists of words to try and remember. 72 words and they asked them to try and remember as many as possible. Then they came back and had the same groups of people try to without any continued training, four-months duration, tried to do the same thing.

They were trying to understand two things; number one, in the immediate term, are we actually getting better results? Are we able to immediately after learning skills for a matter of minutes or hours, are we able to improve our memorization? Four months later, if we tell these people, “Okay don’t practice. Don’t bother with,” are you actually seeing lasting effects or is it a fluke?

In tandem to that, they also studied the brains of 23 word-class memory athletes. I don’t know where they found 23 of them, because the memory athlete community is pretty small and pretty selective. 23 world-class memory athletes and 23 people similarly aged with similar health, similar IQ, but with self-described average memory skills.

What’s so exciting about the study is they actually were able to use FMRI, which is pretty new technology and leaps and bounds above what MRI imaging can do, because you can actually observe the blood flow changes that are happening in the brain in real-time. Totally huge

Here is what happened, basically they realized that the only differences between people who are memory athletes and normal people was the connectivity patterns in the brain. If you look today at an Olympian like Michael Phelps, you’re going to notice that there are some actual structural changes. In the case of Michael Phelps, he has a longer wingspan, which allows him to move water more effectively.

If you look at Olympic cyclists, they have crazy high VO2 and stuff like that. Then you’re actually seeing in many cases mutations – I don’t want to call them mutations, because people straight go to X-Men, but you’re seeing uniqueness in their physiology that is allowing them to do a lot of the stuff. Dean Karnazes, ultra-marathoner we recently had on the show, his body reacts differently to lactic acid and oxygen and stuff like that.

However, with these memory experts, all you’re seeing is that their brains know how to make connections differently across 2,500 different areas of connectivity in the brain and a specific subset of 25 connections really stood out. They were being used by the memory athletes and they were not being used by other people.

Now anyone who has studied mnemonics gets this, immediately understands, because the difference that we train in our students is number one. Well, I guess I should say out of three, number one visualization. Enhance every type of memory with visualization, visualize everything that you want to memorize. Number two, connect it to preexisting knowledge, right? That’s two arrears of the brain that we’re now lighting up.

They are not being lit up when someone else learns something new. Then number three in the study they were using as I said, the method of loci, the memory palace technique, which is a whole different part of the brain. When you’re dealing with locations and remembering specific areas and putting memories into those specific areas; in a sense, creating a visual library in your brain.

With regards to the other piece of the study really, really interesting, taking completely untrained people essentially before the training, individuals were able to recall on average 26 to 30 words. Those with the strategic memory training could recall more than double. They could recall an average of 35 more words and those who just had some short-term memory training, not specific memory palace technique, only got 30% better. They could recall 11 more words. Those who had no memory training whatsoever, just were practicing over and over and over and coming up with their own strategy, but not actual training, could remember only seven more words.

A day later, these results stayed the same. I know you guys are wondering what the hell happened four months later. Only those with the strategic training, those who actually learned the memory palace technique were able to show substantial gains. Here is what’s so cool, the same day they were able to do 35 more words on average, so over a 100%, about a 115% better performance. Four months later without even training these techniques, they still got over 22 more words per training. That’s a 80% improvement give or take. Just incredible.

Like I said, if I had begged and pleaded and funded the study myself, I couldn’t have asked for a better study, because this exactly explains what we’ve been trying to show people that it’s just a matter of using your brain the way that evolution intended, actually harnessing different parts of the brain that are being used when you’re just repeating over and over and over and over and over with rote memorization. Exactly as we say, if you train for a short period of time and it’s just 30 minutes a day, you’re essentially relearning how to use your brain and there are very, very long-lasting changes in the way that your brain works. Not so much in the structure, but actually in the way that you’re using the equipment that’s given to you.

[0:21:49.3] MB: It’s really fascinating and so interesting. I’m sure you get this all the time, but it just makes me think of how can this really have such a huge impact? For somebody who’s listening and maybe thinking to them self, “Oh, yeah. That sounds great. If I’m going to try it, it’s not really going to work.” What would you say to someone?

[0:22:06.6] JL: Yeah. I get that so much that I actually came out with a lecture recently in our program. It’s a concept. It’s around the concept that I call the Intellectual Pygmalion or Golem Effect. If anyone is familiar, anyone has studied management, the Pygmalion effect is the idea – this weird unexplainable phenomenon that came out of the Rosenthal Jacob study, which I believe, don’t quote me on this, but I believe if memory serves was 1979.

What it says is if a manager or authority figure, such as a parent, teacher or whatever believes that a student is a high-performer, is intelligent, is going to be successful, whether or not they communicate that – in fact, even if they tried to suppress their beliefs in a situation where they’re supposed to be objective, such as in academia, teachers are not supposed to show that they believe or don’t believe in a student. They’re supposed to show that they believe in every student, even if the authority figures tries to suppress that, the student will actually perform better or worse.

Better is the Pygmalion effect, the golem effect is the opposite. If I hire an employee and after the first week I start thinking, “Oh, man. What a dufus. I completely screwed up hiring this guy.” You can actually take an A performer and magically turn them into a B performer or worse. What I realized over half a decade now of teaching this stuff almost, is the same thing is happening with ourselves, that the highest authority figure to each and every one of us is our ego.

If people walk around telling themselves, and I’ve observed this in myself. If I told you Matt that I always use the memory techniques that we teach, I would be lying. Because probably five times out of 10, I don’t even use them. If it’s not a significant memory challenge, such as memorizing a 16-digit number, I’ll just say a credit card number and I’ll remember it.

Now what I realized is that something along the lines of what Harry Lorayne told me which is, even if these techniques don’t work for you, they’ll still work for you. What I realized is that just by believing that I have an exceptional and extraordinary memory by trusting my memory, I’ve flipped from the Pygmalion effect to the golem effect. My ego’s incentive, my mind’s incentive is always to prove me right.

If I’m telling myself I have a lousy memory, I’m really bad with names, or I don’t know – I hear so many of these. I get e-mails every single day, Matt. I’m a horrible language learner. I have this undiagnosed learning disability. I have always been told that I am not good at math. Those things become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I think one of the greatest side effects, if you will, of any program, whether it’s ours, whether it’s my friend Anthony Metivier, whether it’s Tony Buzan’s, any training program is people start to believe, “I have this tool in my pocket. I’m actually incredibly bright and I’m actually incredibly gifted with my memory and I actually can do this and I can remember this phone number.” People see just a dramatic switch, a really, really dramatic switch solely by believing in themselves.

I know it sounds so touchy-feely, but like I said the research backs it up and I tend to believe if a manager can influence your results, just imagine how much your own self-talk and walking around telling people, “Oh, my God. I’m such a klutz. I’m so forgetful. I have the worst memory.” Just imagine the effect that that has on you.

[0:25:37.7] MB: One of the things we talk about on the show is the importance of mental models, building a toolkit of mental models so that you can better understand reality and achieve your goals. That’s why I’m excited to tell you about our sponsor this week, brilliant.org.

Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. You can learn the concepts by solving fascinating and challenging problems. Brilliant explores everything from probability to computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more.

You can master these skills in exciting and interactive experiences enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. As Charlie Munger, one of my personal heroes said, “The models that come from the hard sciences and engineering are the most reliable models on this earth.”

Brilliant is a great place to build your stem skills and really start mastering the fundamentals of a hard sciences, which are the cornerstones of any toolkit of mental models. Right now, brilliant.org is offering our listeners 20% off of their annual premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Succes listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Sign up today and get started on building a powerful toolkit of mental models for yourself.

Back to the show.

[0:27:07.1] MB: Let’s get into some of the specifics of how the brain is supposed to work from a memory standpoint. I know one of the things you’ve talked a bit about the picture superiority effect. I don’t know if t hat’s a piece of it, or if that’s one of the cornerstones. I’d love to hear your thoughts about that specifically, and more broadly how our brains should be learning and how we can start to learn and memorize in a way that speaks the evolutionary language of the brain.

[0:27:32.4] JL: Yes, absolutely. I will preface this by saying I’m not a neuroscientist and I don’t even pass as one on the internet. What I have been able to do is take a lot of neuroscience and a lot of research both from the soft sciences; so from psychology and stuff like that and from the hard sciences, understanding the small amounts of neuroscience that I do putt into my courses and synthesize those.

The truth is I have to say that they’re all sync up and meshed u perfectly together. We know a lot of different things about the brain, despite the fact that we know less about our brains than we do the bottom of the ocean floor. We know actually quite a bit about them. One of the things that we do know is that our brains are built in clusters, in networks. A lot of people are hearing the terms neural networks thrown around.

Many people in fact who are software developers may not even realize that that is a real thing outside of computer science. Neural networks refer to the clusters of neurons in our brains. Now our neurons are basically electrically excitable cells. We have, if I’m not mistaken, a 100 billion of them. There are more neurons in your brain than there are stars in the known universe, which is a really, really amazing thing if you think about it.

The human brain is far and away the most complex object known, which I just think is so cool. It will probably be another 100 years before we’re able to design something as complex and sophisticated as the human brain and yet, it runs on 20 watts of power.

Little aside on how amazing our brains our, these neurons are connected by synapses, which are just think of them as little electrically connective pathways. The way that they’re setup and built is essentially in clusters. The brain is highly plastic. It’s always building new connections. Every time we go to bed, it’s building connections, it’s removing connections.

You can think of your knowledge as organized in these clusters, these chunks, which are called neural networks. The way that we enhance our memory is really three-fold. I like to think of it as three-fold, and then I’ll put it into context a little bit, as far as some of the research goes and what some of the theorists on adult andragogy or learning have said.

The first thing is as you said, picture superiority effect. The way that our brains work really interesting, our strongest and most memorable scent is actually smell and taste, which are effectively the same sense. That’s because smell and scent are way older than any of our other senses. In fact, they’re hardwired directly into the brain. I believe it’s the thalamus. Again, don’t quote me on it.

That’s why if someone passes out and you put smelling salts under their nose, they will wake up, because smell is very, very deeply rooted. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us for a lot of our learning challenges. Our second most memorable sense, which makes sense from a very evolutionary perspective is sight.

What’s going to be your most powerful evolutionary advantage, it’s probably going to be smell and taste, because so many of our ancestors died from food poisoning and bacteria and poisonous foods and poisonous spiders and God knows what. The next thing is going to be visual. How do the berries looked that poisoned the tribe? What are the colors of the enemy that I need to be aware of? Of course, location which is so closely related to visualization. Where is the watering hole? Where did I bury the food?

Both visual memory, as you said the picture superiority effect and location are deeply ingrained in us. If anyone doesn’t believe me, I challenge you to think back to your childhood home, whether or not you have been there in the last 20 or 30 years and just imagine yourself going into your parents’ bedroom, which is probably a room that you weren’t allowed into very often.

Then go to your mother side of the bed and ask yourself whether or not there was a nightstand. If so, what was on that nightstand? I’ve asked this question probably to a thousand people over the years. Every single time, even with people who tell they’re not visual learners, even with people who tell me they have lousy memories, every single time people have told me exactly what was on that nightstand, or that there wasn’t a nightstand, and in fact the dog’s bed was there. Really interesting. That’s principle one.

Principle number two, which again ties in very, very deeply with the adult andragogy theory is connecting all of our knowledge to preexisting knowledge. As I said, our brains are built on these connections and there is something called Hebb’s Law, which says that neurons that fire together, wire together. Meaning, the more connected a memory is to other memories, the stronger those connections will be and the more easy it is going to be fire that neuron when we need it.

Everything that we learn should be connected to other pieces of knowledge that we have. Malcolm Knowles as I said, suggested this. I mean, essentially he was working for three decades on his theories of adult andragogy, then 1980 finally published his four principles. One of which was that experience, including mistakes must provide the basis for learning activities.

In other words, she found that experience and connecting to preexisting knowledge is so much more relevant for adults than it is for children. Which makes perfect sense if you think that adults have so much more experience and children are able to learn just because of the novelty and newness of things that wears off for adults.

Then I would say, yeah the third thing is exactly that, is even as adults we could take advantage of novelty and newness. Our brains thrive on novelty. They’re always sensing patterns. In fact, as I said, they are the most sophisticated super computers in the known universe and their specialization, what they can do that even the most powerful super computers cannot do is pattern recognition; things like recognizing exactly what is in an image.

The reason that we all do so many captures every day is because if a piece of text is even slightly outside of what the computer expects to see, they can’t do it. Yet, a two-year-old child who spent a week memorizing the alphabet can do it. Novelty is really, really powerful for our brains. They are pattern-sensing machines. If anything falls outside of the pattern, they pay very special attention to it.

Coming back to lesson number one, we always want to be thinking a very novel and creative imagery. Then I would say as a bonus is learning how to put things into space, so learning how to use the memory palace technique and then combining all of the above. The beauty of the memory palace technique is you’re taking imagery, which is you’re putting images at what we call markers in the course, into an imagine the visual locations such as your childhood home, or your office, or whatever it might be.

You were then connecting it to that preexisting knowledge, because it is a location that you know, and they are images comprised of elements from your memory. Then you’re making things incredibly novel and unique. You’re making strange visualizations that make no sense logically, but are therefore highly memorable.

That in a sense is the way that you really take off all the boxes. You learn to structure your memories, you learn to build out deliberate neural networks, you learn obviously on top of that to do reviewing and space repetition in the right ways. It sounds so simple, but you’d be amazed that the results that you can get simply by taking advantage of these and by restructuring the way that you learn and memorize new information.

[0:35:28.9] MB: Many different pieces of that that I want to dig into. Tell me a little bit more about how do we encode our new knowledge onto preexisting knowledge?

[0:35:41.6] JL: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, why don’t we take something that we want to learn and let’s play around with it. Toss me something that I could memorize, maybe we could do a foreign language word if you want. We could do any fact. We could do numbers, figures. I guess, I could give you some foreign language words that I’ve learned over the years and we could play around with that.

[0:36:02.1] MB: Yeah. I’m down for whatever. However you want to do it.

[0:36:04.5] JL: Yeah, cool. I’ll never forget. This is one of my favorite learning stories, because I – I learned basic conversational Russian over the last couple of years. Russian is a very, very hard language, so I feel like as any foreigner, you always have to qualify. I didn’t Russian – I learned very basic Russian. I speak like a two-year-old. In any case, one of my favorite words in Russian is otkrytyy, which means open.

I like that example, because it literally sounds nothing like open. Like otkrytyy. Totally strange word. The way that I would teach a student to learn a word like that is to break it down into component elements until it’s recognizable, right? Ot and maybe krytyy. Now the beauty of using this method is if we need to use preexisting knowledge, it therefore would mean that the more preexisting knowledge we have, the easier it’s going to be to learn something.

For example, when I give this lecture in Israel and I talk about otkrytyy, it’s actually easier for people in the audience to learn, because ot in Hebrew means letter, letter as in alphabet letter. Krytyy is actually the way that you would say critical. I ask people to imagine a critical letter, the most critical letter in the alphabet and then imagine the fact that it’s opening up to give them a hug.

Now if you’re an English speaker, you can still do this. Let’s imagine we want to go with obviously very vivid, maybe even violent imagery, because it’s going to be more memorable. I want you to imagine a situation in which you’ve been, heaven forbid, stabbed. You’re holding your gut and you run up to the emergency room, and you think to yourself that it really should be open, it ought to be open, because I’m in a critical situation. You have the ot and krytyy.

Then you realize, “Thank God, it is open.” The emergency room is always open, so now you’ve encoded that meaning to maybe some preexisting image, or concept, or idea that you have about an emergency room. If you really wanted to supercharge it, you would think of maybe a specific movie or situation in which someone was stabbed. You might even think of Julius Caesar doing it, because that’s going to connect with all different ideas and knowledge that you have about stabbings and betrayal. It’s literally as easy as that. As taking a visualization that you might already have for something that seems unrelated, right? What is a stabbing have to do with the Russian word for open?

I guess, what I would stress to people is that the actual connection themselves don’t make really any difference whatsoever, so much as that you make them. You make these strange logical jumps, but just the fact that you make them is really what gets the job done. I recently built a memory palace, because I’m studying piano and music theory as well.

I needed to come up with a memory palace to have this circle of fists. I come up with the most ridiculous visualizations. For some reason, an A – the A chord for me is army guys. B is a bass strap, because it happens to be in my recording studio. It doesn’t matter. As long as I remember that a bass strap is B. I remember – I can’t say some of them, because they’re pretty indecent, but let’s see. An A sharp is only sharp, so it’s where I stand with my computer and I check the videos in the room.

Really any connection works. It doesn’t even matter. G sharp is a G-shock watch in the closet of the room. It’s just a matter of making these logical connections and connecting. I remember when I was 13 years old, these G-shock watches were considered really, really sharp and everybody wanted one. That’s when I think of a G sharp, I just get a G-shock. It’s much more memorable to remember that than trying to remember the letters G and hashtag, or pound in the corner of the room. It’s so much easier or visualize something that I already know what it looks like.

[0:40:15.8] MB: Do memory palaces get crowded? If you’re using the same image, or the same space again and again, do those memories start to get jumbled and bleed together? Especially one of the examples I’ve seen, you start doing some memory homework on my own is using the same image for numbers. After a while, I feel like it would start to get – it start to sort of bleed together and become really, really hard to inherently recall any of those memories.

[0:40:43.7] JL: That is precisely right, Matt. I always say that these techniques are a victim of their own success, in the sense that I’ve created memory palaces and then years and years and years and years later, I still remember the order. It literally works that effectively. I’ve made a mistake in the past. I was coaching my girlfriend on a Ted Talk that she had to give.

I said, “Okay, well why don’t we do it in a place that we both know.” I wasted effectively one of the best memory palaces I could use, which was a new apartment that I not so long ago moved into. Now it’s her Ted Talk and I can’t reuse it. I mean, I could if I really wanted to do the spring cleaning. I know a lot of memory athletes, in fact most of them do reuse memory palaces. That’s typically for things that they go through once in a competition.

When someone’s memorizing 24 decks of cards back-to-back, they’re using a predetermined memory palace. Or when they’re doing speed cards where they try to memorize a deck of cards and the current world record is 24 seconds, you don’t have time to build a new memory palace on the fly. They use the same one over and over.

It’s not something that they’re reviewing. Whereas, when I’m memorizing a speech, or memorizing words in the rest in vocabulary, or the circle of fist, I’m reusing that memory palace over and over and over to get to really, really, really ingrained in. Fortunately, memory palaces are free. You can create as many as you want, whenever you want. It’s very easy and you’ll effectively never run out of places.

Every shop you’ve ever gone into you can use as a memory palace, and you’ll find that so many places if I think about it there are 10 different grocery stores that I go to in my neighborhood depending on what I want to buy that day and I know the layout of all those grocery stores automatically. Most people in the audience do too.

I remember so many classrooms from my childhood, I remember all of my aunts and uncles and their houses. If not, when in doubt, I’ve met many memory champion who will just window shop. You need a new memory palace, you go in to a clothing store, you say, “Yeah, this place looks big enough.” You walk in. “Can I help you with anything?” “No, just browsing.” You just walk around and create a memory palace.

It’s really all it takes. You really don’t need more than that. In fact, people ask, “Well, what if I get it wrong? What if I forget?” It actually doesn’t matter. As long as you get it wrong consistently every single time. You can use completely fictional areas. You can use the levels of your favorite games if you have them memorized. You can use streets, cities. You can use completely fictional structures. The main point is that you always consistently remember the exact same layout and order of things.

[0:43:38.2] MB: This is going to get into the weeds, but I’m curious like how many things will you typically put into a given room of a memory palace and how do you ensure that you pull them out of that room in the right order?

[0:43:52.9] JL: It completely depends. Sometimes, I’ve coached chess prodigies who need to memories hundreds of things in a room and we’ve worked on creating structures that allow that kind of density. I’ve done simple memory palaces, like I said for a 10-minute Ted Talk, where I want to structure the information in such a way that each idea is in a room. It may end up that I have three sentences on a specific idea.

Again, you create completely artificial logic. The part where I talk about the person getting sick, well that goes in the bedroom logically. Or the part where I talk about the years of hard work I did, that goes in the office. As far as order, there is a method to the madness when you go through a memory palace. If it is something like a speech that needs to be done in order, you go along the outside walls of a room. You can do it clockwise or counter-clockwise. Personally, I like to go clockwise. But I know when I’m working with people in Israel because of the way that Hebrew is written, they like to go counter-clockwise, right to left.

A lot of scenarios by the way, if you’re memorizing vocabulary doesn’t really matter. Sometimes I’ll structure by letter. K is kitchen, O is office, B is bathroom, so on and so forth. What I’ve realized, actually a student of mine pointed it out to me is that doesn’t really help me, because there are a very few situations in which I’m searching for a B word, unless you’re writing poetry. He pointed out to me and I love it when students improve the methods and pass it back to me.

He goes, “It’s more often that you’re going to be searching for a verb, or you’re going to be searching for a specific adjective.” I mean, even in English when you’re talking, you have something right on the tip of your tongue you’re like, “What is that? What is that adjective that I need right now?” He said, “Why don’t you set it up that the entire first floor of the house is nouns, the second floor of the house is adjectives, third floor is verbs and so on.”

Since he said that, I’ve realized that that is a much better way to structure your memory palace. It actually doesn’t matter the order of things and where you put them. You just go based on the logic,  right? If you have an entire floor which has the dining room, the TV room and the kitchen all in one floor, then the verb for to saute goes on the stove. The verb to cook goes to the right of the stove where the oven is. The verb for to wash goes in the sink.

Then you’re again connecting that preexisting knowledge, creating more encoded connections, because you know that that’s where you wash. Just the fact, even if I forget the actual word, I just go and I visit the sink and I go, “Okay, why the hell do I have a care bear rubbing a grasshopper on his face? Okay. Right, right, right. To wash is so and so.” Does that make sense?

[0:46:52.9] MB: That does make sense. I think the other key point that I want to underscore or understand a little bit better is how you – when you say you put a verb on these – the stove top for example, what is that verb? Like when you go and look at the stove top, what are you actually seeing?

[0:47:08.9] JL: Yeah. That was an example I just pulled out of nowhere. Why don’t we actually do it? I’m going everyone a word in Hebrew. To cook in Hebrew, every infinitive word starts with la, like in English you would say to. To cook, le veshel. La or le. I guess, in English, you would spell it L-E-V-E-S-H-E-L, le veshel.

The le, you probably don’t have to encode, but we could encode it anyway. Most likely if you’re studying  the language, you would just know that that is the infinitive form. What I would do if I were relearning Hebrew is I would actually take the root. All semitic languages, again a little bit of a detour out into the weeds, but all semitic languages, like Arabic, Turkish, I believe Amharic, Farsi have this root, where if I know these three letters I can form any word around it. I can form any form of the word.

For example, cooking, like culinary cooking is bishul. I cooked, beshalti, veshalti. What else? Cook this, te vashel edze. You know based on the B, or V, the BVs, which is I chose a tough example, but based on those letters I can form anything. What I might want to do is just form a visual marker, getting back to your questions, around B-E-S-H-E-L. Are you with me so far?


[0:48:40.4] MB: Yeah, definitely. I’m trying to think about in my head, like what a visual marker would be. Maybe I’m thinking a shell of some kind, maybe wearing a lei so I could get the le part.

[0:48:52.6] JL: Perfect. Perfect. I want you to think, that’s exactly what I needed because I want to use your imagery, not my own. A lot of people ask me they’re like, “Why don’t you sell a library of images that you have an animator come up with for each language. A lot of our students want to learn biology or whatever.” I say, “It’s not going to work, because I need your imagery.” I love the idea of a lay. Let’s imagine, you go to the stove and you’re wearing a lei.

Then what you do is you actually lay down on the stove a shrimp, because you’re about to cook it. The thing is you realize that this is the best shrimp you’ve ever seen, because the shell is so bright red. Or we could even make it a lobster. Le beshel, in this case it would actually be le veshel, because the word has to change. There is a weird grammatical rule, but we’re going to go with it.

You could also just think of something with a ve. For examples, vest. You want to try and avoid encoding these extra characters. Le is perfect, ve how could we think of? This is why when I said actually the more languages you know, the easier this becomes. We want to think of something with a ve. For example, the lobster is writing a vespa, or he’s wearing a vest. Then shell is perfect, remembering that lobster is wearing a shell. Now you want to take that actual visualization, you want to put it right there on the stove, the actual stove that you’re thinking of.

[0:50:26.4] MB: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I’m envisioning slightly different thing, but I’m seeing like a giant seashell riding a vespa and I’m gently laying it on the stove top.

[0:50:35.9] JL: Yeah, just remember you want to encode the order –

[0:50:38.5] MB: That’s important.

[0:50:39.5] JL: - careful. Yeah, because otherwise you’re going to come back with ve lashel, or something like that. Ve shela. That’ a very tough word specifically. I like it when – this is always why I tell people, the more languages you learn, the easier this gets, because you have a larger library of sounds. I can’t think of anything in English that works with just ve. Let’s see, ve, ve, ve. Whereas, in Hebrew, ve it means aunt. Super easy, right?

[0:51:07.5] MB: Yeah, I was thinking maybe like a ve or like victory or something.

[0:51:11.1] JL: Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s perfect.

[0:51:14.0] MB: I think this is a good example of a visual marker and how to create one.

[0:51:17.4] JL: Exactly. Exactly. For anyone on the audience who’s wondering like, “Oh, my God. This is impossible. How is this not so much slower?” Once you’re practiced at it and a lot of what we do is actually creativity training, because a lot of these takes retooling the way you think creatively. To the point where when someone introduces himself, or herself and says, “My name is Sangita,” you immediately go to this woman sitting in a gi, which is a karate uniform in the sun and remarking, “ah.” That’s one that I just came up with. Now so you immediately get to this place very, very quickly, Sangita.

[0:51:56.9] MB: That’s a great example. There’s so much more I want to dig into about memory palaces, but I know we’re winding up on time. I want to dig in a little bit on speed reading as well, because I know that’s another area that you’re an expert in. Personally, I’m really curious, because I’ve always considered myself an auditory learner.

My fear is if I completely move away from sub-vocalization, that is going to reduce my comprehension. I think more broadly, a lot of people have that fear of if they’re going to get into speed reading, it’s going to really negatively impact comprehension and retention. I’m curious as somebody who teaches this and is an expert in it, what’s your experience been and how have you been able to in some cases, actually improve retention with speed reading.

[0:52:41.3] JL: Yeah. This is a really, really great question and one that I’ve dug into very recently for a YouTube series that we’re doing on just exactly this question, like how does speed reading work and is it actually a hoax?

What I realized is we were in a lot of ways feeding into a lot of misconceptions, because when people hear the term speed reading, they’re thinking about these Howard Berg 12,000 word a minute, or Ann Jones, 5,000 word a minute guarantees. As I dug into the research, I mean we don’t make those kinds of claims. But as I dug into the research I realized that that’s what people specifically academics think of when they think of speed reading. Most of that is bullshit. In fact, the vast majority and Jones has been tested with 5,000 words per minute.

Howard Berg claims to read 12,000 words a minute. He also went to prison for false advertising. There’s a lot of controversy around speed reading, and so I want to very clearly out front explain to people the kind of speed reading I’m about to talk about is not 5,000 words a minute, it’s not even 2,000 words a minute. It’s 600 to 800 words a minute.

Interestingly enough when you look into the academic papers and the research that are supposedly disproving speed reading, they in around about indirect and intentional way prove speed reading, because they say in our test we were only able to confirm people reading between 600 and 800 words a minute and so on and so forth.

Really interesting and we have a video coming out on our YouTube, where I analyze the most prominent paper disproving speed reading by Keith Rayner, Elizabeth Schotter, Michael Masson and so on. In any case, essentially the core claim, the core technique behind speed reading is the same no matter who you talk to, whether it’s us or the guys claiming 5,000 words a minute.

When you get up into the really fast speeds, people are claiming things like photo reading and reading an entire page at once and that’s all BS. The reasonable claims are very simple. It’s training your eyes to recognize even the stuff that’s slightly fuzzy outside of what’s called the fovea, the exact area where eyes focus. Training the brain to recognize a couple words at once even if they’re a little blurry, or even a few words, minimizing the motion of the eyes and minimizing the amount of focus that you have on the edges of the pages.

Then of course, minimizing back-skipping and most importantly the thing that everyone agrees on is minimizing sub-vocalization, or that voice that we hear in our heads. Now you said something very, very interesting Matt, which I want to touch on. It’s this idea that I worry if I completely get rid of sub-vocalization that I won’t be able to comprehend and you’re absolutely right.

We realize that our trainings were not completely clear, because we were telling people reduce sub-vocalization, reduce – when in fact, the word we should’ve been using was minimize. Minimize, but not eliminate. You cannot eliminate sub-vocalization. It’s just the way that our brains work. Because reading is a linguistic activity, you’re always going to hear some of the words in the mind’s voice.

The trick of speed reading is to try and minimize that as much as possible, because it does slow you down. We can process verbal information, auditory information at about a maximum of 340 words a minute. Some people, 400 words per minute. If you want to test this out, go on YouTube, or better yet go on something like overcast, which allows you to actually take audio beyond 2X. YouTube has realized this and so they only allow you to go to 2X.

The average person speaks at about a 140, 150 words a minute. The mass checks out. If you try to go to 3X, you’ll quickly realize that you can’t differentiate the words. Whereas, with speed reading you start at 450 words a minute, and as I said the research indirectly proves that a lot of speed readers are able to get 600, 700 and even 800 words per minute with very high comprehension. The way that you do that is in fact, minimizing, but not reducing sub-vocalization to an absolute zero.

[0:56:58.6] MB: What about for somebody’s who’s primarily an auditory learner, is that going to have a more negative impact on their sub-vocalization?

[0:57:05.6] JL: I reject the idea of someone being an auditory learner, similar to the way that I reject someone as just being inherently weak. If you take someone who’s inherently weak and you put them in a weight room and you train them on how to properly do squats and how to properly do dead lifts, they will quickly become strong.

I think the same is true of the various ways that we learn. I think many people, not to throw you under a bus here, Matt, but I think many people who claim to be auditory learners are auditory learners because they were taught in an auditory fashion. They spent most of their childhood listening to someone lecture.

Generally, when I sit down with someone like that and I teach them visual learning strategies, it’s night and day for them. With that said, I don’t completely shun auditory learning. I think it has a very valuable place for us, especially given how much we all spend in our cars and on our bikes and walking our dogs. I think it’s great to listen to audio books.

Even in the case where you are doing auditory learning, I always encourage my students to be setting markers to be doing the visual work. As you’re listening to that podcast, if there are things that you want to remember, if there are book titles that you want to note for later, create a memory palace as you’re going. Gary Vaynerchuck starts talking about one of this favorite books, create a marker for Cloud C. Hopkins. How are you going to remember that? Then put it right on the tree next to where your dog did its business, so that you’re going to remember it later, because otherwise a lot of that stuff, even for self-proclaimed auditory learners is going to go in one ear and out the other.

I think the same is true by the way when we read a book in a normal fashion. When we all just sit there and read a book, how much do we actually remember, even if we’re reading it slowly at 200, 200 words a minute, how much do you actually, actually remember three months later? Whereas, my students will flip back through that same book and go, “Oh, yeah. This is the part where Benjamin Franklin took that wheel barrel. Right. Yeah, he did say that he did—”

They will actually have archival knowledge based on the images that they’ve created and the visual linkages and the encoding of the knowledge that they’ve done. I think that’s 70% to 80% of the benefit of our program is teaching people how to use their memories properly in any situation. Whether it’s you meet five people at a conference all at once, everyone shakes hands. Four out of those five people, besides the person who’s been trained immediately forget the names. That’s one situation.

Remembering a phone number that you need when you don’t have a pen and paper, that’s another situation. Whatever it may be, I think the crucks of the method and the real value is maybe not so much even in the speed reading, so much is the ability to actually retain the information that you profess to learn.

[0:59:55.3] MB: Just focusing on our creating these visual memory anchors while you’re reading, does that slow down your reading speed?

[1:00:04.4] JL: Yes and no. We advise people to create these markers during pauses, after paragraphs, while flipping pages, in between chapters and things like that, because for most people it’s not something that you can do at once. You can’t be using the visualizations such as the brain to read and do that visualization at the same time.

With that said, I have experienced and many other people who’ve taken the course and we don’t make this guarantee, because it’s inconsistent as to when it shows up for people. After maybe six to eight months of practicing this stuff myself, the visualizations usually just come up in my mind automatically. Then it happens as I’m going from one line to the next, then I start to formulate these images as I go along. In that case, it doesn’t really slow you down.

What does slow you down is you do need to review back. We do tell people, as soon as you finish a chapter, or an idea, close the book, hold your finger where it is. If it’s a kindle, you just put it down. Review back and flip back, and that’s something that’s called spaced repetition. Then do it again when you get to the end of the next chapter. What are the last three chapters that I read? You need to be doing that review process. That does slow you down.

We also advise people to do something called pre-reading, which is where you flip through the chapter and start assessing what are going to be the different things that are going to be talked about at about eight times the speed you would normally read, but just to get an oversight and to prepare your brain for the things that you’re going to be learning. What are some of the key words? What are some of the questions that they’re going to be asking or answering? What are things that I want to look out for? What are things that raise my interest that I’m unclear on? Why is this appearing in the text? All those things do slow you down, but on average you’re still going to find that you’re reading significantly faster. They also serve to improve your focus, so you’re not back-skipping nearly as much.

[1:01:54.9] MB: Do you have any recommendation, or tactic about reading paper books versus kindles or digital reading? Is there one that’s better than the other?

[1:02:05.2] JL: Yeah. Well, let’s see I like the Kindle for a couple different reasons. Number one is I can adjust the size of the text, which is important. If you’re speed reading, you want to be able to get the text to exactly the size where two to three [inaudible 1:02:16.9], or two to three fixations are going to be fixations are going to be the right size for you.

I also think, I love the little x-ray preview feature, because I can preview it very quickly. I just tap on the pages and then I hit the X button and I’m back on the actual page itself. Then the other thing that I think is really, really, really valuable that you’re not going to get unless you’re reading digitally is I highlight. Then what I do is I highlight key areas, key points and then I just go to, I think it’s read.amazon.com/myhighlights. I just review.

Instead of actually flipping through the book and searching for my highlights, I just scroll through them. Every time I finish a book, I go through the last few books that I’ve read. Once a year, I’ll get nostalgic usually towards the end of the year and I’ll flip through all the books that I read the previous year and I’ll review. My knowledge of the books that I read, even though I read an absurd amount, like any given year I might read 20 to 40 books. My knowledge of those books versus someone else who reads at that quantity is pretty remarkably high.

If you were to quiz me on a lot of these books, I think I would do pretty well. That’s because I actually take the time to review the books, and that’s so much easier when you have them all on one webpage stored on Amazon, that all I have to do is flip through them.

[1:03:36.7] MB: What would one piece of homework be that you’d give to somebody listening who wants to maybe take an action step, or a first step towards implementing some of the strategies we’ve talked about today?

[1:03:47.2] JL: I love that you ask that question, Matt. First action step, I think is just to make the world a little bit of a better place by making some connections with real humans. It’s nice to be able to memorize all the capitals of all the countries in the world. I think what the world needs is to people to look one another in the eyes and smile and relate to other human beings just a little bit more.

The homework that I would give is to just go out today and learn the names of 10 completely random strangers. They can be the bad boy at your supermarket. They can be the person who clears your table at the restaurant. Look 10 other human beings in the eyes and smile at them and say, “Hi, I’m so and so. What’s your name?”

Then memorize those names using the techniques. Imagine Mike holding a microphone. Imagine Robert with – dressed up like Robert E. Lee. Imagine Mark dressed up as Mark Twain and see if you can remember those people’s names.

[1:04:44.8] MB: For listeners who want to dig in, learn more, find you, your books, your course etc., online, what’s the best place to do that?

[1:04:51.2] JL: Yeah. I’ll give you a couple different options here. For people who want to try out the course, we offer a completely free trial with no credit card required. People I think can take the entire first two sessions of the course. They can test their memory and reading speed and everything. They can do that if they come at superlearner.com.

For folks who want more super human optimization around nutrition and memory and productivity and lifestyle, they can go to superhuman.blog, where we put out a weekly free podcast with some of the world’s top performers, similar to yourself Matt.

[1:05:29.0] MB: Well, Jonathan thank you so much for coming on the show sharing all of these wisdom, so many practical strategies and tips. I really think that both for speed reading and this enhanced learning memory techniques etc., in many ways a meta skill that if you master that –

[1:05:45.6] JL: 100%.

[1:05:46.2] MB: It’s like a domino that makes everything easier. Makes everything more effective. It’s something I definitely personally need to step my game up on. I’m really glad that we had this conversation. In fact, I really got a lot out of it. Thank you so much.

[1:05:56.9] JL: It was an absolute pleasure. You know what, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m often quoting as saying learning is the only skill that truly matters. I believe it. I went from completely dissatisfied with who I was academically, socially and professionally to just through learning, whether it’s learning leadership skills, academic skills, business skills, financial skills, even athletic skills and picking up new hobbies. I literally was able to become someone that I’m very proud of to look in the mirror and the only difference was that I learned how to learn more effectively.

[1:06:34.7] MB: Jonathan, thanks again. Really appreciate having you on the show.

[1:06:37.5] JL: My pleasure. Take care.

[1:06:39.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com. Just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Why Your Brain Struggles To Understand Money with Jeff Kreisler

In this episode we discuss how money messes with your brain. We look into the obvious traps we fall into when we think about money, examine how cultural influences shape our financial choices, and explore the key biases that underpin the most common and dangerous financial mistakes that you are most likely to make with our guest Jeff Kreisler.

Jeff Kreisler is a bestselling author and the winner of the Bill Hicks Spirit Award for Thought Provoking Comedy. He is most recently the co-author of the new book Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How To Spend Smarter with Dan Ariely. (who we have previously had on the show as well?) Jeff is a regular contributor for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and more!

• Get rich cheating??? What’s that all about?

• The common tropes within the self help industry (and how many of them are not based in evidence)

• The power of satire to explore the underpinnings of human behavior

• What is money?

• Why do we have such a hard time thinking about money?

• Awareness of your biases is a huge difference maker (even if you do nothing other than just being aware of your biases)

• Spending is very obvious in our culture, but saving is not

• Research shows men are more willing to admit they take viagra, than how much money they've saved in their 401ks

• We dig deep into several of the mental biases that stop you from understanding money

• The relativity bias and how that impacts spending habits

• ‘What do you want for dinner” vs “would you rather have chicken or fish for dinner”

• One of the most obvious traps that we fall into with money

• “The Pain of Paying” Bias and how it impacts what we think about money

• “The credit card premium” and how using a credit card makes you pay more

• Anchoring bias and arbitrary coherence.

• How your social security number could impact how much you pay for a bottle of wine

• We often obsess about small financial decisions, but make judgements on a whim with large financial decisions like buying a home or car

• Self control is really hard

• “Ulysseses contracts," reward substitution and how to create self control

• How self awareness is the cornerstone of making better financial decisions

• The locksmith example and how we misunderstand value and fairness

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This week's Mindset Monday is brought to you by a product we've been personally using and are LOVING - Ample K!

Have you been looking to take your diet to the next level using superfoods and science backed research? Have you ever wanted to learn more about Ketosis? Perhaps you've tried the "Keto" diet but find it impossible to eat the same foods each day and are looking for something quick, tasty, and easy?

Then Ample K is for you!

Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficient healthy fats in a powdered, mix-on-the-go format! Their formula includes 10x more probiotics than a serving of yogurt and over four types of fiber to promote a healthy gut! If you're a long time fan of the show you know how important gut health is for mental health as well!

For a limited time Ample is offering our listeners 15% off their first order of Ample! That's an incredible value and it's only for Science of Success listeners! Just go to https://www.amplemeal.com/pages/ample-k and use the promo code "SUCCESS15" at checkout to claim your 15% off discount on your first order. 

We use it, we love it, you will too.

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners TWO MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for two months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of two whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler

• [Book] Get Rich Cheating: The Crooked Path to Easy Street by Jeff Kreisler

• [TEDTalk] TEDxEastSalon- Jeff Kreisler: Get Rich Cheating

• [BluRay] Magnolia

• [Personal Site] jeffkreisler.com

• [Twitter] Jeff Kreisler

• [Twitter] JK Behavioral Sci

• [Website] People Science

• [SoS Episode] How a Judge Literally Rolling Dice Could Get You Double The Jail Time - The Anchoring Effect

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss how money messes with your head. We look into the obvious trap you fall into when we think about money, examine how cultural influences shape our financial choices, and explore the key biases that underpin the most common and dangerous financial mistakes that you are most likely to make in your life, with our guest Jeff Kreisler.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today, by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There is some amazing stuff that’s only available to our e-mail subscribers, so be sure to sign up and join the e-mail list. Number one, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. Our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free, along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the e-mail list today.

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been loving this e-mail; it’s short, simple, filled with actionable videos, articles and things that we found enjoyable within the last week.

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, change our intro music, even submit your own questions to our guests and much more when you join the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. Or if you’re on the go, if you’re driving around and you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. That’s “smarter" to 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to build a rock star brain. We went into the neuro-chemical compositions that create moods from happiness to depression. We looked at how you can change the building blocks of those neuro-chemicals by changing your diet and your daily habits.

In a world where people are more stressed than ever, sleeping less and trying to do more, we look at the causes of brain drain and what we can do to have physically happier brains with Dr. Michael Dow. If you want to think with crystal clarity, listen to that episode.

[0:02:28.1] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Jeff Kreisler. Jeff is the bestselling author and winner of the Bill Hicks Spirit Award for Thought Provoking Comedy. He is most recently the co-author of a new book Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter with Dan Ariely, who was a previous guest on the show. Jeff is a regular contributor to CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and much more. Jeff, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:54.1] JK: Thank you for having me.

[0:02:55.6] MB: Well, we’re excited to have you on here today. To get started, I love to talk a little bit about a previous book that you wrote and there is a Ted Talk around this as well, just called Get Rich Cheating. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to give that talk and what underpins that.

[0:03:13.2] JK: Sure. I can give you the short-ish version, which is that I was spent many years doing political comedy. One of the things that drove me into that was pointing out the hypocrisies that’s obvious in politics. Through that, I ended up getting up to and to work for Jim Cramer’s thestreet.com writing a humor column about finance.

Then through that, I got an opportunity to pitch a book idea to a publisher and I pitch this idea of get rich cheating. It was basically looking at these get rich quick books. Typically it’s how to flip real estate is almost all of what their suggestions are. Looking to that, combined with this study of hypocrisy, I guess you could say I had both in the world of finance and politics and sports and people showing up their pre-package advice, all of which sort of had the same theme.

It felt like it was a great way to use a vehicle of satire to make a commentary about our obsession with money and really what our system of gaining money was really about. Whether it was the restriction in this real mobility that we talked about, or just the fact that we became so obsessed with getting money and getting rich that we often could justify cutting corners and being unethical.

The book became a combination of really digging to the research of the Enron’s and Bernie Madoffs and the steroid scandal, and even the lesser known things. I mean, I’m sure many of your listeners remember world com. There were plenty of smaller scandals where people got rich, but didn’t get in trouble. Or the trouble they got in was a small fine. One of the over-arching themes of the book, which is what then fed this lecture and talk and show was everyone’s doing it, no one is getting caught, why not?

It was a cost-benefit analysis. There’s no cost. One guy get caught, Bernie Madoff, no one else got in trouble. The benefits are gigantic. This message resonated in a weird way. Like I spoke at business school sometimes doing a satirical thing and I wouldn’t say it was a joke. It was obviously funny, but just interesting ideas and people would say, “Yeah, that makes sense.” Because it eliminated the idea of ethics. Obviously, ethics and morality are important for society function. If you’re strictly an economic actor, just cost-benefit, you’ll latch onto it.

I went a little far from the question being, like how was it inspired? It was inspired as a unique vehicle to expose some of the hypocrisies and challenges in our system. It was a lot of fun to do. I did it. Theaters and business schools and comedy clubs and all over the place.

[0:05:51.4] MB: Well, we’re definitely going to include your Ted Talk in the show notes so the listeners can get a taste of that. I just found it really fascinating, because the show – The Science of Success is all about evidence-based growth, and we really try to focus on science, the data, the evidence. I found your speech to be a really great amalgamation of a lot of the tropes within the self-help industry that totally the opposite of evidence-based. People hawking their own personal systems and these kinds of things. I just through it was a great expose in many ways of a lot of those methods and behavior for lack of a better term.

[0:06:29.0] JK: Yeah. One thing I do when I created the show and when I took it off the book page was I looked at the Tony Robbins. I actually think Tony Robbins has some value to add, but he is a great avatar for these self-help people. Remember Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia for those that might know that relatively obscure reference.

It was just about, like as you said, it wasn’t evidence-based that I was presenting, even though I was using facts about people that did it. It was just these things that resonated with people emotionally. I think I had a whole setup, whereas like you’ve got to visualize your dreams and I would talk about getting rich and being so rich, you could afford [inaudible 0:07:03.9] egg omelets and you can bite your half.

To visualize your dream, then you confront obstacles to your dreams and it’s stuff like ethics and it’s stuff like society and your board of directors. Then you bust through those obstacles to achieve your dreams and stuff about how you cheat on your 10B5 forms, or whatever it is, or how do you take steroids, or who do you use to back you up and all the different ways that people cheated.

It was all in this very emotion-triggering format of visualizing dreams and being a real man and like, “Let’s go get it.” That is what a lot of self-help tends to be is it goes for that emotional response, not the factual one, not the intellectual one and that is what we fall into. In a way, we’ll get in this later. That’s sort of what that my latest book about money is about is about how – when you make financial decisions based upon emotion and often unconsciously based upon emotion. We’re led away from the best scientific rationale intellectual choice. Certainly when it comes to cheating and it comes to get super rich at any cost, the emotion is in there. Our eyes get big and we get excited for all the things we can do and stuff we can buy with money.

[0:08:18.4] MB: Let’s dig into that a little bit. Tell me about your book Dollars and Sense and how – let’s start really simply, how do you define money? What is money?

[0:08:27.3] JK: Sure. Money is essentially supposed to represent the value of other things. Money is a great development and despite a lot of my work criticizing sort of what money has done to us, it has allowed society to become what it is. If not, we’d be constantly bartering, constantly struggling just to survive.

Money allows us to specialize to pursue arts and sciences, to save, money is divisible, money is storeable, it’s fundable and exchangeable. It’s a wonderful thing, because money represents other stuff. Money really represents opportunity costs. Many of your listeners may have heard the concept opportunity cost. They know what it is. An opportunity costs is basically like what are the other things you could do with money besides what it is you’re about to spend on.

If you’re going to buy coffee and buying coffee is the common financial example, so I’ll just stick with that for now. Think you will spend $5 on a latte, what else could you do with the money? Now there is tons of stuff. You could save it, you could buy five lottery tickets, you could buy whatever 500 penny candies.

There’s a world of opportunities both now and in the future and that is what’s great about money. But it’s also what is the challenge about money, because that’s a lot to think about. It’s a lot to conceive of all the possible things you can do with money. It’s impossible for humans to do that. Strictly scientific economic basis, that’s what we should do is we should think about that opportunity cost.

What ends up happening is that because it is so difficult, because it’s so difficult to really evaluate all the options for this $5, we’d end up taking shortcuts. That’s okay, but oftentimes taking those shortcuts, it goes to such extreme lengths that we lose sight of even any other options.

My co-author Dan Ariely who some of your listeners may know from his book Predictably Irrational and other books. He didn’t experiment where he and some colleagues went to a Toyota dealership. They asked people at the Toyota dealership, “Hey, you’re about to spend let’s say $25,000 on a car. What else could you with that $25,000?”

They couldn’t think of anything. They just couldn’t like even get out of the idea of spending it on a car when pressed further. They said, “Well, if I don’t buy a Toyota, I could buy a Honda.” Even there, they thought of an alternative, but it was still within the same category. It was still about buying a car, when really $25,000 is five vacations for five years. It’s a quarter of a year less work in your life. It can be so many different things.

Money is about opportunity costs, which is great, but is also tremendously challenging and it’s why we have such difficulty thinking about money and evaluating what we should do and why, because of that difficulty we end up taking shortcuts that are often not the best decisions.

[0:11:19.4] MB: I feel like it’s really challenging. I mean, someone who comes out of the financial world, I used to work on Wall Street and I’m still an investor by trade. The infinite possibilities of the opportunity cost of money, how do we start to wrap our heads around that?

[0:11:37.1] JK: Well, one thing you can do and one thing  that drove us to write this book is to start being cognizant of the biases that we have, or the value queues, the shortcuts essentially that I’m talking about that we take when we can’t evaluate a financial choice. Once you’re aware of those, then we don’t want you to face every decision and then spin in your head, but you can start setting up systems to help yourself perform better.

For instance, we know that we don’t save enough money. We know that we burn through our discretionary spending at a rate that we probably shouldn’t. If you’re aware of that, then you can setup a system, one idea that we put forward that’s improving the work is if you have a separate account, like a checking account and then you have a savings account and you get some money put in your savings account, some in your checking account.

Because most of us think about how much money we have to spend based upon what’s on our checking account, what’s on that balance when we take out money from the ATM, we can trick ourselves into thinking we have less money, that even if we stop to think about we know, we have 50% of our paycheck went over to this other account. But what we see is how we decide what to spend. We can trick ourselves to end up spending less. That’s one simple suggestion.

Ultimately, the biases and value queues and shortcuts that we talk about in the book and then others talk about elsewhere, being aware of those is the first and the biggest step towards then developing a personal system, or a system within your family, or a system within your company, or even your community to make better financial decisions.

It feels a little woo woo, but it is very true like just awareness is a huge difference maker. If you just think about how in this country we don’t really talk about money that much. I mean, it’s ironic. In a way, we “talk about it,” because we obsess about it. Our sports heroes make their money like who’s making this much and like we’re always thinking about money, but we never think about how we think about it.

In particular, we never think – excuse me, we never really talk about savings. Spending is very obvious. When people are spending, it’s easy to compete. Your neighbor has a new addition on their house, or a new car, or paints their house. Or your friend gets a new flat screen TV. It’s easy to compete on consumption, but you never are aware what people are saving.

Really that’s one of the most important things you can do with money is to save it, or to invest it for college for your kids to go to college, for you to retire. We never talk about that. I doubt very highly that any of your listeners or many of your listeners know what their friends are saving.

Actually there was a study that men are more willing to admit whether or not they used Viagra than how much they’ve saved in their 401K. I mean, like you think the thing about just how dysfunctional and tiny your savings is will be more impactful and more personal and private than Viagra use, but it’s not. It’s something that I hope that as a culture we can start to break through that wall and be a little more comfortable talking about money. It’s understandable that we aren’t. I come from a family that never really talked about those things either, at least not about savings, but just that awareness that it’s an issue, I think will help us grow and develop better habits. If we can compete on the good aspects of money, as well as the bad ones, I think we’d be better off.

[0:15:03.2] MB: I think that’s a really good point. The whole idea of how money in many ways is a central focus of our society with things – you talk about The Kardashians and lifestyles of the rich and famous and all these things, but at the same time it’s only one facet of money. Really the most important facets, things like saving, investing, etc., really aren’t on the forefront. I think in many ways, one of the things that I look at is it feels like our education system in many ways is going to fail to educate us about – in most cases even basic financial literacy.

[0:15:36.0] JK: Right. Absolutely. We could talk for several more hours or days about our education system has failed us on, but that’s certainly true that we don’t have a system that really gives us useful tools to be more financially literate. Part of the issue is that they’ve done studies that show that financial literacy lessons that are very distinctly, like you should do this, like [inaudible 0:16:00.2] and you should put 10% of this check into this. Those things fade. You get that lesson and it disappears from your memory eventually.

Again, our hope with the book is that it’s more like if you – instead of getting that this is what you should do, we present this is why you’re doing what you’re doing, these are the forces at play, then hopefully that will create within yourself an ability to develop your own system, because what limited financial literacy there is and as you’re correct to point out there isn’t much of it, it doesn’t really stick with people, because it’s presented almost like a fact.

Like who remembers the capital of South Dakota? I think it’s Boysie, right? No, it’s Idaho. See, even I don’t know and I’m sitting here, I got a computer, I could look it up. The point is people don’t remember those hard fact rules, but if you give them other tools that help you become emotionally connected to the things that we do, the decisions that we make, you’re more likely to help them make better decisions in the future. That’s not how we teach when we do teach finance. It’s not what we do.

[0:17:01.4] MB: Let’s dig in concretely into some of these biases, as we call them biases, value queues and shortcuts. I want to talk about a couple specific one. To start out, in the work that you did with Dan, what were some of the most obvious traps that people fall into or biases that people fall prey to?

[0:17:19.5] JK: The one that I’ve often used to introduce what the book is about and it’s pretty obvious is this concept of relativity, which is that we often measure something based upon comparing it to something else. The easy example why this doesn’t work and this is the holiday season, is sales. You go and you go to a store and you’re more likely to buy a sweater that used to be a $100, but it’s marked down to $60, than you are to buy a sweater that’s just listed at $60.

It’s because you think there is more value, because you’re “saving $40.” It used to be a $100, and I compare it to a $100, $60 is a great deal. Whereas, just $60 on its own, there’s nothing to compare it to so you don’t know how to evaluate that. It is a simple trap and it’s a simple solution. You shouldn’t ever think about what your “not spending.” You should think about what you are spending and besides is that worth it? Now maybe it’s worth it to buy a $60 sweater, so be it. Go for it. Maybe you would’ve paid a $100, so in a way like you do feel like you’re getting value. 

Don’t just look at that number that at what it used to be. That is something that retailers and so many commercial interest do is they put a price out there and then that price is slashed, because that helps us compare the two.

One real-world example I like to give people, what’s an easier question to answer? What do you want for dinner tonight, or would you like chicken or fish for dinner? The first, it’s a whole world of possibility. The second, you have something to compare it to, do I like chicken or fish better? That’s an easy choice, or it’s an easy process to decide yes or no. Whereas, if it’s wide open, you can’t.

The same is if you’re looking at a sweater and it’s $60 and you’re trying to decide, “Is this worth it? I don’t know if it’s worth it to spend this money if I valued that highly or not.” That’s more difficult than would you like a $60 sweater, or a $100 dollar? Of course, I like the $60 sweater. That’s what that choice becomes. It doesn’t become, “Do you want a $60 sweater, or do you want to spend money on a sweater becomes you want $60 or a $100.” That’s really obvious trap that I think we all fall into frequently is getting suckered by sales, by stuff being marked off.

Another one that really has stuck with me and I think I’m seeing it more and more is something called the pain of paying. That is the concept and the idea that when we pay for something, it stimulates the same region of our brain as when we feel pain, physical pain. That’s important. Feeling pain has an evolutionary purpose. You put your hand on a stove and that burn teaches you not to touch the stove anymore.

We should learn from pain, but often what happens in the financial world is instead of healing that pain and being conscious of what we’re doing and learning not to do it, we just numb the pain. You stop feeling it. Financially, the way that the pain hits us is twofold; one is just being aware of the spending. When you pull a $20 bill out of your wallet and you hand it over to someone, you’re aware that you’re spending that $20.

When you use Apple Pay and just swipe it at something really briefly, you’re much less aware how much you’re spending. There are studies showing when people use credit cards as the classic example of less awareness of paying, they spend more, they tip more and they’re more likely to forget how much they spend.

I ask people all the time, “Do you use credit card?” “Yes.” How many people know at the end of the month exactly what their credit card bill will be? Almost nobody knows that. We forget how much we spend and just adds up. 

An amazing thing to me, a study that I found that just floored me was that a fact, they call the credit card premium, it takes place even when you don’t actually use the credit card. If you just put out paraphernalia for a credit card, like a credit card swipe machine, a little MasterCard sticker, just putting that at the place of payment makes people spend more and more likely to forget how much you’re spending.

It’s less than using the credit card, but it still impacts. We’ve become so in-tuned with that shortcut, with that value queue, that bias that it’s just a trigger to us. It’s Pavlovian. Not being aware of that pain of paying. Not feeling that pain makes us do things that maybe we wouldn’t if we just stop to think, “Is it worth it?”

Many of your listeners I imagine, are a point in their lives when they’re probably starting to save like 401Ks, like starting to save for retirement, starting to invest more. You think about funds where you invest in like an index fund and there’s a management fee. For ease of numbers, let’s say there’s a management fee of 1% and you’ve got a million dollar portfolio, in which case you should buy both of my books, not just one.

Let’s say you got a million dollar portfolio and there’s 1% management fee. What happens is that 1%, you never see that 1% leave, right? You just get your statements at the end of the year. Somewhere there is a line that says that they took their 1% off of everything. But what of instead of it just being buried in a statement, at the end of every year, you have to write your broker a check for $10,000? You’d feel that pain and you would at least stop and say, “Oh, is it worth it to pay $10,000 for what this broker is doing or not?”

We don’t feel that pain and therefore, because we’re not aware of it and therefore, we don’t have that hand on the still burning moment of saying, “Oh, should I change or not?” That’s this pain of paying are really the way that our culture has evolved to numb that pain of paying is a huge, huge thing that we fall into and it’s something that concerns me as I look at the way technology has really advanced. I mentioned Apple Pay.

Many of these FinTech developments are “make paying easier.” Yeah, it’s easier but it’s makes paying easier. It doesn’t mean it makes your choices better. It just makes it easier for that money to flow out of your pocket. That isn’t necessarily a good thing. Again, we don’t want people to become freaks and think about every spending decision and you have decided to have your coffee every day for 5 bucks. Great, just spend it.

When you’re not aware of decisions at all and it just flows out when you’ve got Amazon technology everywhere with one-click spending and you never think about what you’re doing, that’s not financially healthy. I think what ends up happening is it’s like – it’s almost like we have an obesity crisis in finance, but no one is aware that they’re obese.

We have a spending crisis, but no one is really aware they’re doing it because we don’t feel that pain of paying. The relativity and the pain of paying are two of the early ones we talked about in the book. There’s tons of them, but those are two that I always feel like everybody deals with that and gets what we’re saying when we explain it.

[0:23:50.7] MB: I think those are both great examples. The relativity bias makes me think of a joke. My father-in-law always says, which is when his wife comes home from shopping he goes, “How much did I save today?” Instead of he say this like, “How much was everything on sale?” I’m curious, is there a component of anchoring bias embedded within that bias?

[0:24:10.3] JK: Absolutely. Everything isn’t totally clean. It’s just one force impacting another. Anchoring is very much at play when it comes to sales. Anchoring is the idea that you see the first figure that you see about a product will determine what you think it’s worth. Especially when it’s something you can’t assess.

One example is where they came out with the iPhone. Steve Jobs said this iPhone is on sale for $600. When you come out with the iPhone, how did you evaluate what an iPhone is worth? You’ve had cellphones, but all of a sudden you can do all these other things, have this functionality. You can look at pictures, you can go online, you can do amazing things, but how do you evaluate what’s the worth? We said, $600. 

Then a few weeks later the price was lowered to $400. Suddenly, oh my gosh, that’s a great deal. Then the factors at play both that relativity, like it seems like a relative great deal, and the fact that we had heard $600. We think, “That’s the number associated with it.” We are drawn to. I mean, it’s called anchoring, because it’s like an anchor that you just can’t get too far from it.

When I was looking at the research here, one of the amazing things about anchoring is not just how often it comes into play, but that it is so powerful that the numbers don’t have to necessarily relate to the product you’re buying. There is a thing called arbitrary coherence. Arbitrary is the keyword here that they didn’t experiment with.

I have people write down the last two digits of their social security number completely random. Like what the numbers could do. Then they would have them bid on items that they really couldn’t assess the true value, like obscure wines or random chocolates, or new technology thing. Stuff that you didn’t know what it was worth at all.

They found that those people that had written down high two numbers like their social security ending in 89 or 94, they would bid higher on all the other products that were random, than those that had low social security numbers, like 24 or 12. It was just because they had had these high numbers primed into their head.

Now by all rights, the social security number has nothing to do with the price of a bottle of wine. But because we are creatures that seek consistency, that seek to make logic, that look for value queues, we will grasp on to whatever number, whatever anchor we can find in order to give ourselves some stability.

It’s something that you should be aware of as consumers. You walk by a store and they have a $1,000 item, a pair of sneakers for a $1,000 in the window. No one is going to buy a $1,000 sneakers. You go inside and suddenly there’s a $250 sneaker and subconsciously, you have that $1,000 crazy thing in the window that anchored you to this is a place to buy expensive sneakers and $250 doesn’t seem so bad.

Anchoring is something that works with relativity, that is everywhere. Go to buy a car and there is a car on the showroom floor that’s all suit up that’s $75,000. Suddenly spending $35, $40,000 doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

[0:27:22.1] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities, so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our loyal and amazing sponsor, Skillshare.

Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. You get unlimited access to all of these classes for a single low monthly price. You never have to pay per class again.

They have some awesome courses on there that I personally love; everything from mastering Evernote to Mind Mapping to learning how to draw, or if you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare.

Skillshare is offering something incredible to our listeners; two months for just 99 cents. You can get that by going to skillshare.com/success. That’s skillshare.com/success for two months of courses for just 99 cents. Be sure to check that out.

I want to tell you a funny quick story about second sponsor for this episode, Ample K. Ample K is the first all-in-one keto meal to provide sufficient healthy fats in a powdered mix on the go format. In fact, Ample sent me some free samples of their product a couple months ago and I was skeptical at first.

In fact, the sample basically sat in my pantry for a month and a half and my producer Austin and I were joking about, “Oh, they send us this protein shake in a bottle, blah, blah, blah. Probably taste really bad.” Don’t really have much desire to try it. But I’m going to be completely honest with you, one day I was out of time and I needed a protein shake, and I just grabbed a bottle, filled with water, shook it up and started drinking it.

First of all, it tasted delicious. Great taste. The nutritional content is awesome. It’s like 30 grams of protein, almost 30 grams of healthy fats, it’s only 400 calories in one of the servings and you can literally mix it up and drink it in 10 seconds.

I now probably drink three or four them a week. I just ordered like a massive order with my producer Austin and I split it, because we ordered one of the largest orders you can possibly make. I’m a huge fan, personal user of the product and I wanted to share that story with you. They’re offering something special for listeners of the show. Anybody who’s listening can get 15% off of their first order of Ample. This is exclusively for Science of Success listeners. All you have to do is when you’re checking out at amplemeal.com, just use the promo code SUCCESS15 to check out, to get your 15% discount on your first order of Ample.

I highly recommend checking it out if you’re looking for something simple, easy and on the go.

[0:30:07.2] MB: What are the other examples that when you’re talking about fees and the pain of paying, and if you look at your brokerage statement, one of the mental models that I think is one of the most powerful around finance, money, personal finance, etc., is the power of compounding and how incredibly impactful compound interest can be over time.

One of the most interesting ways to look at fees specifically is to think about the compounded value of fees, especially percentage fees over time. That 1% that you don’t see gets compounded essentially out of what you’re doing over time. If you run the numbers, even small differences in the management fee can make a huge, huge difference over like a 20-year time horizon and what the compounded end result is.
[0:30:56.6] JK: Yeah. That’s one way that you might better think about looking at the – a fee is like a – it’s like a negative compound interest. I’m not sureif that’s quite the right term. But yeah, you lose that $10,000 and it’s not just, “Oh, is it worth $10,000?” The question is is it worth $10,000 this year? Well, next year is actually $11,000, which the following year is $12,100. Again, two component for some off the top of my head.

Yeah, is that value worth it? I mean, it’s staggering and there are people that have developed charts to show what you lose. That’s not to say the choice is, “Okay, have something with no management fees, or the lowest management fees. Because that isn’t always the best choice. It’s just be aware. What often happens is that we obsess over these sorts of details for small financial decisions, but not large ones.

We go to a supermarket and we can’t decide if we should get the organic tomatoes that are 35 cents more than the regular tomatoes. We sit there and we weigh and we think about whether or not organic is really good for us. What is our health [inaudible 0:32:01.8] and all the stuff. Then we go and we buy a house, or we remodel a home for $200,000 and someone comes and says, “Hey, for an extra $5,000 you can have something Italian. You’re going to have some marble thing.”

You’re like, “Okay, whatever. It’s just $5,000. Who cares?” All the tomato saving in the world is not going to add up to that $5,000, but oftentimes it’s the little ones we obsess about, not the big ones. We would suggest that you obsess about the big decisions and let the little ones go. That we reversed the mindset.

I remember my own personal life example is I went on a family vacation. I can’t remember. It was a long time ago, but we went to Capri, the Island of Capri. Which is a super expensive island, and I’m sure it was a real expensive vacation. It was a special trip. I don’t know exactly what it cost, because I was along for the ride as a little kid back when this happened.

Let’s say the trip cost $15,000. I don’t know if that’s what we know. Say that that’s the figure. I can remember my parents arguing with a cab driver over like $2 of a tip. Spending 20 minutes arguing about this. I didn’t think about it at the time, but in retrospect it’s like, “We just rode off. Hey, let’s spend 10 grand, but we’re going waste our time arguing over $2.” I think there are deeper psychological reasons and I don’t want to get too much on the couch here and talk about my mother and my feelings towards my family. From a perspective of rationality and money and what’s the standard of scientifically-backed approach that wasn’t the wisest choice at which battle to pick.

[0:33:35.6] MB: For someone listening, how can they pick the bigger battles when they’re facing that decision?

[0:33:42.8] JK: I think it’s up to them to decide whether the less frequent to special spending times, and by special I mean you can just categorize it as large. Buying a house, buying a car, starting a new job and signing up for your benefits and your 401K withdrawals. Think about those things that really have a significant amount of money involved with it, because those are the ones, it’s almost like the compound interest deal. Those are the ones where the little decisions will mean a lot.

Don’t worry about that other stuff. Now that’s not to say you should never think, “Should I spend $5 on a latte?” Our advice would be, they’re spending that is infrequent and small. You go to buy a pack of gum once in a while. Don’t worry. Don’t jest about that.

Then they’re spending that is relatively small, but it’s frequent. That’s a habit. You decide to spend $5 on a coffee, or you just decide every night I’m going out to my favorite restaurant and bar and I’m spending a $150. Don’t think about that every time, but once in a while, once every  year, once every six months, look back at all that spending and decide whether or not it’s worth it and how you might adjust that habit. Then it becomes a habit again, but do consider it once in a while.

Then there is the big spending things. For those, because you have so much of impact, because the result of that choice can impact your ability to do all those other smaller choices and  have the money to have a $100 dinner every week, it’s worth taking some time and thinking about what are the real forces at play here and what really matters to me and ultimately, what are the opportunity cost as your listeners move forward in their lives and get to a point where I am, like I have two young kids and we have a nice house. It’s a small house and it’s like, “Oh, we could spend more to get a bigger house. But does that mean that we can’t take some cool real experience vacations that might enhance our lives more than just having more room?”

It’s a difficult choice, but it’s something to think about and it’s a way. Oftentimes, with that example people are just like, “Oh, I got to get the bigger house.” They don’t think about what they’re giving up. Our advice would be at those moments, that’s when you do think about it. Don’t worry about what you’re giving up when you’re buying that $1.50 piece of gum, but do one it’s a $150,000 more of a house or so.

[0:35:57.2] MB: I think this also comes out of being in the financial world, but it’s definitely not a perfect model, but the yardstick that I typically use to think about the opportunity cost of spending, and again more for big picture spending items, like you’re talking about. It’s to think about sort of, I just one alternative and that’s basically if I were to invest this at a – let’s say between a 6% and 8% compounded annual return for 20 years, what’s a better use of these funds? Just spend it on this, or is it just to invest it?

That’s definitely not a perfect proxy, but it’s a good enough proxy in many ways to just think about, “Okay, what’s a better use of this capital? Is it to spend it on a new sofa and renovating the kitchen? Or is it to spend it on investing this money, so that I can have savings and build some wealth over time?”

[0:36:45.7] JK: Right. It’s great that you’re able to think about that, because that’s a difficult way. It’s challenging for us to think about the future like that. We have a chapter on the book all about self-control and that itself could be a whole book. The real challenge of self-control particularly when it comes to savings and investing for retirement and while we have such retirement prices is that people have a hard time thinking about the future selves.

Even though it’s me when I’m 65, 75, I’m not connected to that emotionally as much as I am to me right now. To think about my needs later, it’s really hard to connect and to feel obliged. We always think of ourselves as being better in the future. I may not save now, but in a couple of years I’ll start saving. You keep making those promises to yourself.

Or you think everything will be fine. “I’ll be fine by the time I’m 70.” You don’t think about all the things you need and part of that is because we’re not emotionally connected, and when it comes to saving it’s also because it’s so hard to figure out. In retirement, you have to forget how long are you going to work? How much money will you have saved? How long are you going to live after you stop working? What’s your cost of living going to be? What are your health issues going to be? What are your kids going to be doing? All these things that are just totally unpredictable.

In some ways it’s easier to not think about all that hard stuff. At the end of the day, a lot of what we humans want to do is we want to go the path of least resistance. We want the easy solution, the quick solution. That’s understandable. That’s human nature. We don’t suggest you try to change human nature. You just are aware of it and every now and then you choose the hard path.

Also ever now and then, you create systems to let the easy path happen. Places that have speaking of retirement that have made it so that you start a job and the default option is that you are putting aside money for retirement, as opposed to you have to select that. You have to opt out instead of opting in, because you’re automatically in. That the savings right is skyrocket. I mean, it’s tremendously different, just because the easy way is just to let the default ride.

When that default is savings, people do it more. You can apply that to so many things. I mention having two different account, like you can go one time to your HR department and say, “You know what? Put $200 of every check combined into this separate account.” You put it in an account and it’s there and you never have to think about it again. You can set up default systems, so that you don’t have to think about it every time. That’s what we would advise you to try to do as much as possible when you recognize your own financial failing.

[0:39:16.6] MB: Let’s dig a little bit deeper into self-control since we started talking about that. What were some of the lessons that you saw from the work that you did around the book?

[0:39:24.9] JK: That self-control is really hard. That we looked at different situations and it ultimately is about emotion. I’ll take a mini-detour to say that when it comes to the world of finance and particularly, let’s be honest comes to men, I’m thinking about world of finance. We don’t think emotion plays in. We think it’s just a number game.

Really emotion does play in it. Emotions are things like being connected to the desire of now to falling for the temptation of now. To falling for like I want this motorcycle, I want this sound system, I want these things that I can feel now as opposed to that stuff that’s way in the distant future that you’re not emotionally connected to.

I mean, an easy study, or example is studies that show that  in a state of arousal, people will do totally irrational, unethical, immoral things, because they are emotionally compromised. One lesson, or one sort of practical piece of advice is to try to insulate ourselves from those challenging emotions, to insulate ourselves from the difficulty of self-control.

There are thing that we call Ulysses Contact. Called Ulysses Contract, because in the story of Ulysses, he wanted to hear the sound of the sirens, but he knew that you go by the sirens and all these ships crash against the rock, because they were so tempting. He had himself tied to the mast and he had his crew put stuff in their ears so they couldn’t hear the sirens and he told them, “No matter what I say, don’t let me tell you to go sail closer to the sound.”

That worked. They got past the sirens. He heard the songs and it was great and not on Spotify. He didn’t crash. You can setup systems for yourself to do the same thing and make it so that you can’t take it out, that you can’t misspend your money, that you can’t fall victim to your feelings of self-control.

In some ways, that tax penalty that comes when you setup an IRA and you are penalized, I think it’s like 10,000 or maybe it’s a percentage. I’m not sure. You’re penalized if you take early withdrawal. That’s an essence, a Ulysses contract and you’re getting punished for not sticking with the promise you’ve made to yourself.

Being aware of that, being aware that you may have to lock yourself into the good behavior can be a way to overcome self-control. There are other tricks, something we call reward substation, which is if you’re having trouble doing something because it doesn’t feel good, that you find an alternative, a way to reward yourself in a way that does feel good.

Obviously, you don’t want to undermine the benefits, like if you’re having trouble exercising, don’t reward yourself with a milkshake. That’s silly, but if you’re having trouble exercising, reward yourself with an hour of Netflix, or reward yourself with something else that provides you pleasure, so that pushing through that difficult thing that you don’t want to do becomes about achieving a goal that you want, not about achieving whatever the goal is of exercise, of losing weight, of better health and all that if you don’t connect to it.

[0:42:18.9] MB: In many ways, you know that makes me think of essentially using decision architecture to create self-control for yourself similar to everything about weight loss or something like that. Taking all these snacks out of your house, so that there’s nothing to snack on. Or putting your gym clothes next to the bed ready to go, so that you are – make it easier for yourself to go to the gym the next morning.

[0:42:41.0] JK: It’s exactly that. It’s recognizing and being comfortable admitting that we have human failings, that we’re not like perfect machines and saying, “Okay, I’m not a perfect dude that’s just going to get up and work out and never eat candy. I have to make it hard for myself.” Studies regarding like people trying to have better diabetic outcome. That literally show putting a bowl of healthy snacks, celery, carrots, grapes, whatever it is, put in a bowl of healthy snacks in the front of the fridge, or on the counter has tremendous impact versus, like having it be that candy.

You walk through a lot of offices. They have administrative cubicles in the middle and people have little candy. It’s great. You go and you grab some candy and you chat with that person and it’s a great relationship. Because it’s so easy, you just grab it. If you do hide the bad snacks and we’re not saying don’t ever have a snack, you’ll be a miserable person if you never eat a piece of chocolate. If you hide them, you’re less likely to eat them. That’s admitting that it’s a challenge.

I don’t have the data on this. I haven’t seen it, but I know that guys, especially guys who consider themselves high achievers, they don’t want to admit their failings. That is actually the best thing you can do and in some ways, the strength – it’s a sign of a really strong person is recognizing those areas that you’re not also met and seeking to improve them. That’s what we can do when we see what our failings are, whether it’s we eat too much snacks, or we don’t save enough money, or we buy too many thousand dollar shoes.

[0:44:11.9] MB: I mean, that is probably the single most recurrent theme on the podcast, the idea that self-awareness is really the cornerstone of improvement, making better decisions and understanding what needs to be done to get where you want to get and whether it’s saving money, whether it’s your own personal health, whether it’s achieving your goals, you have to start with a really honest assessment of who you are, where you skills are today and once you are capable of doing that, you can really move past any obstacles.

If you get trapped – caught in the trapped of self-sabotage, it becomes really, really hard to – and lack of self-awareness becomes really hard to ever move beyond the same thing that keeps stopping you over and over again.

[0:44:54.8] JK: Absolutely. I will say I’ve been speaking more to groups that are involved in the investment community, like fund managers and people in New York and London, who are super high-achieving alpha dog guys, largely men who – top of the finance game. A world where you think is very just need jerk reaction opposed to things that sounds what I call woo-woo, soft science like self-awareness and mindset.

I have been really pleasantly surprised by how receptive they become. I don’t have the data to say they weren’t receptive 15 years ago, but I feel like that they probably weren’t. I mean, that’s not hard science. Regardless, I’ve been happy to see how they have embraced that, even these highest achievers in a field that you think are very closed off to emotions playing a role. They’re very open to it.

I tell people, like if these super alpha dogs get it, the rest of us can certainly get it. You see in sports too, like Tom Brady is an alpha dog, but he is very like, “It’s about your mind-body set. It’s about  your health, mental health, your physical health, and having all those pieces together.” I’m really pleased that that’s extending to all different practices in all different fields.

[0:46:13.4] MB: One other bias that you wrote about that I want to touch on is fairness and effort. Tell me a little bit about how we sometimes think erroneously about that.

[0:46:22.5] JK: Sure, as I said before what happens is it’s hard to assess the value of something in the financial realm and other realms is what’s it worth to pay. We go for these shortcuts. One shortcut that we take is we assess the effort it took to produce something. People are more willing to pay for a locksmith that fumbles around and breaks them stuff and have to run back to his shop 10 times, it takes an hour to open your door.

Then locksmith who comes and opens it in a minute, not because it looks like it was a lot more effort, that it was a lot more fair to pay for all that work. When really what should matter is what’s the value to you of getting into your house? It shouldn’t matter how long it take. In fact, that first – the second person who spend just one minute is more valuable, because in the other hand that other locksmith you’re paying for his incompetence.

We don’t know how to asses value. What’s the value of getting into your home? What is that worth financially? Unless, you’re working hourly and the tab is running, or the meter is running in your house, there’s no way to know what that’s worth. We fall for effort.

It’s something that happens to us outside of the locksmith. People will pay more for data recovery if a technician takes a week to fix and save your computer data than if they take an hour. Consultants. Large firms hire like a McKenzie or an outside consultant. They show up with a 600-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining everything they’ve done. The food was served on the flight out to Columbus that week to study with you. All you care about is the final slide and the final recommendation, but they had this long thing, because it shows how hard they worked and then they throw you a check for 250 grand for your company and you sign off on it, because it’s hard to assess the value of what they’ve done. You look at the effort of whether or not it’s fair.

It’s a real challenge, because people can take advantage of that. You might say, McKenzie takes advantage of the fact that we don’t know how to assess their value. There are times and that’s good and times when that’s a challenge. There is a story, I think it’s just a fable, but it’s illustrative that a woman saw Pablo Picasso in a park and walked up to Pablo Picasso and said, “Will you paint my portrait?” He said, “Sure.” He looked at her for a minute, then with a single brush stroke, he painted a perfect image of her and gave it to her and she said, “Oh, my God. This is beautiful. You captured everything about me. I don’t know how you possibly did this. How much do I owe you?”

He said, “$5,000.” She said, “What? That’s totally unfair. It took you no effort. It only took you a minute.” He said, “No, it took me a lifetime plus a minute.” She judging just on that effort couldn’t assess the value of his whole lifetime of knowledge. It’s those knowledge economy, the people that are professional writers, but they only take an hour to do something. She is paying for that hour, you’re not really paying them what the value is. We oftentimes will underestimate value, at the same time will overestimate, because we see the effort.

Restaurants are great at playing into this. You get a menu item at a fancy restaurant and it describes everything about the food, like where the spinach was grown, the meat, what the name of the cow was and how often it was petted by aboriginal kids, all these things and how far it traveled across the land and how many people lost its fee bringing this piece of meat to you. It’s really just a cheeseburger, and you’ll pay $35 for it, because it seems like it was worth the effort. A reliance on what we can see is a challenge.

It’s been interesting to me to see how companies become more aware of that, not just to be that manipulative person, but also to proactively – I mean, the City of Boston had a real problem, because there are tons of potholes in the winter. Let’s say there are a 10,000 potholes around the City of Boston. If you live in Boston, you open your door, you see three potholes on your street, you call the city, you never see them fix it. You’re going to think they’re doing nothing.

The City of Boston, they created basically a website that show the 10,000 potholes and also showed which ones they fixed that da. If you went there and saw, “Oh, they fixed 25 potholes today. It wasn’t the one on my street, but they’re clearly working.” Suddenly, you see their effort. Suddenly you appreciate the value of took enough steps, like your tax dollars and your government and all that. The point is they are showing me effort.

Oftentimes, companies that are being undervalued, or people that are being undervalued could show their effort more. The trick is of course when to know as a consumer are they showing a real effort that we should value, or are they showing effort in a fake attempt to inflate their worth?

[0:50:49.5] MB: I love that Picasso story, and it’s funny. I was actually going to give that example, but you beat me to it. It’s one of my favorite stories and I commonly share that with people. I’m curious, we talked a little bit about this and as we’re wrapping up, what are some practical pieces of advice, or maybe a piece of homework to give to somebody listening to this, that they could start with as a beginning step towards understanding their own biases and how that impacts their thinking specifically within the realm of money?

[0:51:19.8] JK: Well, there are a ton of things you can do. Before giving a piece of advice, it applies to everyone. The suggestion would be to look at which bias, or which value queue really resonates with something you do, and then sort of address that. One common thing you can do is if you are – the pain of paying I mentioned is something that’s very common and that a lot of people suffer with is start paying cash a little bit more.

It’s a challenge in our economy to try to be all cash. Many places don’t even take it anymore, but start paying cash a little more frequently and see if you make different choices. Similarly, you could look at your monthly credit card bill, or even get a buddy, a spending buddy and I don’t suggest you use a spell, so if a neighbor listeners are married, but get a spending buddy and go through your monthly credit card and just explain every item on there and justify it and say what it was.

Then you’ll find just having gone through that process when you start spending again and you have your next credit card bill, you either do it again with a spending buddy, or just be aware of that. You’ll be more conscious of what each item is that you spent. Talked about the idea of having a different account for discretionary spending and you can do that. If you have the ability, you can try using a prepaid debit cards for weekly spending.

If you really are spending too much money on a week-to-week basis, like you go out and you spend a lot, set up as give yourself a prepaid debit card of however much money you think you can spend each week and give it to yourself on Monday. Don’t give it on Friday, because Friday you’ll go out on the weekend and spend it all. Give it to yourself on Monday and that’s all you can spend.

Stuff like this is pretty restrictive and I wouldn’t suggest going through your life like this, but you do it two or three or five times and you start to recognize your own patterns and you start to get into better habits. Then you can go back to stuff that’s maybe a little less cumbersome. To whatever extent possible, don’t have things on autopay. Don’t just use the latest technology, because it’s easier to pay. Amazon developed a store recently where you just walk in, you never go to a checkout counter, you walk in, you put stuff in your bag and a little chip reader, scanner somehow connects your credit card and pays. You walk in, you walk out.

That’s so much “easier” to shop. That’s not good for your spending. Don’t leap to the first new technology thinking it’s great, without thinking about what it really does. Ultimately, the thing is just to stop and think every now I then, I mentioned the different type of spending, the small spending, the habit spending and the big spending. Every now and then just stop and think about those habits, stop and think about the big spending, and just take a beat and think about opportunity cost, think about what else you could do. You’ll find that that adjust your mind and adjust your mindset and adjust the way that you value money in the future.

[0:54:07.9] MB: Jeff, where can listeners find you and your books online?

[0:54:12.0] JK: JeffKreisler, K-R-E-I-S-L-E-R.com. My Twitter is JeffKreisler. I also have a behavioral science Twitter JeffKreislerbs and the [inaudible 0:54:21.8] to there. Starting in 2018, I’ll be the editor of a new website called peoplescience.com, which is all applied behavioral science. Certainly just going to jeffkreisler and following down that rabbit hole.

Plus I speak for groups all over the nation, colleges and companies. I’m often near you wherever you are. Folks coming out around the world, so I’m hoping to get abroad on 2018. Jeff Kreisler is a good start. Yeah, that’s it.

[0:54:51.5] MB: Well, Jeff thank you so much for coming on the show sharing all of the wisdom that you have about personal finance, biases and how we often missthink money.

[0:54:59.8] JK: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a great podcast. I hope you have the greatest success.

[0:55:04.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Evidence Based Habits You Need To Build an Unstoppable Brain with Dr. Mike Dow

In this episode we discuss how to build a rockstar brain. We get into the neurochemical compositions that create moods from happiness to depression and look at you can change the building blocks of the neurochemicals by changing your diet and your habits. In a world were people are more stressed than ever, sleeping less, and trying to do more - we look at the causes of “brain drain” and what we can do to have physically happier and more productive brains with Dr. Michael Dow. 

Dr. Michael Dow is a psychotherapist, neurotherapist, and a New York Times Bestselling author. He has been the host of several television series examining relationships, brain health, addiction, and mental illness. Dr. Mike is frequently a guest cohost on The Doctors and his work has been featured in Today, Good Morning America, Nightline, and more.

• Your brain is being drained every day by stress, life, etc

• The 3 subtypes of brain drain

• Adrenaline

  1. Norepinephrine

  2. Cortisol

• What happens, neurologically, when you suffer from “brain drain” or brain fog

• What are we doing in our daily lives to cause brain drain?

• The brain balancing neurochemicals that are the antidotes to stress hormones

• Through everyday lifestyle changes you can transform your neurochemicals

• EPA and DHA Omega 3 Acids - and why they are important co-factors in building a healthy brain

• People are feeling more stressed than ever, working more, sleeping less

• How are we causing “brain drain” with our daily habits and activities?

• The 24 hour relationship between cortisol and melatonin

• Throughout the day, your melatonin level rises and your cortisol level decreases

• What we do every single day has a far more profound effect on our neurochemicals than we even realize

• Lifestyle interventions you can implement to rebalance and change your neurochemicals

• Stay away from foods that boost your glycemic index

• Sugar and flour drain and shrink the hippocampus - which is the main site of neurogenesis

• Eat more spinach, quiona, bannanas

• How do we cultivate GABA?

• Glutamine from spinach

  1. Vitamin B6 in bannanas, magnesium and zinc

• Eat seven servings of whole fruits and vegetables every day

• “Probiotics are the new prozac”

• Are vitamins and supplements are useful tool or should we get all our nutrients from whole foods?

• The importance of getting Omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA)

• EPA = Feel Better Omega 3 (stress less Omega 3)

  1. DHA = Sleep soundly Omega 3 (promotes restful sleep)

  2. EPA and DHA compete for space in your cells

• Vegan and vegetarian options for Omega 3 fatty acids (ALA)

• Omega 3s are one of the best foods you can eat for your brain - they are the building blocks of yo

• You can build a “rockstar brain” with a modified mediterranean diet

• Lean protein

  1. Nuts

  2. Olive Oil

  3. Fish

  4. Lots of fruits and vegetables

• How soybean oil & Omega 6 fats cause brain inflammation

• The modified mediterranean diet has been shown via research to combat major depressive disorder

• "You are what you eat, ate"

• Common sources of omega 6 fats - soybean oil and factory farmed meat products - most intense source of omega 6 fats which cause brain inflammation

• Strategies for shifting the brain from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic

• Progressive muscle relaxation

  1. Autogenic training

  2. Self hypnosis

  3. Mindfulness meditation

  4. Mantra based meditation

• Fit people release 40% less cortisol than those who are out of shape

• The right exercise at the right time is essential to balancing your neurochemicals, for example Interval training is great long term for weight loss, but spikes cortisol levels in the short term

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can get started for free right now!

In you enjoy learning these incredibly important skills, Brilliant is offering THE FIRST 200 Science of Success listeners 20% off their Annual Premium Subscription. Simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to claim your discount!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Heal Your Drained Brain: Naturally Relieve Anxiety, Combat Insomnia, and Balance Your Brain in Just 14 Days by Dr. Mike Dow

• [Book] The Brain Fog Fix: Reclaim Your Focus, Memory, and Joy in Just 3 Weeks by Dr. Mike Dow

• [Personal Site] Dr. Mike Dow

• [Twitter] Dr. Mike Dow

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode, we discuss how to build a rockstar brain. We get into the neurochemical compositions that create moods from happiness to depression and look at how you can change the building blocks of the neurochemicals by changing your diet and your habits. 

In a world where people are more stressed than ever, sleeping less and trying to do more, we look at the causes of brain drain and what we can do to have physically happier and more productive brains, with Dr. Michael Dow. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscriber, so be sure you sign up. First, you’re going to get access to awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Send it out on Mondays, by the way. It’s short, simple, links, articles and stories that we found interesting, exciting and motivating in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show. You’re going to get to vote on guests, vote on things like changing our intro music and even submit your own personal questions to our guests, which we will mix in and ask in our interviews. So be sure you sign up, get on the email list. Only people on the email list have access to these and other amazing content that I haven't even told you about. 

You can go to success podcast.com and sign up right on the homepage or if you’re driving around, if you’re on the go, if you’re on your phone, just text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

in our previous episode, We explored luck. Does luck exist? Is there a science behind luck? What does the research reveal about lucky people and unlucky people? Is it possible to manufacture your own luck?

We spoke with the research psychologist, Dr. Richard Wiseman, and learned the truth about luck and how you just might be able to create a little bit more in your own life. If you want to be luckier, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the show today. 

[0:02:31.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Mike Dow. Mike is a psychotherapist, neurotherapist and New York Times best-selling author. He's been a host of several television series examining relationships, brain health, addiction and mental illness. He's frequently a guest or a cohost on The Doctors and his work has been features in Today, Good Morning America, Nightline and much more. 

Mike, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:54.0] MD: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

[0:02:56.1] MB: We’re very excited to have you here. So I’d love to start out with when — And I think this is a more common phenomenon, more and more common phenomenon. When we feel kind of cloudy or we don't feel like ourselves, we feel like kind of sluggish, what is that and what’s going on? Is that just a natural part of aging? Is that a natural part of life or is there something deeper there?

[0:03:15.1] MD: To some degree, 1% of it is a natural part of aging. Our brains tend to shrink a little bit as we age, but most, 99% of it, I would say no. What's really going on is our brains are becoming drained. Of course, the title of my book is Heal Your Drained Brain, and I was inspired to write this book, because I was looking at the statistics and I was looking a brain scans, I was looking at what I was countering in my clinic, in my private practice. Just to be honest, a lot of my fellow authors, my colleagues, my friends, what they were experiencing in everyday life and how hard it is to be a high achieving human being these days if you want it all. 

So if you've ever seen like a madman, you look at these old days when you could kind of go to work and you had somebody taken care of your calls and you sat a quiet desk and you focused and then you came home and work rarely bothered you. Those days are over, but I guess the question remains; what is happening? What is all that chronic stress do to your brain, especially if you are somebody who is trying to juggle your romantic life, your personal life, your friends, your families, your career where our brains are becoming drained. 

I'm sure we can jump in to some of the neuroscience and the neurochemicals involved, but that feeling is what I call brain drain, and if you look at the stats, more and more Americans and, by the way, people around the world are now experiencing this condition of brain drain and chances are — It was funny, I just got back from New York and Rachael Ray and I were talking about this and she said she started up the segment by saying, “I don't know what a drained brain is, but I think I have it,” and if you're like her, you probably are in her shoes. If you have this drained brain, you're going to feel it. You're not can have the energy. You're not going to have the resiliency that you need to get through everything you need to do in your daily life. 

[0:05:14.1] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that, kind of what's going on at sort of a neurological level, neurochemical level when we’re experiencing this brain drain.

[0:05:22.1] MD: Yeah, a couple of things. So neurochemicaly, if you have a drained brain — I've created these names for the subtypes of drained brain. There are three stress hormones that I call your three brain drainers. They are adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol. So in a healthy brain you encounter a stress. So let's say you're creating a new app and maybe you're in a new relationship and you got those texts flowing in, rapid fire on your phone and that stress. Every time you get that new text of, “Hey! We have a new deadline approaching.” 

In a healthy balance brain, you have two waves. The primary wave is adrenaline and norepinephrine secreted from your adrenal glands, and then you have this secondary wave of cortisol. Ideally, of course, it’s a little bit easier in the book because you have — I have these nice X-Y graphs, but if you could kind of just visualize two waves. 
Imagine the ocean, you have the primary wave, that's adrenaline and norepinephrine, and then you have that second wave, and that's cortisol. Now what happens in drained brains is a couple of different things can happen. So in what I call the sort of the garden-variety, sort of light drain, all three stress hormones go a little bit too high. In what I call skyrocket drain what happens is they sort of — As the name implies, they skyrocket and then you have panic attacks, you have like feelings of absolute dread. The anxiety becomes almost paralyzing in that case. 

Then you have what I call drop drain. So we've seen in research that some people when you have that stressor, you have that initial response. So if you look at those two waves, you will see the waves of these stress hormones going up, but then it's like imagine two waves hitting a brick wall just as they're cresting. Instead of being able to rise and gently fall, they sort of rise and then they drop. 

Now, while generally speaking, we want to decrease the brain drainers. We also want this normal healthy response, because remember that stress hormones are designed to help you charge through that presentation, get through all the stressors, because a little bit of these brain drainers can be helpful. Then you have this fourth subtype of a drained brain, which is what I call X-treme drain, and I spell X-treme, X-treme, because if you look in an X-Y graph, it really does form an X, meaning the adrenaline and norepinephrine are going up, but cortisol sort of paradoxically stays low. 

So if you stress yourself out for too long and that is left untreated, or we also saw this and scientists and researchers were actually surprised, if you’re a vet, if you are somebody who’s been through a trauma, if you're the survivor of abuse, people who are diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, and if you’re left untreated and you don't take some of my advice in the book, then you're going to have this extreme drain. So you're going to have low levels of cortisol that sort of remain too low and adrenaline and norepinephrine run too high, which creates the state that sort of this you're going to feel wired but also tired.

Cortisol actually helps to wake us up in the morning. In the wee hours, our cortisol starts to rise and that sort of helps to wake us up. So in these brains, the cortisol just stays too low and the other brain drainers are high. So it sort of forms this X, right? So that's sort of — In terms of the neurochemicals, those three brains drainers are at play, and then what I call the brain balancers, which sort of are the antidotes to these stress hormones, so that acetylcholine, GABA, serotonin, melatonin, endorphins, all of these feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters, they're basically running too low. What’s incredible is that through everyday lifestyle change, this is how you exercise, this is how you eat, you could make more of the brain balancers, you can make more GABA, more serotonin naturally, and of course later the show I’d love to tell you how, and then you can also manage the stress hormone spikes, which is really incredible, because we want to sort of regulate the brain drainers, and this is important overall. 

I'm talking about the chemicals now, but now, if we just shift to brain structure, what happens is in drained brains, you are literally shrinking your brain. Unresolved chronic stress we know shrinks the prefrontal cortex. That's a part of the brain that separates you from animals. It is the part of the brain that makes you a human being. It is the most advanced part of the brain. It helps you to put the brakes on urges. It's been said that if a soul, if you're soul lived in a part of the brain, it would be in the prefrontal cortex, right? So that part of the brain shrinks if you don't do anything about this drained brain. Also, if you are eating the wrong foods, we know that, for example, spiking your blood sugar too often shrinks another part of the brain, and hippocampus, and then some solutions, some of the foods in my 14-day program are really designed to help prevent sort of this shrunken drained brain by restoring the brain balancers, making sure your brain doesn't shrink. 

Our brains do, again, shrink a little bit as we age, but if you're getting the omega-3 super foods, especially the EPA, the DHA that's found in seafood. I can talk a little bit about vegan sources of omega-3's if you'd like and getting these B vitamins, especially B12 and B6, all of these vitamins and minerals that act as cofactors that help your brain and body to naturally manufacture the feel-good neurotransmitters that you need to balance this brain drain. 

[0:11:20.3] MB: I want to dig into the strategies we can implement and lifestyle interventions to create kind of a happier, healthier brain. But before we do, I want to look a little bit more at sort of what kind of the inverse side of that coin, which is what are people doing that's causing so much brain drain and kind of brain fog today? 

[0:11:40.2] MD: Yeah. That's a great question. So some of it is — I've a chapter in this book, in Heal You Drained Brain called wired for worry. There is some genetic loading, of course, and then people who are — If you have this family history of any sort of anxiety disorder, you're more likely to think in ways. For example, if you're anxious maybe you get caught in what I call paralysis analysis, which is another way of saying rumination or stewing in anxious thoughts. That drains your brain. It can be a little bit of genetics. It can be what you went through if you're the survivor of trauma, if you didn't have the kind of healthy parenting that you wish you had, but it can also be the result of our everyday lives. 

Even if you don't have a family history, even if you had great parents, it seems like everything in the modern world, Matt, is set up to drain us. So if you look at the stats, the American Psychological Association has been doing this landmark study for over a decade now, and 2017, last year, was the highest reported average stress level Americans had ever reported. So we really are more stressed out than ever. We sleep an hour less than we did a generation ago. We’re working more. This is especially true for Americans compared to other countries. We just — We work all the time. Our commutes have gotten longer as — it's great that our economy is doing so well, but that is also forced people to live further away from their jobs and further away from city centers. So our commutes have actually got longer, and then we’re on the rapid fire text, email, Instagram. It's almost as if the very technology — I always make a joke that it's funny isn't it that social media tends to make some people antisocial, because they're so glued to their social media accounts that they don't have any real friends. Remember that these technologies were invented to supplement or to help us in our lives not take the place of them. 

I think the danger for so many people these days is we are using our phones, our social media accounts as replacements for things like five minutes in nature, a walk with our dog, a sit down dinner without a phone for like 30 minutes. Our phones are great. I love social media. I love texting my friends. I love texting my mom. I don't like long phone calls. I'm not that kind of person. Thank goodness for texts. It’s how I stay in communication with the world mostly, but we have to also remember that dividing our attention — We know that in brain scans, what's happening. If you think you're multitasking, you're kidding yourself, because in brain scans, what you are doing is you are rapidly switching tasks. So what you're doing is you are rapidly single tasking so that it feels like you're multitasking, but in reality you're probably not. 

If you're multitasking between two things that are simple, that's fine, but what happens is as the complexity of the tasks will grow, you start to lose efficiency by switching from task to task in your brain. Even if it feels like you're doing two things at once, you're actually switching really quickly. And then your brain starts to slow down, and then if you are what researchers deem as a heavy media multiuser, so if you're sitting watching Netflix while you're completing a spreadsheet and then you have your phone in your lap and your checking on your Instagram account and you do that 24 hours a day, you lose the ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli. That means when you're at a meeting and you're at a job interview or you’re trying to land a client and somebody is talking to you, you're going to lose your train of thought. They're going to say something and you're going to say, “What? What did you just say?” and that's not going to look good, right?

So it's important to be — It's great — I'm guilty of it to. I love sometimes at the end of a long day sitting with my laptop in my lap and sort of perusing emails as I have something mindless on TV, but we should also know that we can't do that all the time, because it really is fogging our brain. It drains our brain. It increases our level of stress hormones. 

The subtitle of my book talks about how my program not only relieves anxiety and stress, but also insomnia. I also want to talk about the 24-hour relationship between cortisol and melatonin. So I think I mentioned before that cortisol spikes in the morning to help wake you up as melatonin dips, and then throughout the course of a day, your cortisol level should go down as melatonin rises. 

Think about that. At night when you go to bed, your cortisol levels should be at the lowest point they’ve been all day. One of those brain drainers, that stress hormone cortisol, and your melatonin levels should be at their highest, but if you are sitting at 11 PM in bed checking emails from your phone, number one, the stressful email from your boss is going to shoot up your cortisol levels when your cortisol levels should be going down, and then the blue light from all electronics screens — And by the way, if you have one of the newer iPhones, you should use the night filter, because it is the most [inaudible 0:16:46.7] production, but is not perfect. So it's still going to suppress a little bit of melatonin production. Television, phones, it's really taking the melatonin production in your brain. It's suppressing it at the very time when you want melatonin high and cortisol low. Basically everything we’re doing is in some way draining our brain and there's just so much we can do to naturally reverse that process. 

[0:17:09.2] MB: It's fascinating, and I love hearing kind of the sort of interplay between all these different neurochemicals, and something we talk a lot about on the show and I spent a lot of time thinking about, especially kind of how to cultivate things like GABA, serotonin and even dopamine. Is this kind of a good point to segue into and look at some of the positive interventions and ways that we can make lifestyle changes that can actually start to rebalance the neurochemicals within our brains?

[0:17:35.8] MD: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important for people to realize that what we do every single day has a far more profound effect on our neurochemicals on the state of our brain than we think. I want to give you an example. We mentioned serotonin. Serotonin is really our main feel-good downer. Dopamine is really our main feel-good upper, and then it I would say that GABA is also sort of a — Serotonin and GABA sort of are a little bit different, but they're both sort of feel-good downers. If you take a Xanax or releasing a lot of GABA, serotonin — People like the street drug molly, because that releases a lot of serotonin. It tends to make people very feel really good, but very calm, versus dopamine. 

So let's look at, for example, serotonin. First of all, we want to shift away from foods that spike our blood sugar, foods with a high glycemic index or glycemic load. All of those foods that you already know are bad for you, but they're probably worse for you than you think when it comes to your brain. We now know from recent research that your brain will shrink, that spiking your blood sugar with anything that contains sugar or flour, that is going to drain and shrink the hippocampus in your brain. That's a really important part of the brain that you don't want to shrink. It’s the main source, the main site of neurogenesis or the birth of new brain cells and connections, and sugar is basically undoing that and it's shrinking that part of your brain. 

We want your brain to get bigger and better. If you want to have it all in this world, if you want to have a life where you can have a healthy relationship, a rockstar career, you really do want a big beautiful brains to manage all of that stress and juggle all of those things. Let's say you're going to have a rich diet and you're going to eat — A lot of people, when they think of amino acids, they think of muscle growth in bodybuilder, and that's one of the — A variety of fruits, vegetables, and amino acids, but the other reason is for these brain chemicals. 

For example, tryptophan, which is an amino acid that’s found in, for example, quinoa. So if you’re shifting from pasta or pizza and the sugar and flour that's going to shrink your brain to healthy quinoa, you're also going to get this amino acid. Now, your body and your brain converts tryptophan into 5-HTP, which is then converted into serotonin, which is then later converted from serotonin into melatonin, but your body needs cofactors to make this conversion. 

To convert tryptophan into serotonin and melatonin, i needs folate, it needs vitamin B6, it needs vitamin C it needs zinc, it needs magnesium. So that's why you want these healthy food. So for example, you’re going to get some — Let's say you have the salad. So you have the quinoa, which is a great source of tryptophan. You have spinach, which is a great source of folate, a.k.a. vitamin B9. By the way, I like leafy greens, because folic acid, the synthetic form of folate, not nearly as good as folate, the authentic nature’s form of folate found in things like spinach, and then your body is going to convert that to 5-HTP, and then with the help of vitamin B6 from bananas, maybe some vitamin C from raspberries, maybe some think from chickpeas, maybe someone magnesium from Swiss Chard, your brain is going to convert that into serotonin. 

Now, the same thing — Let's talk about GABA, right? Something that also helps you to relieve anxiety. Same thing here, glutamine is an amino acid found in spinach with the help of vitamin B6, magnesium and zinc. That is converted into feel-good GABA. Then the same thing for your main feel-good upper. Tyrosine, with the help of these the same cofactors, these vitamins and minerals, it converts that into dopamine, right? This is why I recommend in my 14-day program that you eat seven servings of whole fruits and vegetables every single day to ensure that you're getting all these vitamins, these minerals that are going to help your brain to make the feel-good neurotransmitters that you need to start to keep
Feeling good and relieve that drain brain. 

[0:22:12.2] MB: One of the things we talk a lot about on the show is the importance of mental models, building a toolkit of mental models so that you can better understand reality and achieve your goals, and that’s why I'm excited to tell you about our sponsor this week, brilliant.org. 

Brilliant is in math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. You can learn the concepts by solving fascinating and challenging problems. Brilliant explores everything from probability, to computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more. You can master these skills and exciting interactive experiences enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. 

As Charlie Munger, one of my personal heroes said, the models that come from the hard sciences and engineering are the most reliable models on this earth. Brilliant is a great place to build your STEM skills and really start mastering the fundamentals of the hard sciences, which are the cornerstones of any toolkit of mental models. 

Right now, brilliant.org is offering our listeners 20% off of their annual premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Success listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Sign up today and get started on building a powerful toolkit of mental models for yourself. 

Back to the show. 

[0:23:41.9] MB: I want to want to dig in to some of these solutions a little bit more, but for something like vitamins, for example, what are the effects or is it beneficial to take, for example, a vitamin B supplement or fish oil supplement, the kind of supplement your diet if you maybe are not getting enough of these foods naturally or is it not as bioavailable or is not as effective. Tell me a little bit about that. 

[0:24:02.8] MD: Listen. I think it's a great safety net for a lot of people. Nature has a way — I will say this. Nature has a way of putting things in combinations that increases our bioavailability. It’s just fascinating the way nature just knows how to put things together. 

In many ways, yes, when you do get in a natural form, I like to see the synergistic effects — Something else that heals your brain, probiotics, which I call the new Prozac. If you're eating a diet rich in probiotics, there are prebiotic, but then there are probiotic boosters. If you're eating natural healthy foods, that actually enhances the effect of other feel-good neurotransmitters. There is something to be said about synergy and synergistic effects of foods, but I will say that for a lot of people, supplements can be a really great safety net. 

What I don't want people to do is to supplement and then think that taking a B vitamin supplement means that you can skip all the other great sources of vitamin B6, B12 and folate, because those three B vitamins, 6, 12 and 9, a.k.a. folate, are just so vital. I have to say that I love supplementing, especially when I'm traveling and I’m not getting a healthy well-rounded diet. I can actually feel the difference when I get a little supplement of those B vitamins. So they are really helpful. 

It is also very difficult for a lot of people, unfortunately our world is polluted and it is polluted a lot of our seafood. In my book; Heal Your Drained Brain, I have what's called the omega-3 super food list, which is the list of fish that have, number one, high levels of omega threes, but number two, low levels of toxins, like mercury, and a lot of people just think, “Oh! I just should eat wild caught all the time,” but that’s actually a myth, because for salmon, that's true. Wild salmon, you want to stay away from farm raised salmon, but there are some farm raised varieties of fish, for example, farm raised rainbow trout that are actually very high in omega threes, but actually quite low in mercury. So it's safe to eat all the time, just about as safe as it is to eat wild caught salmon. Of course the same is not true for farm raised salmons. So you want to stay away from that. 

But supplementing with an omega-3 can be fantastic. In this book, in Brain Fog Fix, I call the two omega threes, the two usable forms of omega threes, EPA and DHA. In my book the Brain Fog Fix, because that book is really talking about brain fog, depression, dementia. EPA is your feel — I called it your feel-good omega-3, because it's been shown to relieve anxiety and boost mood, and I called DHA your think better omega-3, because it's also been shown to improve cognition and prevent dementia. 

Now, in this book; Heal Your Drained Brain, because I'm talking more about stress and insomnia, I call EPA your stress less omega-3. We know that supplementing with high levels of an EPA supplement with very low levels of a DHA can reduce your anxiety by 20%, but the ratio of EPA to DHA in a supplement needs to be 7 to 1 or higher for you to get that effect, and that’s because EPA and DHA compete for space in your cells. 

Now, in this book, I called DHA your sleep soundly omega-3, because it's also been shown to promote restful sleep. So even though I eat a lot of clean seafood and omega-3 super food, I do tend to also take on most days, not all days, I do really like taking an omega-3 supplements. I have a family history of heart disease. I'm always on planes. I’ve been to New York and back, been to LA , New York, LA in the past — What is that? Five or six days. So sometimes that's a little stressful packing and unpacking, waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning. A high EPA supplement can really help to relieve that anxiety, and if you're a vegan or vegetarian, I think what a lot of people don't understand — So number one, if you’re man, or number two, if you're an aging woman, what's interesting about the vegan sources of omega-3's, the ALA that you're going to find in walnuts and flaxseed, people don't understand that when they see a thousand milligrams of omega-3's that's like fortified and added to a food or maybe it's found in walnuts, your body has to convert that into the two usable forms that I just talked about, EPA and DHA, and it's not really good at this conversion, and men are not as good at this conversion when compared to women. 

We think that it has something to do with hormones. Theoretically, we know that younger women are probably better at this than older women. We also know that there is a difference between racial, people with different racial and ethnic background. So really, the best way to ensure you're getting the EPA and DHAs going straight to either the omega-3 super food sea foods or supplement. I'll tell you, if you are a vegan or a man and you're eating a lot of the vegan omega-3's, like walnuts, flaxseed, your body is okay at converting ALA found in walnuts into EPA, and it's a great food. Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic. I recommend everyone eat a lot of walnuts and all the other sources of ALAs that omega-3, the plant-based omega-3. But your body is terrible and men are especially terrible at converting ALAs into DHA, which, remember, is the omega-3 that helps you to think better and sleep soundly. 

If you are a vegan, you can supplement with a plant-based DHA supplement. For all those vegetarians out there who don't eat fish, that may be something, and especially the male vegans out there or vegetarian, you may want to pick up that supplement. I think people, when they think about in this way, it’s now, “Well, do I eat healthy or do I supplement?” It's sort of looking at who you are, your lifestyle and seeing which one works best for you and always using supplements hopefully as something to either augment, enhance or as a safety net for those times, like those busy travel periods where you just can't find. You’re at some chain hotel in the Midwest and in the suburbs and you know that all there is fast food around your hotel. That's a great time to get a great supplement to make sure you're getting all of these vitamin and mineral cofactors to heal a drained brain. 

[0:30:42.3] MB: It’s fascinating. I never knew that I can learn so much about just omega-3s. It’s really interesting. 

[0:30:48.7] MD: I love them. Omega-3s are probably one of the best things for your brain. Part of my 14-day program is you have to eat one omega-3 super food each and every day. It’s the best thing you can do for your brain in terms of food, that is. It's the building block of your brain. It’s why pregnant women need DHA to give their developing infant’s brain the building block that the human body needs to construct a brain, and if you're building new brain cells — And by the way, of course, I always talk about use it or lose it, and for a lot of people who are trying to enhance their productivity, it's use it and improve it, and if you're trying to improve your brain and you’re trying to boost neurogenesis and have a better brain, a faster brain, a bigger brain that is going to be able to handle more and be the best in your field, you really want those omega-3s, because it is the building block of your brain. It is important, and you can't go wrong if you supplement, if you supplement as a safety guard. Again, I do both. I supplement and I eat a lot of the omega-3 super foods. 

[0:31:52.6] MB: When you say that they are the building blocks of your brain, you mean sort of litearlly at a cellular level. It's one of the cornerstones of building healthy cells, correct?

[0:32:01.4] MD: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I really compare — When people don't understand what DHA is, that omega-3, I say imagine DHAs like play doh. It's your brains play doh that is actually constructing, or Tinker Toys is may visually is actually a little bit more accurate in terms of what neurons look like in the synapses and dendrites and all that. It really is literally the brain’s building block. People who had — If you have had a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, if your brain is healing from anything, high DHA supplement — My brother has a rare brain disease and had a massive stroke when he was 10 years old, and the first thing my brother, we started — I was 15 at the time and not an expert on brain health, but my father was a physician and did a lot of research and the first thing we did was we got my brother on a high DHA omega-3 and it really helps the brain to rewire. So even if you haven't had a stroke, if you are trying to make your brain better, DHA is probably one of the best things you can take. 

[0:33:04.3] MB: Really, really interesting. What about kind of — We touched on this a little bit, but macronutrients more broadly, sort of each of the different macros, so carbs, fat, etc., and protein, how do each of those kind of play into brain health?

[0:33:18.6] MD: That's a great question and a really large question in terms of what we could talk about. So let me just say that a couple of really interesting things when it comes to sort of that breakdown. I think it's really interesting. I think as Americans we are sort of all or nothing thinkers, right? Remember, a fat-free craze and then it was sort of the carb free craze. One day, everyone in America was eating bagels, fat-free bagels, and then everyone was on the Atkins diet and they’re eating no bagels, but they are eating bacon all day long, and I think what I recommend is the healthiest by far when it comes to having a rockstar brain is what I call a modified Mediterranean diet. That is a diet that is looking at sort of a nice healthy balance. So it's not going carb free. It's not going fat-free, but you’re shifting away from the high omega six fats. So you have this balance, and I call it modified, because in my program, it's a pretty — I would say it's a lower, but not carb free. It's a lower carbohydrate, Mediterranean diet. If you really want to lean body and a lean brain, you want a modified Mediterranean diet filled with the lean proteins, the nuts, olive oil. Those are your best fats.

Olive oil, there's a lot of — People are insane for coconut oil these days. I think coconut oil, if it's a high quality extra-virgin expeller-pressed organic, I think that can be a great treat, but in my opinion, extra-virgin olive oil is still the winner if those two were to be a wrestling match, coconut oil versus EV oil. I think extra-virgin olive oil is still the winner there. 

So you really want this balance. You want this modified Mediterranean diet that can really help your brain to become its best self or you to become your best self and your brain to become bigger and better. We know that shifting away from all of these oils that you will find in almost every food. One of my pet peeves is when I'm in an airport store and I see natural, some sort of a nut and it’ll say like, “All natural almonds,” or something, and I'll look on the back and it's nuts with some terrible oil. All of these oils, especially the worst oil, which is soybean oil, these oils are just terrible for you. If it's not extra-virgin olive oil, all of these disgusting oils, they’re just crap, because they put your brain in a state, something I don't think we've touched on yet. 

The other thing is it put your brain in a state of chronic inflammation. We know that the inflammatory response in the brain is just terrible for the brain. We want to shift to the brain from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory, and if you take out all the crap oils in the standard American diet and you shift to oils found in nuts, nuts with no added oils, extra-virgin olive oil for cold preparations, and then extra-virgin olive oil isn't as stable at high temperatures. So if you're cooking, you can use just regular, sometimes it’s labeled light olive oil or just olive oil, if you're heating it, shifting you from high omega-6s, a.k.a. inflammation, to higher omega-3s anti-inflammatory response in the brain and the body. This used to be just a few years ago. We thought that this was sort of a preventative approach, but in the past, I believe it was just about one year ago, there was a human clinical study published that show that even for patients diagnosed. So this is not prevention. This is now treatment. Patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder who followed a what I call this modified Mediterranean diet. Some of them actually went into remission. So that's kind of huge for any of us. Even if you're not facing major depressive disorder, we know just how powerful this modified Mediterranean diet is for your brain. It's just fantastic. So it's a lot of fruits and vegetables, nuts, olive oil, fish, and then if you are eating animal products, I tend to try to limit mine. I think a lot of people eat too much. 

When you eat a lot of meat, by the way, your body and brain to get a little boost in stress hormones by eating a lot of meat, so you are going to get a little bit of that brain drainer. So you do want healthier meats, and research also shows that when you favor organic, grass-fed, pastured, humanely raised, all of these words aren't just great for the animals. They're great for you, because you are what you eat ate. 

If animal is humanely raised, grass-fed, free-roaming, organic, and they are actually outside and they are actually eating grass — Food companies can get away with some of these labels and trick you and feed them industrial grains, but if they’re organic, still get away with some of these. So you want as many — I try to go for as many of these words as you can find, and they're becoming less and less expensive these days. We know that animal products that have these words have more omega-3s, which again are great for the brain and less omega-6s when compared to conventionally factory-farmed animal products. Whether you're drinking milk, eating cheese, chicken, beef, no matter what it is. If you favor the organic, you're going to get more omega-3s and less omega-6s. You're still not going to get as many omega-3s when compared to eating like an on omega-3 superfood, but you're definitely going to get more than the conventionally raised crap meat that a lot of Americans are eating all day long. That's sort of a good overview, I think, may be of proteins and fats and sort of the macro approach. 

[0:39:16.5] MB: Just to give some examples. You touched a little bit on soybean oil, but what are some other kind of common sources of omega-6 fats?

[0:39:23.9] MD: I would say the most offensive villain here is the factory-farmed meat. If you go anywhere in the country, it’s pretty much anything you find in processed foods is going to have soybean oil and then it's going to have a factory-farmed meat product. So those two are the most egregious offenders of this high omega-6, a.k.a. a pro-inflammatory diet for your brain, and you just really want to shift away from that, if at all possible. 

[0:39:51.3] MB: I'm curious. Are there other kind of strategies that you recommend or have we missed anything in terms of kind of digging into the various interventions that we can implement to kind of get away from brain drain and build a really smart, healthy, vibrant brain?

[0:40:06.3] MD: Yeah. So I have a lot of practices. The second week of my 14-day program is all about these practices that help to shift your brain from a sympathetic nervous system dominant state, a.k.a. fight or flight, into a parasympathetic dominant one, a.k.a. rest and digest. 

If you kind of look at these two sides, I always use the analogy, this visual of a seesaw, your brain is always going to be tilted towards one or the other. If you're not stressed out and you’re nice and balanced, the seesaw will be tilted towards parasympathetic, rest and digest. If you're drained, it's going to be tilted towards sympathetic nervous system, a.k.a. fight or flight, and it's going to stay there, right?

We basically need to find a practice, and hopefully it's going to be a practice that's natural. I think the other thing that we’re relearning is the less people can rely on prescription medication, the better. So if you don't need to take a Klonopin or a Xanax or an Ativan to shift your brain away from fight or flight into rest and digest, the better. 

I have a lot of clinically proven practices, like progressive muscle relaxation, autogenic training, self- hypnosis, mindfulness meditation. I think this these things used to be sort of very hippie, airy fairy, but I think they've come into the mainstream and I'm so glad, because they really do work, and I think —I have a script of all of these practices in the book and sort of mantra meditation in the book, and it's sort of finding that tool that works for you. 

I've done a lot of mindfulness meditation and a lot of self-hypnosis. My brain, I prefer self-hypnosis in terms of how deep I can go how quickly, and if I'm feeling really stressed, that's a little practice that I can use in my own mind if I'm — No matter where I am, that works for me. Having that toolbox of what is that little practice, that 30-second practice that works for you. Also, exercise, right? 

In the chapter in Heal Your Drained Brain called jog for joy, it's fascinating. People are just loving — They're going nuts over this chapter, the people that have read and reviewed this book, because I've really broken down exercise into these brain chemicals. For example, overall, we want to be more fit, because during the course of the day, fit people release over 40% less cortisol, that stress hormone, that brain drainer, compared to people who are out of shape. You want to get in shape, but you also want to be really careful and you want to use the right exercise at the right time. 

So let me tell you what I mean by that. If you get on that treadmill and you're having a really bad day and you carry around a lot of anger and you're just having the worst day you’ve ever had, and then you do intense interval training. Recent research shows that you may increase your risk of a heart attack. It's kind of interesting that that would, for example, be a great day to do yoga or something, maybe something that's not interval training. 

Interval training, by the way, is one of the best ways to get in shape fast, and if you need to lose some belly fat, interval training is fantastic, and we do want to get in shape rapidly, because as I said, it's one of the best ways to sort of globally reduce your stress hormone levels, because fit people release less cortisol throughout the day compared to people who are not in shape, but interval training actually spikes your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels in the short term, but then you get this long-term benefit. 

Another thing that I have in the book that people love is this new form of interval training, and it's a 10- minute interval training protocol that's been clinically proven in research. In this research, they found that cardiovascular health improved in these two groups in equal amounts. One group was doing standard interval training, about an hour class. The other group was doing 10-minute, these high intensity, let’s call it sprint interval training, where it’s sort of warm-up, jog, all out for 30 seconds, jog, all out for 30 seconds, jog, all out for 30 seconds, jog, cool down, a little 10-minute. Over the course of — I forget what the timeframe was, but I think it was about a month. These two groups had similar improvements. 

So this is not to take away from an hour long interval training class. You should absolutely do that. I do a lot of those classes myself, but it proves that 10 minutes — This is a little trick that I use. When I'm in a hotel gym that's disgusting and — It's like basically in this little room and it's hard to motivate yourself when you're tired and jetlagged and you're in this little hotel gym with like one treadmill. You can do this little 10-minute workout if you only have a little bit of time, and it's certainly better than nothing. If in fact, we think that if you follow this format that's in my book, that it may be just as effective in many ways as a longer class, because you're just pushing your body and then pulling back, but you also want to make sure that you're, again, choosing the right exercise for you on the right day at the right time, because it really does have a profound effect on your brain health. 

[0:45:28.8] MB: So many good strategies and kind of practical tips. For somebody who’s listening to this interview, what would be kind of one starting point that you would give them as kind of a piece of homework or an action item that they could use to implement the ideas that we’ve talked about today?

[0:45:44.5] MD: I would say just starts slowly. Remember that when it comes to brain health and healing your drained brain, my 14-day program is certainly a great jumpstart and most people start to feel a lot better, but at the end of the day, your brain health, it's not a sprint, it's actually a marathon, and a lot of the choices are choices that you're going to make for the rest your life. 

That being said, if it is a marathon, the biggest change — The pyramids started with one brick or the Empire State building or whatever that visual is that you love. Just do one healthy thing that you didn't do yesterday and do it today and gradually you’ll start to feel better, and a lot of times when people make one change, they start to feel a little better, and that provides them with the momentum and the positive feedback that makes two changes easier to do tomorrow. If you're somebody who maybe does need a little bit of a boot camp, my 14-day program is great, but what I don't want people to do is go all out and then feel hopeless and then say, “Oh! I can't do it. It was too hard.” 

If you’re in that boat where you’re just feeling, “Oh, gosh! There’s so much I have to do differently.” All you have to do — I would say today, do one thing that you've heard today that is going to be better for your brain. The positive feedback will carry through and hopefully tomorrow you'll do two. 

[0:47:03.7] MB: And where can listeners find you and your books and all these information online?

[0:47:07.8] MD: Yeah, you can go to my website, drmikedow, like Dow Jones, .com, drmikedow. I’m on social media, Dr. Mike Dow on all my accounts, and my new book; Heal Your Drained Brain, is available in all major bookstores; Amazon, hayhouse.com, all indie bookstores. It goes on sale February 6th, 2018.

[0:47:32.4] MB: Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these information. I learned a tremendous amount about brain health, omega-3s and much, much more. So thank you so much for being a guest and sharing all these wisdom. 

[0:47:42.6] MD: Thank for having me, Matt. 

[0:47:43.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

Remember, that the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

“The Most Innovative Experimental Psychologist In The World Today” on Luck, Deception, and Success - Dr. Richard Wiseman

In this episode we explore luck. Does luck exist? Is there a science of luck? What does the research reveal about lucky people and unlucky people? Is it possible to manufacture your own luck? We speak with research psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman and learn the truth about luck and how you just might able to create a bit more in your own life.

Dr. Richard Wiseman has been described by The Scientific American as “The most interesting and innovative experimental psychologist in the world today” and his books have sold over 3 million copies worldwide. Richard started his career as a working magician and now holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology. His work has been featured across the globe and he has delivered keynotes to The Royal Society, The Swiss Economic Forum, Google, and more.

• How Richard went from being a performance magician to being deeply interested in human psychology

• How studying "the psychology of deception” taught Dr. Wiseman to subtly influence human perception and behavior

• Most people think they are good lie detectors, but they are in fact not - they are no better than chance

• When you focus on reading only a transcript - average people go up to 60-70% effectiveness in detecting lies

• People prefer to lie with the spoken word rather than with written word

• Ask people “can you email that to me” to catch them in a lie

• Does luck exist?

• What research reveals the difference between lucky and unlucky people

• For the most part, people are CREATING THEIR OWN LUCK by the way they are thinking and acting

• The research supports, with enormous consistency, that you can create luck

• The differences between lucky and unlucky people

• The “newspaper experiment” and how it demonstrates the difference between being lucky and unlucky

• How your “attentional spotlight” filters your perception and reality - causing you to miss basic opportunities - this is what the “unlucky” often do to themselves

• Then, Dr. Wiseman taught subjects in experiments to “think like a lucky person” and these simple exercises caused the “unlucky” to be more lucky

• Keep a “luck diary” - the most positive thing / positive thought that happens in a day - will rapidly reorient you towards being more “lucky”

• The lucky tended to be more intuitive, risk seeking, and resilient

• Generating “negative counterfactuals” and “finding the silver lining” can help you generate more luck

• You are creating your own good and bad luck by what you are thinking and feeling

• What happens if you don’t think you can train your mind to be more positive?

• Try these “luck producing strategies” for 1 month and you will be luckier in your life

• How people get stuck in an identity of being “unlucky” can sometimes trap you in a certain behavior pattern

• Creating and cultivating flexibility in your life - taking a different route to work, changing your conversational style - enables you to capture luck in your life

• Lucky people are “team players” and constantly look for win-wins - trying to help other people become successful and engaging and talking with other people constantly

• Buying lottery tickets all day by exploring opportunities and relationships in an open way is how you can “create luck” in your life

• The biggest myths of self help - and what evidence actually says about them

• The danger of visualization - and why it doesn’t actually work - in fact “visualization is a terrible idea”

• Visualizing endpoint threatens your motivation and ability to actually achieve those results, visualizing process is much more effective

• Brainstorming reduces creativity by 20% in a group setting for 2 reasons

• Social Loafing

  1. Group gets dominated by people who may or may not be the most creative

• The far more effective brainstorming strategy is to brainstorm on your own - then everyone shows up to a meeting with their own perspective

• The Harvard Motivational Study is a “complete work of fiction” - it’s never been conducted

• Asking for evidence is essential - don’t believe something because it sounds plausible and it’s easy

• The power of writing your own eulogy and how it can shed light on your true goals

• The one technique you can use to shed light on your true intentions and goals for life

• Terror management theory - how we respond to the things that scare us

• Life is short - live the best life possible right now

• The “As If” Principle

• You have NO IDEA how you feel until you observe yourself

• How the “As If” principle can help imapct phobias, anxiety, and depression

• Ask yourself “how do I behave when I’m happy” - DO ALL THOSE THINGS and you will feel happier

• The effects happen within 30-40 seconds

• How do you generate the will power and motivation to act “as if”

• I’m not nervous “I’m acting as-if I’m excited” - you can use labeling as a tool to act “as-if”

• The power of the pre-mortem and finding out the risks, downsides, and problems of any project before you get started

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners THREE MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for three months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success99 to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of three whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success99

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute by Richard Wiseman

• [Book] The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

• [Book] The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life by Richard Wiseman

• [Youtube Channel] Quirkology

• [Personal Site] Richard Wiseman

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries.

In this episode we explore luck. Does luck exist? Is there a science behind luck? What does the research reveal about lucky people and unlucky people? Is it possible to manufacture your own luck? We speak with research psychologist, Dr. Richard Wiseman, and learn the truth about luck and how you just might be able to create a little bit more in your own life. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There's some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up. 

First, you're going to get awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get that completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated curating weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday, short, simple, actionable science-based advice that you can implement into your life. Listeners have been loving this email. Next, you’re going to get listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music, even submit your own questions to upcoming guests. So be sure to stay on the list. Only people on the email list have access to these opportunities. You can sign up by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, if you’re out and about, driving around, whatever else, you can text the word “smarter”, that S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed the habits of high achievers, the motivation myth, the deep into the habits, routines and strategies you can use to achieve more in less time, talk about the balance between hustle and hard work versus recovery and much more with our guest, Jeff Haden. 

If you want to get the habit and strategies the top performers use to achieve results in the real-world, listen to that interview. 

Now, without further ado, here's Dr. Richard Wiseman. I did want to give you a heads up. He is in England, so we had a little bit of a choppy connection. Nothing too bad, but I just wanted to let you know before the interview starts. 

Here we go. 

[0:02:28.7] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Richard Wiseman. Richard has been described by the Scientific American as the most interesting and innovative experimental psychologist in the world today. His books have sold over 3 million copies. He began his career working as a magician and now holds Britain's only professorship the in public understanding of psychology. His work is been featured across the globe and he’s delivered keynotes to the Royal Society, the Swiss Economic Forum, Google and more. 

Richard, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:00.6] RW: Pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. 

[0:03:02.6] MB: We’re very excited to have you on today. I love to start out. I definitely want to dig into a number of things you've written about and spoken about. To start out though, your background and the journey of how you kind of became fascinated with all these different subjects is fascinating. So I love to begin with that, hear a little bit about how you began and sort of where that journey took you. 

[0:03:23.5] RW: I guess I began with my passion in life, which was magic and performing magic. So when I was surrounded about 8 years old, I sold my first magic trick, really got into it and went to the public library and started reading a lot about magic. I was professional before in my early teens, and then started to look more at the psychology of magic, because if you're going to be a good magician, you need to understand how your audience thinks and feels. It’s a pretty order, because you're standing in front of a group of strangers and you need to do psychology experiments about magic tricks myself night after night and fool every single person in the room. 

You can't have a good night where you just fool 80% of people. You do have to understand how people's minds work, where their attention is, how they’re perceiving what’s in front of them, how they’re remembering the performance afterwards, particularly when they discuss it with their friends. I just became interested in that very practical, applied aspect of psychology and essentially became so interested in it that I studied as an experimental psychologist first at University College London, which perhaps not surprisingly is in London. 

At the end of that, I was looking for an interesting Ph.D. and by chance I saw a poster up on the wall. These were the days before email. So we used to communicate with posters. There was a poster up on the wall saying that there was a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and he was interested in psychology of deception and was looking for a candidate to explore that topic with him. 

I applied to the University of Edinburgh, was accepted on that course and spent four years looking at deception, and then at the end of that, I came back down to the south of the U.K., at the University of Hertfordshire and started to work on social psychology and on the psychology of self-development, and that's where I’ve been ever since. I've only really have one proper job, which has been at the university and that's been for 20 something years now. But that is basically the kind of line through in terms of my career. 

[0:05:25.4] MB: So the psychology of deception sounds fascinating. Tell me a little bit of what were kind of some of the fundamental conclusions or ideas that you uncovered when you were working on that?

[0:05:36.0] RW: Partly, again, was looking at the psychology of magic. Magicians need to convince you of a certain and that narrative has something impossible in it, that somebody levitates or appears or disappears or whatever it is. But behind that narrative, you have the real narrative, the method some magicians like to call it the trap doors or the mirrors, and we are looking at ways in which magicians encourage you to think one sets of things and not all ask certain questions. 

If you take a very — I don’t know, a very kind of simple trick where you ask people to think for a number between 1 and 10 and the magician might predict that people are going to say number 7, that’s to do with the fact if that trick fools you. It’s to do with the fact that you don’t realize that seven is the most frequently chosen number and so. They hide that a little bit away from you. That was one part of it. 

The other part was looking at the psychology of lying, and particularly weather people, when they lie, give off more information, give off more tales if you like using their body language or using the words they say. We carried out quite a well-known experiment on the British media where we had a very well-known political commentator go on to a television program, and I interviewed him twice, once about his favorite film and he told me he loved Gone With the Wind, and then asked him a second time about his favorite film, and he told me he'd love Some Like it Hot, because one of them was a complete lie. Yes, he hated one of those two films. 

We have the public vote on which they thought was the lie, and in line with all of the experimental work into lying, they were about 50-50. No better than charms. Most people think they could lie detectors, but they really not. When we took just the soundtrack of those two interviews and put them on the radio or just to publish the transcripts in the national newspaper, people's lie detecting abilities went up into the 60%, 70%, and the reason for that is that when we lie, it’s very easy to control our body language. Whether we gesture or smile [inaudible 0:07:39.9]. It’s much harder to control the words we say and how we say them. If you shift people's attention on to those attributes, they become much better lie detectors, and that was all parts of that deception work as well. 

[0:07:52.9] MB: That's fascinating. So an average person will be essentially no better than 50-50 chance of detecting a liar if they're looking at a video of someone, but if you take them to the transcript, you said it was up to 60 %to 70%?

[0:08:06.2] RW: Absolutely. It’s one, the simplest of fixes. If you're thinking someone is going to lie to you, actually just guessing them on the phone is much better than interviewing them or speaking to them face-to-face. In fact, actually I returned that. I know we’ll probably talk about 59 Seconds later on, but I returned that topic in 59 Seconds, which is my book about these sorts of things. The other aspect of lie detection is that people don't want to commit the lie to paper, to something that whether you can look back and go, “hold on a second. You told me that at that point.” They rather like the idea of it being a spoken lie, because then can say, “You’ve misremembered what I said.” 

In 59 Seconds, I was talking about some of the research, which if you want to find out whether someone’s lying to you, the magic words to use are, “Can you email that to me?” If they are lying, that email will never arrive, or when it does arrive, it's somewhat different than what they just told you face-to-face. I became just interested in these simple winds, these things, which evidence-base, that can have a very big impact. 

[0:09:13.5] MB: That’s fascinating. I love that symbols sort of practical strategy of just asking some to email you and then sort of gauging whether that's different from what they communicated to you. 

I’d love to transition, because there're so many things I want to talk about in this interview. Your work on luck is one of the most fascinating things that I think you've done. I’d love to kind of start out with many people think of luck, they think that it's kind of randomness of chance or sort of arbitrary. From your perspective and from the work in the research that you’ve done, what is it mean to be lucky and does luck exist?

[0:09:48.3] RW: That work dates back a long way. It dates back to the 1990s, actually, and at that time — And this was before, really, the kind of evidence-based self-help movement was around. It was a little bit before even what’s called positive psychology was around. I was talking to people about key moments in their lives how they ended up in certain relationships and certain careers and they would talk about these lucky and unlucky moments. They would talk about themselves being a lucky or unlucky person. 

At that point in time, really, people, psychologists, had dismissed the concept of luck. They had said, “Look. It’s just random. It's like winning or losing a lottery. There’s no science to be had here,” or these people are kidding themselves. They’re not really lucky. 

I embarked on this research project, which was gathering together about a thousand people who consider themselves exceptionally lucky and unlucky, and then presenting them with various tasks and seeing how they responded. What we saw even very early on in that research within probably the first six months, it was a four-year project, but within the first six months, we saw very big difference emerging between the lucky and the unlucky people. So we came to the conclusion towards the end of that project that for the most part, it’s not true of every aspect of your life, but for the most part, people are creating their own luck by the way they were thinking and the way they're behaving. 

They didn't realize that it didn't look like that to them, that it will be like a magic trick. To them it looked a magical thing that was just happening that they were either destined to do well in life or fated to do badly, but we could see unconsciously that we’re using certain tricks to accomplish that, and that then formed the basis of my very first book, which was the luck factor, which again was the first kind of evidence-based take on self-help where we were saying to people. “Look. Don't just listen to her self-help guru. Ask for the evidence. We've done the experiments. We can tell you what we found, and here are some exercises that hopefully will make you luckier in life.”

[0:11:52.0] MB: I want to dig in to how to create or manufacture your own luck, but before we do, I'm really curious if you could share maybe an example or two or a story from some of the research you did around luck, because I know there's some really kind of interesting and compelling examples. 

[0:12:07.9] RW: We had a lot of them, and there's enormous consistency. I think the lucky people, always in the right place at the right time, lots of opportunities, they always fall on their feet and so on. In terms of the unluckiest people, we had one woman who had five car accidents in one 50-mile journey, which she put down to her jinxed green car, and then one day she came to the University and watched her trying to park the car, and we realized there were a few other factors in there. She’s also unlucky in love, so she signed up with a dating agency and first date came off his motorbike and broke his leg. The replacement day, walked into a glass door and broke his nose and eventually when she found someone to marry, the church they're going to get married in was burned down one day before the wedding, and that was how her whole life had gone. That was very typical of the unlucky people. Everything I touch was an absolute disaster. 

Then on the flip side, you have these lucky people who wanted to start with a new kind of business venture and went to a party and met somebody there by chance and that person was exactly the person they needed in order to catapult themselves forward, and they became millionaires and so on. So very big differences between the two groups. 

[0:13:24.4] MB: And how can somebody, for example, the woman who was consistently unlucky, how could she sort of transition or become someone who is lucky, and what were some of the differences between her and a lucky person?

[0:13:37.2] RW: Well, if we start with the differences, one was very interesting, almost perceptual different actually in terms of how they were seeing the world, and this was the form, the basis for an experiment we did. This then became quite well-known in terms of having people look at the newspaper. 

We asked people to come into the lab to flick through a newspaper and just count the number of photographs in the newspaper. It's a fairly dull thing to do. What we didn't tell them is there were two large opportunities placed in the newspaper. One was a half-page advert with massive type that said, “Stop counting. There are 42 photographs in this newspaper,” and the other was another half page advert that said, “Say, you’ve seen, tell the experiment you’ve seen, and win,” whatever it was, 100 pounds or something. 

What was fascinating was the lucky people tended to spot those opportunities, and so they would stop and go, “My goodness! That's great. I don’t need to count all the photographs, or could I have my prize now?” The unlucky people literally turned the page and didn't see them, and that's to do with this notion of attentional spotlight, that when we look at the world, we’re not seeing everything that's in front of us. We’re seeing a small part of it, where we place that active attention. When you become worried and anxious and concerned, as the unlucky people were, that becomes very small. You become very focused, and in doing so, you don't see something if you don't expect to see it. 

The lucky people were far more relaxed and far more cheerful, had a large attentional spotlight, and so more likely to see opportunities they don’t expect and also act on them. That was the type of study we’re doing in order to try and tease really what was happening, why one group would say, “My goodness! I get all these opportunities,” and another group would say, “I never get a break.”

[0:15:35.8] MB: I love the newspaper experiment. That’s one of my favorite examples, and I’m so glad you shared it, and it just demonstrates really clearly that it's not necessarily sort of fate and random chance that's causing people to be lucky or unlucky. Obviously, there is a factor of that, but in many ways you can kind of create your own luck.

[0:15:56.0] RW: Absolutely. That was the premises of the research. Then what we did was to go on and test that. So hold on a second. If we take a group of people who are not particularly lucky or unlucky and we get them to think and behave like a lucky person, does that increase their luck? That data forms the basis, the luck factor book, and we found very simple exercises. The simplest one, but one of the most popular and which is now a well-known exercise, but at the time it wasn't, which is just getting people to keep a lucky diary and at the end of each day writing down the most positive thing, positive thought that they’ve had during that day, or one negative event that used to happen is no longer happening, or some sense of gratitude they have, their friends, or family or health or job or whatever. That starts to reorient people quite quickly. 

So one of the issues with focusing is that if you are an unlucky personal or think you are, you literally do not see the good things in your life until you start to carry out that exercise. It’s a very, very simple intervention found, well it’s the simplest of interventions that had the most powerful effects, but you could see dramatically over the course of a month or two people becoming more positive, becoming luckier because of those interventions. 

[0:17:12.7] MB: I’d love to dig in to a few of the other kind of tactics and strategies that you talked about that people can use to create their own luck.

[0:17:20.2] RW: There are lots of them. We looked at intuition. Lucky people tended to be a little bit more intuitive than unlucky people. They tended to be risk-takers without being reckless. They also tended when bad things happen to be very resilient. So whereas the unlucky people would always generate what are called positive counterfactual, that is when a bad event happened, they always imagined how it could've been much, much better. 

If they — I don’t know, fallen on the stairs, broke their leg. They said, “Well, I could have fallen down the stairs and not broken my leg, and therefore this is a terrible, terrible outcome.” What lucky people do naturally is imagine they could've been [inaudible 0:17:59.4], and so they’d go, “Well, I could've fallen down the stairs and broke both of my legs,” for example. That automatic generating of an negative counterfactuals really helps people with resilience as does finding the silver lining, that no matter how bad the event, there will be something good that has come from it. Again, lucky people very naturally do that. Unlucky people, it's very, very hard for them until the exercise is pointed out to them to find that the positive in what seems like a negative event. 

All these things are very simple, but I think we're the first people to really try and put numbers to the them, to kind of go, “Okay. Let's test this. Let’s find out what works and what doesn't work.”

[0:18:43.3] MB: I just wanted to confirm again for people listening that your research came to the fundamental conclusion that people who are and think of themselves as unlucky can learn these basic behaviors and literally sort of manufacture or create their own luck and become a luckier person just by implementing a few of these behaviors. 

[0:19:04.0] RW: That’s right. It doesn't feel like that at the time. It feels like, as I say, something magical or supernatural is happening, but it is deeply psychological. It's not true of everything. I mean, there are some events in your life that really are chance and nothing to do with you, but for the most part you’re creating your own good and bad luck by the way you're thinking and feeling. More importantly, change how you think and feel and you can increase the luck you experience, and that was the very radical notion which underlie the luck factor book. 

When that came out, it sold right across the world and became this kind of big bestseller, which was a lovely thing to see, that we could take our research and give it not only a national, but an international platform for people.

[0:19:43.6] MB: And what would you say to somebody who’s listening and sort of things to themselves, “Yeah, that sounds great, but that’s not work for me, or it's not going to happen when I do it, or I can't train my mind to see the positive in things.”

[0:19:58.7] RW: I guess — We heard that a lot from the unlucky people, and what we found was it was the simplest of interventions that have the big effects. The problem with some of these more [inaudible 0:20:09.4] interventions is that people get confused or they don’t have the willpower to keep going or they’re not quite certain what they should do. Everything is very simple. We know it works with the vast majority of people. I have to say, [inaudible 0:20:23.8]. There’s around about 20% of people that rather enjoy being unlucky, and what I mean by that is their self-identity is bound up with that. They’re the person that goes to parties and knocks over glasses and, “Oh my goodness! That's clumsy me. Everything I do, absolutely terrible,” and at some level they’re enjoying that and at some level are deeply afraid to move away from that identity, and those folks are very hard to reach, actually. But for the vast majority of people, actually these things do work, but you do need to do it. If you give up before you stopped, clearly it's not going to have much of an impact. You need to do these things. The person says, “Well, they’ll work or won’t work,” I would say come back after a month of doing them and then tell me that. If you tell it to me right now, I'm going be a bit skeptical, because you’re giving up before you started.

[0:21:16.8] MB: So you mentioned the luck diary. We talked a little bit about sort of find the silver linings. What are some of the other really simple strategies that people can implement?

[0:21:26.6] RW: Part of it was about flexibility, that even when the unlucky people saw an opportunity, they were very scared to move forward, because they were in a rut and they rather like routine even though it wasn’t a successful routine. Getting people to be more flexible, getting people to try things they haven't tried before, going to work or college with a different route, listening to whatever it is, radio that you don't normally listen to, trying different types of food, altering your conversational style. If you’re [inaudible 0:21:57.3] spending a bit more time, vice versa if your introverts, going two hours without saying the word I. All of these things give you a sense of flexibility, and that means that when an opportunity comes along, you're far more likely to make the most of that opportunity rather than go, “No. I'm not that sort of person. I am not a sort of person who’s flexible and changes.” 

[0:22:19.2] MB: Even these simple sort of daily interventions, things like taking a different route to work, changing the conversational sort of strategies or styles that you’re using, maybe going for a walk randomly or to a different place that you don’t typically do. All of these create sort of the behavior or the sort of competency of flexibility, which then enables you to kind of capture “luck” when it sort of falls into your lap. 

[0:22:45.1] RW: That's pretty much it. It puts you into the mindsets in that instance of somebody who’s flexible, who changes. The one thing we know about life is it’s not predictable. The strategies that worked last week may not work so well next week. So you need to be able to change and alter the sort of person you are., and lucky people were like that. They were very open to an uncertain future they thought they’d be able to cope, but they were very open to an uncertain future, where the unlucky people really like the idea of a plan. Even if that plan didn't work out, they would still keep on repeating it, because at least it have some certainty to. 

Also, lucky people tended to be team players. They tended to be trying to negotiate win-wins all the time and to build up a network of contacts around them. They were be very, very well-connected. The unlucky people tended to be socially isolated. If they had an idea they hadn't really going to want to bounce it off of. They haven’t got that experience or talking to somebody and then going, “Oh! You should be my friend.” They’re really interested in that, and that plays an absolute key role in success. That was about the social side of it rather than the cognitive side.

[0:23:55.2] MB: That's really interesting, and so that’s kind of another one of these learned behaviors, is that if you become more social, you can also create luck essentially through sort of the network effect of meeting and engaging with more people. 

[0:24:09.9] RW: Oh, absolutely. I can remember one lucky person who came into the lab and they were trying to sell their car. So we’re doing the experiment, on the way out, they spoke to one of the secretaries in the department and they were chatting and then the secretary, “You’re not interested in buying a new car, because I’ve got a car I’m trying to —” and the secretory, “Oh! I am actually. How weird you mentioned that. I am.” The two of them got chatting and he ended up selling his car to her. Now that's a very, very good example of him creating his own good luck. He will look back on that and go, “My goodness! What are the chances? I just happened to bump in to somebody.” 

The fact is, he was bumping into people all of the time. He was buying a [inaudible 0:24:49.0] times a day in that sense and occasionally have hit the jackpot. The unlucky people simply weren’t buying the tickets, that they weren't spending any time with other people or exploring those relationships in an open way, and so they weren't getting those opportunities. 

[0:25:02.7] MB: Yeah, it’s the old kind of analogy that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right? So lucky people, it sounds like — And according to the research, are essentially sort of constantly dabbling and exploring all these potential opportunities and sort of things that may emerge, and then when it does, they’re like, “Oh! Look at that, that opportunity kin of emerged.”

[0:25:24.4] RW: That’s right. Also, particularly with social networks, if you hit a node, if you hit somebody who's very well-connected, then you’re massively increasing your chances. You’re not just talking to that person or that party, your essentially talking to all the people they know. So if you're talking to somebody who’s well-connected, it might be that that opportunities is not for them, but they'll say, “Oh! Let me introduce you to so and so.” With networking, the way it works in terms of how we connected to others, it's very easy to get access to a very large number of people, and that’s what the lucky people were so skilled at doing. 

[0:26:02.1] MB: I think digging down the rabbit hole of how to build relationships and social networking is probably beyond the full scope of our conversation, but for visitors who are curious, we do have another interview with Keith Ferrazzi that goes super deep into a lot of strategies you can use to implement many of those different things. 

I'm curious, I’d love to kind of transition a little bit. I mean, the luck factor and all the work you did there is really fascinating, but I want to talk about some of the other work you’ve done, because I also think it's really aligned with what the show focuses on and what we often talk about on here. In 59 Seconds, which is one of your other books, you talk at length about sort of debunking some of the myths and confusion points in self-help. I'm curious, what kind of lead you to want to write that book? 

[0:26:46.7] RW: 59, I mean, all the books have slightly old origins. 59, was because I went out for lunch, I think it was, with a friend of mine who’s quite the CEO in quite a big organization, and she started to talk about happiness and she said, “Oh, you know a bit about happiness. How does it work in terms of psychology?” 

I started to answer and she said, “I’m quite a busy person. Can you really tell me and sort of cut it down a bit?” I said, “How long have you got?” She said, “Around about a minute,” and I thought that's kind of an intuition. [inaudible 0:27:19.2] ideas in psychology, that can be conveyed [inaudible 0:27:22.5] .Originally, the book was called 60 Seconds, and we round, and it was about evidence-based — In less than a minute, and at one meeting I said precisely that, I said less than a minute and someone said, “It’s not 60 seconds. It's 59 seconds,” and that's a much better title for all sorts of reasons.

So part of that book is debunking the myths of self-help, things which we all like to believe, which simply aren’t true and therefore are hurting us, and then the other parties, and here is what you can actually do to be more successful in these various domains, such as happiness and relationships and parenting and so on. That was the origins of that book, and it then became a very successful YouTube channel and has been all around the world again. So it is probably the book I’m best known for, and actually the quickest one to write. I think that was probably written about two months. So it was [inaudible 0:28:15.6] stuff that I've been storing up in my head.

[0:28:20.4] MB: You're probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities that you can use to live a rich and rewarding life. That's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our incredible sponsor for this show, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 courses in design, business and more. 

You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and they offer unlimited access to all of their courses for a low monthly price, so you never have to pay per course again. They have some awesome courses on though that I personally love including mastering Evernote, getting in the mind mapping, which is an incredible skillset, learning how to draw, and much more. 

If you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare. Right now they're offering an incredible value to our listeners. You can get three months of Skillshare for just $0.99. Go to skillshare.com/success99 to redeem this offer. You can get three months for $0.99. They’ve been incredible sponsor. They’ve been supporting the show for months. Go check out their website. It's absolutely awesome. 

Now back to the show. 

[0:29:36.7] MB: What were some of the bit myths that you uncovered that kind of permeates self-help?

[0:29:42.0] RW: I think the biggest one was this notion of visualization, that there are so many self-help books that tell people to visualize endpoint. That is to visualize yourself in five years in the perfect relationship, perfect career, whatever it is. When you look at the psychology to an experiment, there is a single experiment that doesn't say that that is a terrible, terrible idea. It makes you feel good, which is why people like doing it. The problem is in terms of success and in terms of bringing that [inaudible 0:30:17.6] into reality, it sets your expectations very high and encourages you not to do anything else. All you need to do is dream. 

So when that future doesn't emerge, then you become very discouraged. You think like, “I gave it my best shot, and I’m quite fatalistic,” and so very unlikely to move on throughout the strategies. There’s probably about 10, 15 papers now showing across pretty much every domain, that aspect, that application of visualization is a terrible idea. 

There’s an equally large literature that says that visualization is a powerful tool, but you visualize process, not endpoint. If you want to do well in an exam, you visualize yourself doing the sorts of things. good students do; asking questions in class, revising, going a little bit further than the other students, or whatever. You don't visualize yourself sitting down and having a wonderful exam or opening an envelope and taking out an A-grate certificate. I think that was one of the key things. I mean, that notion, that visualization of endpoint is now all over the place, but I think we’re the first to sort of bring it into kind of public consciousness. 

[0:31:25.9] MB: That is a great distinction, because I think it gets lost on a lot of people when they talk about visualization. The methodology itself can be effective, but it needs to be applied to a process as opposed to an endpoint. 

[0:31:38.1] RW: That’s correct, then there’s a large literature suggesting exactly that. Even [inaudible 0:31:42.9] it wasn't known, and so all these athletes were being encouraged to visualize exactly the wrong thing. So it's a complete waste of time. It was nice to sort of dig up some of these. 

The other one was brainstorming. This notion of all getting together in the room and coming up with ideas, again, reduces creativity by around about 20%. As we speak, there’ll be organizations around the world where everyone is sitting around in a room and trying to solve a problem in a creative way brainstorming terrible and apply it in that particular way. 

What is far more effective is everyone brainstorms on their own, and they arrive at that meeting of ideas and you go around the table and everyone discusses their three ideas. Then you see big increases in both the number of ideas, obviously, and the originality. It’s a very simple tweak, but it’s very important one. We’ve been getting brainstorming wrong for many, many years. 

[0:32:42.0] MB: That makes a lot of sense. What was the sort of science or the reasoning behind why brainstorming in a group is so ineffective? 

[0:32:49.9] RW: There’s two bits of science behind it. One is social loafing, which is anyone in the group, and some people would just simply not try very hard, because [inaudible 0:33:00.1]. One, they’re thinking, “Well, if I come up with a key idea, the whole group gets the kind of glory for that, which I don’t like the sound of.” The other is, “I can just lean back and let everyone else do the work,” and both of those ideas means that people don't tend to engage very much. 

The other is that within any group, you’ll get some people that dominate, and who knew the most dominating people are not the most creative, and they end up telling you all their ideas and the quieter people don't get a word in. So simply by having this very simple intervention would change of everyone arriving with three ideas get rid of all of those problems very, very effectively. 

[0:33:40.7] MB: What were some of the other kind myths that permeate self-help that you uncovered in 59 Seconds?

[0:33:47.8] RW: There’s quite a few of them in there. I mean, right I think when I was writing it, the notion of the Harvard motivational stuff, which is the study where the Harvard researchers — I mean, [inaudible 0:33:59.1]. It’s credited various universities, but normally Harvard. Harvard researchers go in, ask kids what they want to be when they grow up and only 3% know, and that 3% for 20 something years accounts for 90% of the income of the cohort. Used all over the place to encourage people to get their kids to focus very young, and when you look at the evidence for it, there’s simply isn’t any evidence. That's a complete work of fiction. That experiment has never been conducted, and people need to know that. there is no hard evidence that getting children to focus very young will have any positive impact on their the long-term success or career. 

Again, parents didn't know, and I regularly taught organizations, and you get people in the audience saying, “I just had no idea that's entirely fictitious.” There's quite a lot of kind of myth busting in that book. 

[0:34:52.1] MB: I’m curious, because one of the things that we focus on a lot on the Science of Success is what we call evidence-based growth, which is basically thinking about the world from the perspective of evidence first and trying to understand what does the science say, what does evidence say and what is that mean for us as individuals trying to achieve our goals and sort of create a better world? Why do you think that it's so hard within self-help to bring that evidence to the forefront? Often, it seems like there's so much noise that it's really challenging to sort of distinguish what the signal is. 

[0:35:34.1] RW: I think it’s [inaudible 0:35:34.7] two reasons. One is that we’re equipped with common sense. One of the problem being is often wrong, but intuitively, it feels like if you get kids to focus young, that would be a good thing. Intuitively, it feels that sitting around a room and kicking around some ideas is a good thing. Intuitions are often wrong. 

That’s one reasons why it’s tricky. The other is that the psychological literature is really spread out. I mean, it is immense now, and that you need a fair bit of expertise to even find out where the relevant papers are, and even more expertise be able to read them and actually know what they're trying to say in terms of the data. 

I think it is very, very tough for people to actually find the evidence, and that was really the thinking behind 59 Seconds, to be honest actually. We’re saying to people, “Look. I will do all that hard work for you,” and I think I probably read close a couple of thousand papers, academic papers for that book, “I will do all that hard work and then I will present it in a way that I think is fair and with some take-home messages.” But I think it’s very, very difficult, particularly now with the web when there are just so many websites out there telling you so many different things, and unless you have access to those primary sources, you’re not really going to know who or what to believe.

[0:36:51.6] MB: And so what can sort of a well-intentioned individual who is not a scientist do if they're looking for these kind of bastions of evidence-based strategies in today's world?

[0:37:04.9] RW: Obviously, read my books is the main thing. That's why I always advise anyone that. But I think always ask the question, “Where is the evidence? Where is this coming from?” Also, how much are you investing in it, because if it is something which is going to take you a couple of hours every day or something like that, you’re going to want to know that there is some kind of evidential underpinning that is in a peer-review journal or whatever it is. I just think asking for evidences is absolutely key, and not believing something just because it sounds plausible or it's easy. If it’s the sort of thing which you enjoy doing, well, it may not be having a wonderful effect on your life. Also, if you're not becoming more successful with it, if it’s not making you happier or improving relationships [inaudible 0:37:51.5], just stop and do something else. It's not rocket science, and I appreciate that it can be quite tricky for people particularly on the evidential front. 

[0:38:00.6] MB: Yeah, I think that’s a struggle that we think about a lot, is how can — Obviously, on the show, we take a lot of time. We read through a lot of the research. We try to find people who have done their homework and actually speak from a position of sort of scientific authority, but it’s definitely a struggle, and I think a lot about there's so much just noise out there. How can we see through the mist and figure out, “All right. What’s actually true? What's actually effective?” It’s something that's kind of a mission of ours and that we spent a lot of time thinking about.

[0:38:34.7] RW: It’s important work, and it’s even more important when you move out to the health domain where people are doing all sorts of weird procedures that aren’t helping at all. Some of the sort of cutting edge health research showing some of things we thought were extremely helpful [inaudible 0:38:48.8] in terms of some sorts of surgery and pills and so on has simply having no effect. If it's a problem there, it’s definitely going to be a problem when you move over to psychology. 

[0:38:59.5] MB: I'm curious, there's one other strategy that you talked about and 59 Seconds that I thought was really interesting, which is the idea of writing your own eulogy. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[0:39:11.5] RW: Yeah, it’s a lovely idea. I mean, it's — Well, not when you come to do it. It’s quite a terrifying idea [inaudible 0:39:16.9] it’s lovely, which is this notion that we don't realize perhaps [inaudible 0:39:21.6] life is and it’s very easy to get distracted and to just simply have a good time and not think about the bigger picture. It’s only when you get slightly drawn in life, these thoughts to realize there are things you wish you had done and that something’s a little bit more meaningful than others and so on. Writing your own eulogy is a nice way of cutting to the chase. So you say to somebody, “What do you want someone to stand up at your own funeral and say about you?” It's a very effective way of setting goals. 

If you ask people to do that, then look at the discrepancy between what they've written for that perfect eulogy and their life as it currently is, you can see people suddenly start to shift and go, “Well, I'd like someone to stand up in my funeral and say what a kind person I've been and I’ve helped to my friends and family, and then you say, “So, currently, are you helping your friends or family?” They say, “No, I'm not,” and so is fairly obvious where the shift is. 

It’s a lovely exercise. There's a lot of psychology to the back that up and into a field called terror management, and it's very interesting. Yeah, it's something I recommend actually to all my students.

[0:40:31.7] MB: What is terror management?

[0:40:33.3] RW: Terror management theory is this notion that there are certain things that scare us and how we respond to that. Of course, the biggest thing that scares us is death, and so most people run away from death. Actually, you want people to confront the fact [inaudible 0:40:52.7] on the few things we know with 100% certainty. Actually, it isn't quite scary. It can be quite empowering, and that is a very old idea. I mean, the idea of memento mori, which was you see skeletons in paintings or something like that, those of there to remind the viewer that life is short and that you should live the best life possible right now, because your life might end much sooner than you think. So it's a very old psychological intervention [inaudible 0:41:22.4]. 

[0:41:23.1] MB: I want to segue now and get into a little bit, just talk about the as if principle. I find that really, really fascinating and that’s something that I think is worthwhile to share with the listeners. Would you talk a little bit about kind of what that is and how you came to talk about that? 

[0:41:40.8] RW: Yeah, the as if principle, again, dates back to the roots of psychology, and particularly to William James who’s one of the founding fathers of psychology around the turn of the last century, and the obvious way of looking at the link between — Let's go with behavior and emotion, is that your emotions create certain behaviors, and that feels like common sense. When you feel happy, you smile. 

What James did was to question that and turn it on its head and say, “Well, is the opposite true? Is there a kind of back channel?” which is that if you face, forced your face into a smile, do you end up feeling happier? He was an experimentalist. He was a philosopher, and so pose that question in various domains before the experimentalists come along and start to go, “Let’s ask that question. When you behave in certain ways, does that affect the way you think and the way you feel?” and they found that it did. You behave as if you are happy, you feel happier. You behave as if you're confident, you feel more confident. That is the basis of the book which in America is called the as if principle. I just explored that very simple idea in lots of different domains.

[0:43:00.0] MB: Is that essentially the idea of fake it till you make it?

[0:43:04.6] RW: A little bit. I think it's not same as that, and in part because the word kind of fake it has a slightly different meaning to it, but it is that notion that if you, yes, behave in a certain way, that will affect how you think and feel.

Fake it until you make it is often about how it [inaudible 0:43:23.8] to perceive you and it’s not quite that. It's more about how your behavior affects yourself, and then that affects others. The fake it till you make it is, “Oh! I’m going to appear very confident and other people will see me as more confident.” The as if principle is, “I'm going to act more confident. That makes me feel more confident, and therefore I am perceived as more confident.” 

[0:43:45.6] MB: Tell me a little about the science behind that. What does kind of research say or should you share some of the specific conclusions or examples from some of the studies?

[0:43:55.4] RW: Well, in terms of the [inaudible 0:43:58.2] pathways, we don’t really know, to be honest. There is a very profound theory that sits behind it, and this is why it interested William James. The theory is that your entire common sense notion that you feel happy and, therefore, smile, is simply wrong, that you have no idea how you feel until you observe yourself. It gets to the roots of consciousness.

So the idea is that sort of there’s someone sitting in your head that’s watching your behavior and then deciding how you feel. So according to that theory, it’s absolutely crucial that you behave in sort of certain ways, because it really does influence how you literally see yourself. There is a profound debate within the consciousness movement about why it might work. 

What we do know is across very many different domains, you see the same effect again and again and again, and so in fact actually one of the most controversial illustrations of it, but still one which I think [inaudible 00:45:08.3] merit is the power posing, which is Amy Cuddy’s work, where you stand in some ways and you feel more powerful and so on. Now, there’s a lot of debate about that particular brand work, but still the fundamental principle there, which is your actions dictate how you and think, I think is sound. 

[0:45:28.3] MB: Tell me a little bit about specifically, how does the as if principle apply in the context of things like phobias, anxiety, or depression? 

[0:45:37.2] RW: Well, if we take the last of those, depression, it's a very effective way of getting people out of depression, which is that you get to behave as if they're not depressed. If you get [inaudible 0:45:46.7] depressed people to be far more active, to do things like gardening, to be more involved in exercise and so on, it alleviates the depression reasonably rapidly. The same with phobias, where if you're scared of whatever it is, a spider, if you slowly bring a spider toward someone, you get them to behave as if they are not afraid, i.e., they relax and calm down, it gets rid of the phobia very quickly. 

It's a very simple idea, but it sits throughout the entire history of psychology and all these different domains which actually hadn't ever been pulled together before. So that book is talking or reviewing areas which actually within the academic psychology would normally be seen as quite separate and populated by academics that don't normally talk to one another across those areas. 

[0:46:34.8] MB: You have kind of a specific, kind of concrete example of how somebody could apply the as if principle to happiness, for example. Just thinking about if I want to be happier, what sort of things would I do if I were happier that make sense?

[0:46:51.0] RW: Yeah. Well, happiness is the easiest one, because you think, “Well, how do I behave when I’m happy?” Maybe you sing and maybe you dance and maybe you smile and maybe you talk to other people and maybe you go out for the evening to a party. Well, do all those things. Do all those things and you will feel happier. 

The problem is motivating yourself to do that, but once you do these things, you’ll feel happier. So all you say, “How do I behave when I think and feel like that? Okay, I'll force myself to do that,” and the effect is very, very fast. So you feel those effects within about 30, 40 seconds. They’re some of the fastest moving effects in psychology. It's simple stuff, but for some reason it’s not something that often comes up on people's kind of common sense radar until the start to think about it. 

[0:47:38.4] MB: Dow do we regenerate the willpower, the motivation to actually take those actions, especially, I feel like it’s hardest to do that when you're in a negative state. 

[0:47:49.0] RW: It is hard, but it’s not that hard. I think singing if you’re on your own, singing a song, dancing around, whatever, they’re not that difficult things to do. It’s not like some huge happiness intervention where you need to think about your explanatory style or whether you’ve just supplied it, but It is just having a good time. I think that's very important. 

It's also in terms of explaining in a way your internal states, and so if you're either nervous before a talk and you can feel these butterflies in your stomach, you can re-label those. You can say, “Well, I’m not nervous. I'm acting as if I'm excited, and that re-labeling then changes how you see yourself and you go, “Well, I’m excited to give this talk. Let me get up there and start.” Not, “I'm nervous. I don’t really want to go up there and start.” It can also apply to how do you label and perceive internal states. 

[0:48:42.1] MB: Labeling could also be kind of a powerful component of acting as if you were happy or confident or excited, etc. 

[0:48:50.7] RW: That's right. If you see your own behavior in a different way and in a more positive way, then that, again, changes how you think of and feel. It’s a curious one, because the principle, the theory, links together all these different ideas in psychology and it's, for me, why the book was interesting to do, because it goes right across motivation and persuasion. So if you're trying to get someone to do something and you stop paying them more and more money, their motivation drops. The reason being, well, what sort of tasks you need to pay me to do a task that I really don't like. So when you stop making [inaudible 0:49:29.8] behave as if I don't like this task by giving me more and more money to do it, you see my motivation drop. It starts to explain these kind of counterintuitive findings that you see in psychology. 

[0:49:41.4] MB: What would be one piece of homework you would give our listeners to concretely implement some of the ideas and strategies that we’ve talked about today?

[0:49:50.3] RW: Oh my goodness! I think I see picking up on what you’re saying, the eulogy I think is good. I would say probably the best thing that comes out of 59 in terms of excess is the pre-mortem, the idea that before any — You convince yourself, that project has been an utter disaster, and you try and figure out why it failed so badly. It's one of the most effective ways of finding our problems with a scheme before that scheme starts, because otherwise you get this huge rose-tinted view, you're convinced it's going to be great and you don't take the necessary precautionary steps. I think the pre-mortem is very helpful.

[0:50:26.8] MB: And where listeners go if they want to find you, your books and all these resources online?

[0:50:32.4] RW: Richardwiseman.com is my websites and the links off there will take you to my YouTube channel, which is In 59 Seconds, which has all these tips and hints there in minutes. Then, obviously, there’s the books. We’ve spoken about Luck Factor and 59 Seconds, as if principle [inaudible 0:50:52.1] sleeping and dreaming and a book called Night School. This is all out there and it’s lovely when people read that material and feedback, and so if people have supported that work over the years, my thanks and gratitude to them. 

[0:51:04.1] MB: Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these wisdom, so many different strategies and concrete evidence-based things for people to implement their lives. It's been an honor to have you on here. 

[0:51:14.2] RW: Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity. 

[0:51:16.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage. There are incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting, fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

Remember, that the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe in iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show; links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Real Strategies Top Achievers Use To Create Results with Jeff Haden

In this episode we discuss the habits of high achievers, the motivation myth, dig deep into habits, routines, and strategies you can use to achieve more in less time, balancing hustle and hard work vs recovery and much more with our guest Jeff Haden. 

Jeff is a contributing editor for Inc.com, author, and ghostwriter. Jeff has ghostwritten nearly 40 non-fiction books including four amazon best sellers. He is the author of the upcoming book The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up To Win and his articles for Inc.com were read by over 20 million people in 2016 alone.

• How Jeff achieved his dream and realized it wasn't nearly as exciting as he thought it would be

• Top achievers don't have special sauce - its hard work and hustle that gets them there

• In interviewing and studying top achievers and the lessons from studying them

• The power of process and the power of routine

• Map out and create a blueprint of what you want to do

• The power of doing the right things every day without fail

• How do we find out what the right things to do are?

• Find someone who has achieved what you want to do, look at what they did to get there, create a blueprint based off of that and execute it

• You don't need to reinvent the wheel

• The hard part is actually what gets you to where you want to be

• Motivation comes from action and progress - not the other way around

• Your muse comes from action, you get ideas from doing things, you get inspiration from getting out there and getting started

• 2 quick and easy tricks to be as productive as possible every day

• A fantastic daily productivity strategy you can implement right away

• Setting your daily MIT every week to avoid decision fatigue and make high leverage choices every week

• "I can’t” vs “I don’t” and what research reveals about using one phrase vs the other

• The benefits of working out in the morning

• How to generate energy in the afternoon with small rest periods

• How do you balance hard work and hustle with recovery?

• High leverage thinking, focusing questions, and avoiding busywork

• The “breaking a sweat” principle - starting with the smallest thing possible

• How do you deal with big, far off goals? “the distance between here and there”

• How Jeff did 100,000 pushups in a year

• Set big goals, but focus on the routine/process every single day to execute

• How talking about your intentions and big goals can actually prevent you from achieving them

• How Jeff want from being a factory manager to a prolific writer, writing more than 40 books and countless articles

• Jeff’s daily writing habit and how he developed it

• Break down into parts, and execute each of those component parts by day

• The power of being an “and” instead of being hyper focused

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners THREE MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for three months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success99 to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of three whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success99

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way by Brendon Burchard
[Book] The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win by Jeff Haden
[Inc. Author Page] Jeff Haden
[SoS Episode] The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais
[SoS Episode] Break Your Phone Addiction (& Your Other Bad Habits) With Charles Duhigg

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:12.1] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries.
In this episode, we discussed the habits of high achievers. Talk about the motivation myth. Dig into the habits, routines and strategies you can use to achieve more in less time. We talk about balancing hostile and hard work versus recovery and much more with our guest, Jeff Hated. 
I'm to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There's some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up. First, you're going to get awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 
Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s short, simple, filled with evidence-based strategies, articles, TED Talks and more that we found interesting in the last week. Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests, change our intro music and much, much more. So be sure to go to successpodcast.com, sign up to join the email list right on the homepage, or if you're driving around, if you're out and about, if you're on the go right now, just text the word “smarter”. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. That “smarter” to 44222.
In our previous episode, we explored the motion and facial expression in depth with one of the world's top experts, the psychologists who pioneered much of the work in this field, Dr. Paul Ekman. We discussed the 6 to 7 major universal emotions. How emotional reactions are unchanged across cultures, ages, even species. We talk about micro-expressions, reading people's faces, how to manage and control your own emotions and much, much more. If you want to learn more about emotion, listen to that episode. 
Before we get started today with Jeff, I just wanted to throw out one little thing. We did have a few challenges with the audio quality on Jeff's end and I wanted to give you a heads up about that. We've done the best we could in editing and postproduction to clean it up, but that audio was a little bit rough. I just wanted to give everybody a heads up. We still thought the episode had enough value that we wanted to share the lessons that Jeff brought to us in that episode. 
Here's the show today. 
[0:02:47.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show. Jeff Haden. Jeff is a contributing editor for Inc.com author and a ghostwriter. He's ghostwritten nearly 40 nonfiction books including four Amazon bestsellers and he’s the author of the upcoming book; The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win, and his articles on inc.com alone were read by more than 20 million people in 2016. Jeff, welcome to the Science of Success. 
[0:03:13.8] JH: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. One of my favorite things to do is talk to people that are smarter than me, so I'm going to be in hog heaven today.
[0:03:21.2] MB: You’re very kind. Well, Jeff I love you — For listeners who might not be familiar with you, I’d love to start out and hear a little bit about kind of your background and your story and kind of what brought you into the world of personal development. 
[0:03:33.1] JH: Wow! This will be really brief, because I'm a pretty boring guy. I worked in manufacturing for about 20 years and worked my way up to where I was running a plant. I thought that was my dream, and it was my dream for a long time, and I got there. Like many dreams, once you're there, you realize that it's not nearly as exciting as you hoped it would be, and it doesn't become your lifelong ambition. Actually my wife talked to me into trying to do something else and I started writing, and I was really, really poor at it at first and had no audience and had very limited success, but I plugged away and just kept working, which in all the successful people that I talked to when I write for Inc., that is the way they succeed. They’re not incredibly talented. They don’t have some flash of special something. They’re the people that I work and outthink and out-hustle other people. So that's what I tried to do. 
In the process of that, I guess the best way to put this is in the process of talking to people who've achieved really big things. I got really interested in how they do that, and that's where my interest in personal development really came from. I think everybody’s interested in personal development, but I really got into it because it was fascinating to see people who had done these things and to realize that it wasn't, again, this special something. It was what they did, not who they were. It was what they did.
[0:04:54.3] MB: I think that’s a critical point, and this idea that top achievers don’t necessarily have some kind of super special sauce, but really, it's about the actions that they take and what they do as supposed to who they are or where they started. 
[0:05:08.4] JH: Yeah. I’ve met a few that have egos big enough to think that they were just born that way. The vast majority say, “Well, I worked really, really hard and I got lucky,” and I think the luck part is overstated and work hard part and work smart part is understated, but that's really the key. 
[0:05:27.2] MB: What are some of the other kind of common themes you’ve seen from interviewing ghostwriting for and studying and working with so many top achievers?
[0:05:35.7] JH: The biggest one to me is the power of process or the power of routine. People that achieve really big things set out to do so by figuring out what it will take to get there and mapping that out and creating a blueprint and then following that blueprint every day, which is what led me to my whole motivation [inaudible 0:05:56.4], which I'm sure we’ll talk about at some point. But it’s the power of doing the right things every day without fail, which is not always easy to do, but if you do that, success may not be guaranteed, but it's really close and you'll probably get to at least 90% or 95% of whatever it is you wanted to do.
[0:06:16.0] MB: How do we determine what the right thing to do are? 
[0:06:20.3] JH: My favorite — It is actually a chapter in the book that’s called do what the pros do. I think what a lot of us like to do, we all think we’re individuals. It’s like that Monty Python thing where we’re all individuals and the one guy says, “I’m not.” We all think we’re individuals, and so we all have to have this special process or special routine or special approach that is just our own because we are so unique, and actually we’re not, and I know I'm not. So if you look around and find someone who has done whatever it is you want to do, and it could be personal, it could be fitness, it could be business, it could be whatever you want it to be and really look at what they did to get there and create a blueprint based on that and say, “If it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me.”
Too many people try to reinvent a perfectly good wheel and there are all kinds of good wheels out there. Pick one and start and followed, and if it is hard, that’s okay, because the hard part is what actually gets you where you want to be. Then later on down the road as you get good at whatever it is you're doing, you can start to adapt some of that stuff to who you actually are. I have a couple examples of that, but there's no reason to wait until you figured out this perfect process for yourself when there are all kinds of awesome processes out — 
[0:07:40.3] MB: Yeah. That's one of my favorite mental models, the idea of studying what others have done to achieve the goals you want to achieve and then working the process and doing exactly what they’ve done. Many of the things that I've achieved in life are direct result of doing exactly that, studying closely people who have achieved what I want and then trying to emulate and do exactly what they did or follow the process that they did and not spending a bunch of mental energy on reinventing the wheel, but really just trying to cultivate a process based on what has worked for others.
[0:08:10.5] JH: Yeah, a good example of this, and it's a personal thing, but some years ago I was way out of shape and I couldn't run because my knees are terrible and I'm old, but I needed something cardio related. Somebody recommended that I try cycling, and I thought, “Okay. I can try that.” But I hated, hated the idea of it. Hated a bike, hated riding a bike. I went riding the first time and thought it was like hot death. Just hated it. 
What I did was I found a local guy, a mountain biker, Jeremiah Bishop. He’s a professional cyclist and has been for about 20 years and he’s won national championships and all sorts of stuff. I just sat down with him and said, “I want to ride your Gran Fondo. It’s like 110 miles, 4 mountains, 11,000 feet of climbing. It’s just a disastrous thing. I said, “If you were me and you had four months to get ready, what would you do?” and he laid it out for me. The first day, I had to go riding for like two hours, and it was awful and I thought I would die, but I stuck with it, and within a few weeks I felt stronger, I was fitter, I was in better shape. I saw that there was light at the end of that tunnel, and so I just followed his plan. Was it perfect? No, because — But halfway through we realize that I don't respond well to lots of recovery time. I'm better if I do things every day. So we quit building in rest periods, and I did well with that, but I still followed his plan. That idea that we’re unique and we have to find that special something. I think that holds a lot of people back because it causes you to wait, and really success starts with action. 
[0:09:56.6] MB: To me, that's one of the central ideas of achieving results, this idea that many people get confused and think that you would need to be motivated to start taking action, but in many ways it’s actually the reverse that just starting taking action, getting started, making a little bit of progress is really what ultimately creates motivation. 
[0:10:18.2] JH: What happens as we read stories of people who, when they were like five years old, figured out their life's purpose, and that's what they became and we assume that that has to be how it works for us. I don't know anybody like that. I know there are people out there like that, but I don't personally know anyone like that. So waiting for that burst of inspiration that will help you find your passion and will give you all that motivation you need to carry on through the obstacles and the roadblocks and blah-blah-blah, then that means you wait forever. I think it actually works in reverse. I think success, even a really small success, creates — It makes you feel good about yourself. That gives you motivation, and then that causes you to be willing the next day to try again, which leads to success, which leads to motivation, which leads to trying again. 
So I think the motivation actually comes from the action and the small bits of success, not from this lightning bolt that you get upfront, and the cool thing about it is that lightning bolt will always wear off no matter who you are, but if every day you're doing the right things and if nothing else you're feeling good about the fact that today you accomplished what you set out to accomplish, even if it doesn't make you feel like you're getting any better. If you did what you said you were going to do, that feels good. If you think about days when you finally sit back after your day is over and feel like, “Wow! I had a really good day.” It doesn't mean that you bought a new car, got a new house, got a promotion, got all that stuff. That's nice, but usually what makes us feel good is, “Hey, I had stuff I wanted to do today and I didn't. I worked hard. I did what I wanted to do. I feel good about that,” and that carries over into the next day. To me, motivation comes from action, not from inspiration. 
[0:12:03.5] MB: I think many people fall into the trap of sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike, and they end up wasting a tremendous amount of time. I think your example is a great one, because in maybe a business context, it's easier to think about, “Okay. Action creates motivation,” but for someone who's an incredibly prolific writer. You’ve written almost 40 books. In a creative sphere, people think, OH! I have to wait for my muse to strike,” but it doesn't seem like that's necessarily the case. 
[0:12:32.6] JH: No. I think your muse comes from the action. You get ideas from doing things. You get inspiration from actually trying things. I’d never had the blank piece of paper or blank screen syndrome, because every day I get up and my job is to write and I know that. So I have a plan. I know what I'm going to start with and I kind of roll on. Actually, that’s one of my favorite tips for being productive all day, and I’ll give you two really quick. One is the idea that the night before you decide, “What is my most important thing I need to do tomorrow? What matters most?” Set that up the night before so that when you get up and you get to your office or wherever it is you work, that everything is ready for you to do that. You don't do other stuff.  You don't check your email. Nothing. That is what you're going to do, and you knock that out, and when you're done, then you can do your other stuff. But by completing what was really important, you get that motivation to work hard the rest of the day and it builds momentum for the rest of the day, because you achieved what you set out to achieve. You feel good about yourself. That's motivating, and that will create the momentum. For me, that creates this really cool cycle of, “Hey, I did that. that was great. Now I’m going to do this. I did that. That was great.” That’s ease your way into the day thing. I guess it works for some people, but I don't know anybody that's really successful that does that. 
It's more of a, “Let me do something right away that makes me feel good about myself.” Not in a happy way, but in a success and achievement way. That'll make you feel good and that will give you the motivation to keep going. That is my favorite tip to give people who say they have a hard time getting known. 
[0:14:15.6] MB: Yeah. To me, the idea of setting out kind of your most important task the night before is one of the cornerstone productivity strategies that I implement my own life as well. I even will basically set out on Sunday. I’ll kind of do an audit of my previous week and then I'll put together, basically, one to two what I just call MIT's or most important tasks for every day of the week. I’ll set out, “All right. This is Monday MIT. This is my Tuesday MIT,” and the idea, basically, as soon as I start working, before I get sucked into email and all these other busywork and everything else, that I execute those things, basically first thing in the morning. 
The goal of that kind of Sunday review process is to figure out, “Okay. What of the big levers that I can pull? What are the big rocks that I need to move? What are the few things that I can really execute on that are going to make the biggest difference in my business and sort of progressing towards my goals?” 
To me, even if I do nothing that entire week except for execute those four, five most important tasks, that keeps the ball rolling forward and keeps creating the most amount of results possible despite distraction and lack of productivity and busywork and everything else.
[0:15:26.2] JH: That's a really good point and it leads to — It’s kind of like the same thing as the environmental architecture that people use sometimes to eliminate choices so that they do the things that they want to do. What you’re doing on Sunday night is you’re actually eliminating choices during the week about what you might decide to do, because you know what you need to do. You don't have to sit there and think about it. You don't have to decide, “Hmm. Is this more important? Is that more important?” In that moment, which is in the moment is usually when we make the wrong decision, and so you're creating a system where these are the things you’re going to do and you don't even have to think about it. Just like the guy that brings his lunch to work every day and it's a healthy lunch. He doesn't have to decide what he’s going to eat. He does not choose to make a healthier choice and drain a little bit of that willpower. It’s just what you do, and that's your system. 
When you have something like that that is just what you do, it’s really, really easy to follow. It kind of fits into this — There's research around two sets of words. I can't and I don't, and this may get boring, so stop me if it does Researchers tried to experiment where they wanted someone to start or a group of people to start a new habit, a new program. So they each were — Different sets of them were given different things that they would say. Some of them would say, “I can't do this, because I'm trying to do that.” Others said, “I don't do this,” and then another group didn't have any strategy to use at all.
What's funny about it is that 8 out of the 10 people that said I don't actually stuck to the program. One out of 10 said that said I can't stuck to the program, and the people that didn't have a strategy at all, 3 out of 10 of them actually stuck to it. So saying I can’t is actually worse than having no strategy at all, and the theory behind it is if you say I don't, you're identifying with whatever that is. So it fits I don't miss workouts or I don't, let’s say, fail to follow up with people. Whatever it might be, if that's who you are, then it’s not a choice. It's just what you do. If it's I can’t, you're opening yourself up to, “Hmm, I do have a choice.” So I can't have the bowl of ice cream, but you know what? I think I will, because it's okay right now, and you come up with some kind of rationale for why that works. 
In a long-winded way, that goes back to that whole choice architecture of if you layout your most important tasks and you decide them when you have time to reflect and it's not momentary decision, you're much more likely to accomplish them because you're not making choices anymore. 
[0:17:59.2] MB: Yeah, I think that's great, and we love research examples on the show, so I appreciate you kind of bringing that example in as well. 
[0:18:07.2] JH: I have another one then for early in the morning. I talked about I have like my most important thing to do. Some days though I choose to get up and work out first. Again, that's a choice and it’s part of my program. There are a whole bunch of reasons for that. If you're into intermittent fasting, it’s the perfect time to work out. If you have a busy day, it is hard for you to get to the gym in the evening. It's the perfect time to work out, because you can always get up early, but there is research that shows that working out first thing, and I we’re not talking hard. You can do 20 minutes of like moderate cardio, which is getting your heart rate to about, say, 110 beats a minute, which is not super high. If you do 20 minutes of that, you actually improve your mood for like the next 12 hours of the day.
So if you want to feel better and feel a little more like upbeat, not just physically, but emotionally, if you do that first thing in the morning, that kicks off the rest of your day. Whereas if you work out at night, you’re going to go to bed in a few hours, so you lose some of that 12 hours that you could've taken advantage of. 
The key to doing that though is if you work out, and even if you work out hard, you have to have a process that says, “Okay. I’m going to do that. I’m going to take my shower. I’m going to eat,” or whatever it is, “and I'm going to roll right into whatever is my most important task.” if you workout and then say, “Oh, wow! That was tough. I better lay back for a while.” You’ve lost all that momentum that you filled by getting something done right away and you don't get that cool little virtuous flywheel of success, equals motivation, equals success, equals motivation. Working out first thing is an awesome way to start your day both physiologically, but also emotionally, but you have to create a routine that allows you to go right from that to other things that will also keep you rolling. 
[0:19:54.6] MB: I agree. I’m a huge proponent of morning workouts as well, but you're right. The critical point is you have to be able to transition from that work out right into that sort of MIT, most important task, before you get sucked into the whirlwind of emails and phone calls and all of these incessant kind of nonsense that can end up destructing you from the really high leverage activities. 
[0:20:18.6] JH: That leads to an interesting point about that whole rolling into the next thing. There's a book that’s out, it’s fairly recent. It’s called High Performance Habits. It’s by Brendon Burchard, and he studied hundreds of people that have net worths of way more than mine, very successful people, and he looked at how they sustained their energy throughout the day, because the average person, about 2 or 3:00, if you’ve been working pretty hard,  you're starting to tail off, and there are tons of strategies out there for people that say, “Hey, you’re going to tail off.” Do stuff that doesn’t require creativity later in the day, and he found that the high-performing people didn't approach it that way. They thought they could sustain energy all through the day, but what they did is they found recharge moments between activities. 
If you're in a meeting, if it takes 45 minutes and you’ve got 10 minutes until your next meeting starts, most people will use that time to like catch up on emails or take your phone call or do that other stuff that drains more energy. The high-performance people said, “I'll deal with that stuff later. For the next 10 minutes, I'm going to recharge so that I am back in the right frame of mind and I have the right energy for whatever my task is next.” For some of them, it was meditating. Others was a snack. Some took a walk, but they had something that allowed them to actually generate energy from that intermittent period rather than draining more of it away. He's got guys and women that do 12, 14-hour days and end the day really strong, because they are constantly recharging during those little bursts. 
Back to your original point, that's what that morning is for. You get up, you workout. You get the benefits of that, but then you leverage that right into something else that keeps you rolling and not that causes you to just sort of sit back, because if it’s me, if I start that day slow, my whole day is slow. I don't have the oomph to go from vegging for an hour to then converting to high-energy the rest of the day. I have to start strong. 
[0:22:25.1] MB: That kind of balance between stress and recovery is something that a lot of people at the top of the performance psychology field really think about and write about. People like Josh Waitzkin, who’s one of my all-time favorite sort of performance psychology expert, or Michael Gervais, we’ve interviewed on the show in the past, talk about these ideas of having these undulating periods between stress and recovery and how vital recovery is to peak performance. 
[0:22:52.0] JH: Yeah. It’s the same with like — If you workout — You’re familiar with interval training. It’s the same principle there, where you do a burst. You have a small recovery period. You do another burst, and over time that actually makes you fitter than the person who just grinds it out, and I think with high-performing people, the ability to go in those intervals and to do a burst and a recovery and a burst and recovery is what makes them have greater stamina period, which leads to [inaudible 0:23:22.6]. I mean not stamina, just physically, but mentally and decision-making and everything. That leads them then to be able to do that over longer periods of time without feeling like they've gotten so drained that they need a break or they need a vacation right away or they just have to stop. The antidote I think to burnout is not to work less, but to create more chances to recharge. 
[0:23:45.4] MB: How do you think about balancing the kind of notion and the idea of sort of hustle and hard work and he who works hardest the longest wins, versus the importance of kind of stress and recovery and having these recovery periods. What's the right balance between those two things?
[0:24:08.7] JH: If we knew that, we do it. I think that that starts with — That hard-work and hustle, there are plenty of people that work hard, but they're not necessarily working hard at the right things. So I think that it's a little bit like your Sunday night routine where you step back and say, “Okay. What are the right things that I need to do this week?” and you're going to work really hard at them, but you're going to identify those. 
I know a lot of people that start businesses that they work endless amounts of hours, but a lot of what they're doing doesn't generate revenue, doesn't create new customers, doesn't create efficiency. It's just work, and there is a difference between the right things and just working. That I think is the place to start. 
Like for me, some years ago, I like I got pretty busy and I don't have a staff and I was writing a lot of books and writing all kinds of stuff and I got tied up with lots of things that were ancillary to that, and I finally one day kind of step back and say, “Okay. Where do I create my value? I create value by writing, and all the other stuff is interesting in its busywork, but it doesn't actually generate any revenue and it doesn't create value, so I stripped away a bunch of it and I've farmed out the little bit that was left. 
I think that's the first place to start is what are the right things and what leads to success in a predictable way. Then I think you have to kind of take a step back and say, “Okay. What supports that?” For me, fitness helps support what I do and I enjoy it. So I could do that. Clearly family and all the other things around also do that as well. I think if you focus on the right things and do those, you can free up some time that allows you to do to recharge things, but there is no one-size-fits-all clearly. What do you think?
[0:25:52.4] MB: I think it comes down to, kind of as you said, one of the most important things, and this harkens back to sort of the Sunday ritual and all these other pieces of the puzzle that we've been talking about. But it's all about what I call high leverage thinking, which is basically the idea of identifying the leverage points of where it's worth to invest your time and where you should be outsourcing, delegating, etc., and constantly asking yourself that question, “Do I need to do this? How can I outsource or delegate this to someone else? What are the really key things that I personally need to be focusing my time on?” 
I think if you can master that, then it's almost a recursive process where you keep applying the same set of questions to whatever current sort of set of problems you have are, and every time you apply this set of questions, you weed out some tasks, you delegate some tasks, etc., and then you do that again and again and again and you keep getting more and more leverage as you apply that. 
[0:26:49.6] JH: That set of question things is interesting and there's — In the book I write about Herb Kelleher, he’s the CEO of Southwest Airlines, and he makes dozens, if not hundreds of decisions today, but basically he applies the same framework to each one of those questions. Will this make Southwest Airlines the low-cost provider? Does that in any way help us be the low-cost provider? If it does, then he'll look at it, and maybe it's a yes. If it doesn't, then it becomes a no. I think that's important for people to do, not to be the low-cost provider, but to figure out what is it that you want to be. If you're an entrepreneur, will this help my business grow? If it's yes, yeah look at it. If it isn't, then it's a no. If you’re trying to get fitter, will this make me fitter? Will this help me be whatever it is I'm trying to become? If it will, cool. If it doesn't, well, then you can set that aside. 
If you just apply that one question too pretty much anything that comes up during your day, it actually strips away a lot of that fluff and get you to the core of what you're really trying to do. 
[0:27:55.0] MB: Circling back to kind of the idea we’re talking about a little bit earlier and just another thing made me think of, when I think about action, creating motivation, one of the pieces that really seems effective for me, it's not just even about — I think the MITs and the daily — Kind of executing those high-leverage tasks every day is critical and I think that's how you make the big moves and the big changes in your business and in your life, but I think to get the motivation even sometimes to get into sort of a productivity mindset, sometimes for me the smallest little things make a big difference, and that's — I think of a couple days ago, I just had a stack of mail that have been sitting on my desk and I was kind of listless and not really doing anything and I just went through the mail. I like kind of answered a couple of the letters. I wrote a check and like put it in an envelope, mailed it. Started doing all these stuff, and then like an hour and a half later I had like done all of these things and it all started with that really simple act of just cleaning up that pile of mail that had been sitting there. Sometimes just cleaning off your desk or just organizing something, those little tiny wins in many cases kind of snowball into a productivity burst that will last, in many cases, for a couple hours. 
[0:29:11.6] MB: To me, strikes me — I kind of characterize that as that breaking a sweat principal, where if you're thinking about — Like when I was cycling a lot, sometimes I would have to go on like five-hour rides or something and I would — Ahead of time you’re just dreading the crap out of it. Don't want to go. Don't want to do it, but if you can just get started and break that first swat, then all that stuff goes away and then you're engaged and then you’re rolling. 
for you to pick up that first piece of mail, that's all you really needed to kind of get past the hump, but sometimes it's really hard to think about starting, and I think that's because the distance between “here and there” is so great. If you're — I don’t know. Let's go bigger. If you're trying to — Say you want to run a marathon, but you're not a runner. If you go out and run a mile today and that was hard and you’ve let yourself think about the fact that someday you have to run 26, the distance between here and there is massive and it is demotivating and depressing and you will probably stop. If all you decided was, “Hey, I’m going to run on mile today. That's my goal. That’s my routine, and if I run that mile, I get to feel good about myself, because I did what I was supposed to do.” That carries you on to the next day. 
For you, you pick up the one. You do something with it. You throw it away or you put it in the mail. That's cool. Let me do the next and the next, and so you just focus on what's next and suddenly you get your really big places. That's the power of numbers to me where you create a routine that just allows you to accumulate numbers, then you can get to a really cool place at the other end. 
Last year, like I did 100,000 push-ups, that was something I decided I would do, and I broke it down into 374 a day. If on January 1 I had thought about the fact I had to do 100,000. It would've been hot death, but all I had to do is 374, and I can do 374. By the end of the year, I've done 100,000, which is a meaningless accomplishment other than that it proved to me that if you put your head down and do the work, you can eventually pop up and look around and say, “Wow! I did something really cool.”
[0:31:25.7] MB: I think that's great, and that is kind of the next topic I wanted to dive into, which is you’ve written and talked a lot about this, the power of process and routine and how that — You touched on this kind of at the opening of the conversation, but how these routines in many cases are really kind of the secrets that’s underpinned successful achievers.
[0:31:45.6] JH: I think a routine — When you first start to do something. Let's say you get promoted and you’re a supervisor. Okay, you’ve got the title. Maybe you’ve got the clipboards. You’ve got all the stuff. So you’re a supervisor, but that doesn't mean you're a leader. People who are leaders have actually motivated people, inspired people, developed people, trained people, brought groups, helped people achieve things. There’s all that stuff that goes into being a leader, and by having your routine that allows you to do that, at some point you don't look at yourself as a supervisor anymore. You look at yourself as a leader. 
In the fitness world, if you start out trying to run a marathon. Well, you're somebody that’s trying to run a marathon. Somewhere down the road though, you become runner, and that becomes this intrinsic thing that allows you to shape how you see the world and how you see yourself, which is a very motivating thing. When you feel like you’re runner, it’s much easier to go running. When you feel like you're a leader, it's much easier to walk into that room and try to inspire the people that work for you. That routine takes you to really cool places, which I know is not the question that you asked me, but the power of routine is that it allows you to start to see yourself differently, and when you see yourself differently, that informs your actions and makes what you do much, much easier. If you're a parent, you don't have to motivate yourself to take care of your kids. You're a parent. You take care of that. So you can use that power of routine to help you become other things, which will then make it really, really easy to do things that you need to do, because that's who you are. 
[0:33:24.5] MB: You're probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities that you can use to live a rich and rewarding life. That's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our incredible sponsor for this show, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 courses in design, business and more. 
You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and they offer unlimited access to all of their courses for a low monthly price, so you never have to pay per course again. They have some awesome courses on though that I personally love including mastering Evernote, getting in the mind mapping, which is an incredible skillset, learning how to draw, and much more. 
If you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare. Right now they're offering an incredible value to our listeners. You can get three months of Skillshare for just $0.99. Go to skillshare.com/success99 to redeem this offer. You can get three months for $0.99. They’ve been incredible sponsor. They’ve been supporting the show for months. Go check out their website. It's absolutely awesome. 
Now back to the show. 
[0:34:40.5] MB: How do you — For somebody who's thinking about kind of this daunting task or goal, let’s say the hundred thousand push-ups. How do you divorce that end goal from the kind of day-to-day activity so that you stay motivated?
[0:34:57.1] JH: That’s something that I’ve found at least by talking to incredibly successful people. They have that ultimate goal, and it's as if they set the goal, but then they forget that and they focus on all the things that it would take to get them there. So some weird little mental shift you have to make, but you really have to just say, “Yeah, that’s my end goal. That's cool. I know this is where I'm going, but what I really care about is routine and the process that will help me get to that place,” and it takes a little bit of time to adjust to, but if you give yourself three or four days, like with the push-up thing. I gave myself three to four days and I said, “No matter what, no matter how this feels, I'm at least going to get to Friday.”
By Friday, I had started to embrace the, “You know, all I really have to do is check this off on my little calendar,” and that's cool and I've done that and that feels good and I, for the most part, had forgotten about the end result, because I really was just worried about the day. That leads me — It's kind of a tangent, but it leads me to some other research that shows that people who talk about their intentions are much less likely to follow through on those intentions. 
So let's say that you planned to hike the Appalachian Trail. It’s from Georgia to Maine, runs up the Eastern Seaboard. Plenty of people have done it, but it’s like 2,200 miles, I think. Let's say you want to do that, and so you say to me, “Hey, I’m going to hike the Appalachian Trail,” and you talk about the stuff you're going to buy and you talk about the fact that you’re going to trail name, because everybody gets a nickname and they go by the nickname, not by the real name. You talk about all that stuff. Research shows that the act of just talking about that makes you much less likely to do it, because you have gotten some of the little emotional and mental kick out of imagining it that you would've actually gotten from achieving it. I’ll tell that to people and they will say, “Yeah, but I need the power peer pressure and I need to tell people my plans, because that way they can hold me to them.” That's really cool, and if you need that, that's great. Tell people what you're going to do. Tell people your routine to get there, not the actual getting there. 
So if it's preparing to hike the Appalachian Trail, tell people, “Hey, for the next month I'm going to do X, Y, and Z,” and then if they want to check in with you to make sure you’ve done the things that you need to do to prepare, that's cool, and there's your peer pressure, but not, “I plan to do X,” and then talk about it as if you've already gotten there, because that kill your motivation to actually do that stuff. It’s a little bit like the — There's other research that shows that the act of planning a vacation is almost as fun as taking the vacation. People that spend months planning vacation get all that fun and anticipation and enjoyment out of the vacation, and actually once they’ve taken it, their happiness set point goes back down to where it was before they took the vacation. It's the same thing here. Imagining yourself in a certain place or doing a certain thing, and that's fine, and yet that also makes it harder to do the thing, if doing whatever that is requires hard work and dedication and some degree of perseverance. 
[0:38:09.9] MB: Yeah, I think the principal exactly as you described it, which is this idea that just by talking about it, you're getting some of the kind of psychological and emotional rewards of dreaming about achieving it. So you're demotivating yourself in some sense. 
[0:38:26.4] JH: Absolutely. I know you’ve had Charles Duhigg on your podcast and he's obviously an expert on habits and creating habits and stuff, and one of his methods for building a new habit is you got the stimulus and you got the action, and then you have the reward, and that dreaming and thinking about a thing is a reward or maybe it's a tangible reward, like if you —We’ll use my marathon example again. If you have to go run 5 miles today and your reward the other end is you can spoil yourself. I think that reward wears off after a while, because you're used to. 
A much better reward is to — And this is what I used to do when I was cycling a lot. I would come home, get off the bike, sit in a little stool outside, drink some water and just think, “Wow! I just rode 55 miles in X amount of time. That feels awesome,” and I would just sit there and feel good about the fact of what I did, and that became my reward. I sort of had to train myself to see that as the reward, but I got to where I really look forward to that, because it was — I don’t know. It was a chance to kind of sit there quietly in yourself and say, “Huh! I did that. That was hard and I did that and that feels really good.” 
If you can create that intrinsic reward rather than, “If I go running, then I get to have a bowl of ice cream kind of reward.” That takes you to that place where you could come something and it makes it much more easy to stick with your routine, because you don't need external reward. You're getting it from inside.
[0:39:59.9] MB: I want to get specific and talk a little bit about your writing habit and your writing process. How did you develop that process and what is your kind of habit look like? Because, I mean, many people fantasize about writing kind of a single book and get overwhelmed and never even complete that task, and writing 40 books is obviously tremendously more, plus all the articles and everything else. How did you go from somebody who was a factory manager to an incredibly prolific writer and how did you develop that process and what is it look like today?
[0:40:34.5] JH: The early motivation was that I left a very good job and went to a job where if it was to be, it was up to me, and if money was going to come in, I had to produce. So that was incredibly motivating, and it cost me to work a lot of hours. 
If we talk about books, you can think, “Hey, wow!” book is, say, 300 pages, “that’s so much. I don't know how I'm going to get from here to there,” but a book is really just a series of connected ideas or connected strategies or tips or whatever, whatever it may be that takes you on a journey from A to Z and leaves you at the other end, hopefully motivated, informed, maybe a little entertained, ready to do something. At least if it's nonfiction and if it's in the how to kind of world, which is where I tend to live. It’s just a series and it’s just a lot of little chunks, and so that fits perfectly within my idea of process, because I don't have to write the whole book. If it's today, I have to write this, this and this and I know that that will then lead to other stuff and that will lead to other things that I've mapped out and I'm confident enough now that if I get to a certain place and I say, “Wow! This took a different turn. I found some research that caused me to look at this differently. I talk to someone that caused me to change my perspective on this.” Well, then I can adapt and it all becomes part of a whole, but a book is a lot of little chunks along the way. 
My goal with anything that I do, because I am the king of being afraid of the too daunting challenge, I can turn something easy into something that seems impossible really easily in my mind. So I just break it down into what do I have to do today, tomorrow, the next day? What are the pieces and parts? And let's start assembling that puzzle. Each time I get a little piece or part done, I feel good about that, because it’s like, “Okay. Got that. Got that. Connected this. Put that together,” and some day you wake up and you've got a manuscript, which I know sounds simplistic, but it really is that way. I'm all about, “Let me break this down into component parts and then let me start accomplishing the parts.” 
[0:42:46.1] MB: Do you set a quota for yourself or X-number of words per day or per week or something like that, or how do you structure that piece of it in terms of it's like the 300 push-ups a day? What is that kind of daily goal? 
[0:42:58.7] JH: I used to have daily goals. I don't anymore, because I've gotten good enough at the process part of it and the sticking with it part that I don't need like a quota to keep me going. Some days it comes easier. Some days it comes harder, and if you have a quota and you're thinking, “Well, I need 5,000 words today and I'm only 3,000 and I’ve been at this for eight hours and how am I ever going to get there?” That can cause you to give less focus or attention to stuff that she really should be working harder on. You might give short shrift to something that you should be working harder on. 
I don't really do that, and what that means is that some days — Let's pretend that 5,000 words a day is my goal. It's not, but let’s pretend. Then if I hit 3,000 today, but I know that I was doing the right things and what I created was good, then that's okay, because tomorrow I might do seven or eight, because I may really get into the flow and it may come really easily. So I don't do word count totals. When I first started, and I was mostly writing articles for other people as a ghostwriter, I did have some quotas for myself, because it was revenue-based. I knew I was going to get X-amount per article and I knew I needed X-amount of money per day, per week, per month to kind of meet the targets I had for myself. So then I definitely did break it down and say, “Okay. I need to do —” Let's pretend. “I need to do six articles a day, because that's how I'm going to hit my targets,” and so that’s what I’m going to do. If it takes me 14 hours to get there. It takes me 14 hours to get there. If it takes me six, then cool. I’m going to [inaudible 0:44:35.1] or something like that. 
I think you have to adapt that to what you're doing, but early on I think it does help to create some quotas for yourself. Otherwise you end up fluffing around and turning the right things to do into things that you think you should do or that are more fun to do that don't actually contribute to your success. 
[0:44:57.6] MB: So what would one kind of action or piece of homework be that you would give to listeners to start concretely kind of implementing some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today?
[0:45:08.5] JH: One of my favorite ones is really simple, and it's another one that's based on research. There are a number of studies and one in particular that shows that if you want to be — Let’s say you want to be happier. I think that's a goal we can all probably embrace. If you write five times a day, if you find five ways to say thank you to or to express gratitude or appreciation or to say something positive to someone that you know. It can be, “Thanks for doing this.” It can be, “Wow! You did that really well.” It could be, “You made this difference in my life.” Whatever it may be. If you do that five times a day and you do that for eight weeks, which sounds like a lot, but really shouldn't be if you think about it, then people's happiness set point, which we all have one, increased by about 50% over that 8-week period. So they felt happier simply by saying nice things, making a difference in other people's lives. That's a really cool thing and that is the power of process and that's the power of numbers, and that by doing things and accumulating numbers of those things, you can get yourself to a really cool point. I think that would be a really fun place to start, because who doesn't want to feel like they've made a positive difference in somebody else's life and who doesn't want to be a little bit happier? 
[0:46:31.1] MB: Where can listeners find you and your various works online?
[0:46:35.6] JH: The easiest place is probably inc.com. Just search my name and you will find about 1,300 articles or so. My book comes out on January 9th. It’s called Motivation Myth, and it will be on Amazon and everywhere else, and there's an audiobook version which based on my voice. You can tell they did not ask me to read. I don't think anyone wants to hear my southern nasal twang for three or four hours, and that's pretty much it. I’m easy to find. 
[0:47:04.0] MB: Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom with the listeners, tons of actionable insights and valuable ideas. 
[0:47:12.8] JH: Oh, you’re welcome. Can I make one more point really quick?
[0:47:15.3] JH: Yeah, absolutely. 
[0:47:17.2] JH: This applies to you and it will clearly resonate with you I'm sure. You're doing the podcast, but then you're also at French Hospitality, so you’re an “and” with quotes around that word. You’re a person who does this and this and this, and I think there are so much information out there that says people should specialize and they should focus and they should even hyper-focus and find these really small niches within which to succeed, and I think that's true, but I also think it's true that you can be a number of different things either at the same time or you can have what I call serial achievement moments where you go and do one thing, achieve it, pick something else you're interested in, work hard, initiate that. those are both really, really cool things. If you’re person at home who is not as satisfied with the things you’ve done, want there to be more to your life, want to achieve more things, want to be more successful, however you decide to define that, because you get to define success, then just take something you're interested in and start and create a process for yourself. Look around, find one that someone else has used that will get you started, and then put your head down and do some work. 
Even if it doesn't lead to anything that makes you wildly successful, you'll learn a ton along the way. You'll have fun doing it, and it may lead you to whatever it is that you choose to do next. So my best advice is always stop talking, stop thinking, stop dreaming and just start doing, because really good things happen when you start doing. 
[0:48:56.2] MB: Great advice, Jeff. Thank you so much for adding that at the end. Once again, thank you for coming on the show. Great insight, great conversation. I really enjoyed having you on here. 
[0:49:05.9] JH: Thanks, sir. It was awesome. Thank you very much. 
[0:49:08.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@success podcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 
I'm to give you three reasons why you should sign up for email list today by going to success podcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive, curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting, fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 
Next, you're going getting the exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 
Remember, that the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe in iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button right at the top. 
Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Simple Keys To Reading Anyone’s Hidden Emotions with Psychology Legend Dr. Paul Ekman

In this episode we explore emotions and facial expression in depth with one of the world’s top experts - the psychologist who pioneered much of the work in this field - Dr. Paul Ekman. We discuss the 6-7 major universal emotions, how emotional reactions are unchanged across cultures, ages, and even species, we discuss micro expressions, reading people’s faces, how to manage and control your emotions, and much much more. 

Dr. Paul Ekman is best known for his work as a pioneer researching the field of emotions and how they relate to our facial expressions and as founder of the Paul Ekman Group. These studies along with many others led to Paul being named one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine and One of the Most Influential Psychologist of the 20th Century by the American Psychological Association. Paul has written over 14 books and 170 published articles having his work appear in Psychology Today, The New Yorker, Oprah, Larry King, and more.

• Reading facial expressions with definitive evidence

• There is some universality to our expressions across cultures, ages, and even species

• Expressions are a product of evolution

• There are 6-7 major universal emotions

• Fear

  1. Anger

  2. Sadness

  3. Disgust

  4. Surprise

  5. Enjoyment

  6. Contempt (maybe not as robust evidence)

• You have to avoid “Othello’s error” - you can read an emotion, but that doesn’t tell you what TRIGGERS it

• The face, as a universal signal system, conveys a tremendous amount of information

• There are 16 different types of enjoyment

• How poker tells can teach us about emotional expressions and how we often read them wrong

• We can know HOW people feel, but we cannot know what triggered how they feel

• In one hour you can learn to read anyone's face

• How making voluntary facial expressions can turn on and create any emotional statement

• The hardest emotion to turn on is enjoyment

• Emotions are memories, expectations, changes in what we think, and changes in how we can remember

• When we are in the grip of an emotion - we most readily perceive things that fit the emotion we are experiencing and ignore things that don't

• It’s not easy to manage your emotions, but it is possible

• Fast onset vs slow onset emotional reactiveness

• Fast vs slow emotional offset

• The specific steps you can take to manage your emotions and create a gap between emotional triggers and emotional reactions

• Diary/journal is a powerful tool for understanding and managing your emotional states

• Record negative emotional experiences

  1. See what they have in common

  2. See if you can anticipate and prepare for negative emotions

• Lessons from 50 hours with the Dalai Llama

• Emotion is useful, powerful, but also can become cumbersome

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners THREE MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for three months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success99 to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of three whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success99

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [APA Journal] Emotion

• [Sage Journal] Emotion Review (EMR)

• [Book] Emotions Revealed, Second Edition: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Paul Ekman Ph.D

• [Book] Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion by Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman Ph.D.

• [Wiki Article] Charles Darwin

• [Training Tools] Micro Expressions Training Tools

• [Personal Site] Eve Ekman

• [Personal Site] Paul Ekman

• [Website] Atlas of Emotions

• [Article] What Scientists Who Study Emotion Agree About by Paul Ekman

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries.
In this episode we explore emotions and facial expressions in-depth with one of the world's top experts, the psychologist pioneered much of the work in this field, Dr. Paul Ekman. We discussed the 6 to 7 universal emotions. How emotional reactions are unchanged across cultures, ages, and even species. We examine micro-expressions, reading people's faces, talk about how to manage and control your own emotions and much, much more. 
I'm going to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There's some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up. First, you're going to get awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 
Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s short, simple, filled with evidence-based strategies, articles, TED Talks and more that we found interesting in the last week. Lastly, you can get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests, change our intro music and much, much more. So be sure to go to successpodcast.com, sign up to join the email list right on the homepage, or if you're driving around, if you're out and about, if you're on the go right now, just text the word “smarter”, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. That's “smarter" to 44222. 
In our previous episode we discussed everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examined the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pulled out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is. The global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence-based strategies for getting better sleep, and much more, with Dr. Matthew Walker. If you want to sleep better at night, listen to that episode.
[0:02:36.7] MB: Today, we have another titan of psychology on the show, Dr. Paul Ekman. Dr. Ekman is known for his work as a pioneer in researching the field of emotions and how they relate to our facial expressions and is the founder of the Paul Ekman Group. These studies along with many others led Paul to be named one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine and one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century by the American Psychology Association. He’s written over 14 books and has 170+ published articles. His work appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today, and much much more. 
Paul, welcome to the Science of Success. 
[0:03:12.8] PE: Thank you. 
[0:03:13.7] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. Your work has informed tons of what we talked about on the show. So it's truly an honor to have you here. 
[0:03:21.2] PE: Oh, ready to be available. 
[0:03:23.6] MB: I’d love to start out and dig in a little bit about kind of the universality and the power of facial expressions. 
[0:03:32.4] PE: Well, when I started out more than 50 years ago, it was believed that expressions were poor source of information. Just a harbor for stereotype and misunderstandings. That has shifted from that to the belief that while there is information in the face, but it's culture specific. And what my work and the work of others has shown, and I think as definitive as evidence ever gets, is that there are some universals of expression, that our expressions are not unique to each culture and that some of our expressions you can see in great apes and chimpanzees, that these are the product of our evolution and culture does influence what triggers the expressions. Culture does influence our attempts to manage our expressions. Culture does influence how we feel about our face. But culture does not write the rules as to what muscles will be activated when fear is felt or anger or distrust. There’re actually six or seven emotions that have a universal expression on the face. 
Those are — I have to count them on my figures as I tell you; fear, anger, sadness, distrust, surprise, enjoyment, and the evidence for contempt I think is almost as good, but it's not as widely replicated. So that's a lot of information from our faces. You don't need a Berlitz book to read the face, but the mistake you have to avoid is what I call Othello’s error. Othello red just about his fear expression accurately. What he misunderstood is what triggers it. Emotions do not tell you their trigger. You could know how someone's feeling, but you don't know what triggered it. 
Often our preconceptions about what should be triggering it may be misleading as it was for Orthello. But the face has a universal signal system. Charles Darwin was not the first to point this out, but perhaps one of the most influential and famous people to point it out, and he learned that because in his five year voyage on the beagle around the world, wherever he went, he was convinced he could understand their facial expressions but not their gestures, and he was right on both counts. Gestures, things like the A-OK are terrible insult in Sicily, for example. Gestures are culture specific, mini-language. I say mini, because they don't really have a grammar. Gesture rarely will you you admit four gestures in a row linked by a particular order. Gestures are pretty much singletons. I think culture specific, unlike the expressions which are universal. 
[0:06:45.0] MB: I find it interesting that out of all of those emotions, they're all skewed towards kind of negative emotions. You have enjoyment as the one positive may be surprised, but that could also most definitely be negative.
[0:06:57.5] PE: Well, I have 16 different types of enjoyment, but they pretty much share the same facial expressions. So there isn't just one way of enjoying yourself. There are at least the 16 that I've identified, but they don't have different signals. The signal is the same. It may differ in strength or in its timing, but it’s the same signal. Why is that so? You’d have to ask a higher authority than me. I don't answer the why. I just answer the when and how questions. 
[0:07:30.3] MB: That make sense. You know it's funny circling back to the idea you talked about a second ago of Othello’s error. I'm a poker player and it makes me think of poker tells, which obviously are very kind of wound up in this. If you can see a tell that might be a strong emotional or reaction, but you don't know if it's a reaction, because they're bluffing and they're scared or they have a great hand and they're scared that it still might lose. It’s so very dangerous to read into certain reactions, because you can sort of commit that error of not understanding what's actually triggering that emotional response. 
[0:08:01.2] PE: Right. We often think it's what fits our preconception of what should be triggering it. That may not be right at all. So it's a danger. We can know how people feel, but we cannot know from their expressions what triggered it. Now, sometimes we can tell by what we just said that it led to an immediate response. Even that can sometimes be misleading. So facial expressions tell us the emotion. They don't tell us the trigger. 
[0:08:32.1] MB: I want to dig in a little bit more and hear about how kind of scientifically validated and universal the work you've done around facial expressions is. 
[0:08:43.3] PE: You would have a hard time getting any respectable scientific journal to publish new evidence on the universality of facial expressions, because it's been established in the judgment of most of the scientific community. There are a few holdouts who do not agree, but I published a paper a year or two ago called what emotion scientists agree about. I first identified how many scientists in the world consider their special area of interest to be emotion. Well, 248 as of two years ago. 
Then I surveyed them. What do you think has been established beyond reasonable doubt? Well, certainly the universality of facial expression was the opinion over 90% of emotion scientists had been established beyond reasonable doubt.
Much less about what areas of the brain are involved? Much less about the triggers. Certainly, the universality of facial expression, pretty well-established. It’s well-established as any scientific fact could be established. 
[0:09:55.5] MB: I think it's fascinating. I read somewhere that you, through the course of your work, studied more than 15,000 people and you found these conclusions across everything from — In some instances, kind of apes and nonhumans, to infants, to many different cultures as well. 
[0:10:11.2] PE: True enough. 
[0:10:12.3] MB: Tell me a little bit about specifically your trip to New Guinea. I know that was one of the most influential moments or kind of inflection points in your work and your research. 
[0:10:22.1] PE: Well, I started out by doing studies in some 16 literate cultures. Some in Asia, some in South America where I would show the photographs of a facial expression and asked them to choose of six or seven words what was the emotion being signaled, and I found a very strong evidence for similarity for universality regardless of the language or culture. But it wasn't conclusive, because all the people I was studying, whether it was in Thailand, or in Argentina, had all been subject to the same mass media influences and perhaps they had all learned expressions, the meaning of expressions from the media. Not from their evolution. 
So deal with that loophole, I had to find a culture that was visually isolated. That it had no exposure to media, no books, no magazines, no photographs, no films, no video, and if possible, no outsiders. In 1966 when I searched for such a group, there weren't many left. I knew time was running out. I had to go to the highlands of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea and hike for four days to get into a visually isolated culture where I was the first outsider that ever seen. I showed them the first photograph that I ever had seen. 
That research was the most difficult to perform, but the most important in ruling out the possibility that similarities and expression were due to learning from common media instead of being a result of our evolution as a species. 
[0:12:21.4] MB: So I think we've established that these universal expressions are evidence-based, that they’re universal, that they're detectable. You can see on people's faces whether they’re experiencing anger or fear, sadness, etc. How do we practically integrate that information into our day-to-day lives? For somebody who's listening, how can they take that science and use it in some form or fashion, practice — 
[0:12:49.2] PE: Well you’re already doing it. You don't need me. Everybody responds to people's faces. It’s a very powerful stimulus, commands attention. You don't need to go to school to learn how to interpret it. From about six months of age and on, you can get good evidence of differential response to different facial expressions of emotion, but you didn't is before my work and the work of others, is whether it was the same across cultures. Yes, it is. You don’t need the Berlitz book of facial expressions when you travel around the world. You know what triggered it and that may well be different. You know how the person feels about the emotion that they're showing that they will be different. But regardless of culture, if the person is not succeeding and interfering with their expressions, you'll see the same configuration on their face. The same expression for the same emotion regardless of culture, and that’s for six or seven emotions. 
[0:13:56.7] MB: I know one of the ways that you’ve practically kind of grounded this, and you've done a tremendous amount of work on this as well, is in detecting liars and detecting lies. Tell me a little bit more about that. 
[0:14:07.4] PE: Well, that's a specific application. We could all lie with words very easily. I was really impressed with what President Trump told me this morning about what his next plans are, and he listened to my questions. I think I said that in a very effective and meaningful way. It's a total lie. So we can with words. That’s what words are made for. They’re made for communication, but it's very easy to lie with words. Much harder to lie convincingly with your face.
I found only about 10% of thousands of people I studied who could effectively lie with their face in a way that I could detect. Now, most of us are suckers for facial expression even rather poor, faked expressions are believed. That’s because most of us don't want to know the truth. We want to know what the person wants us to know rather than how they actually feel. Do you really want to find out that your spouse is unfaithful, that your adolescent is using hard drugs? No, of course you don't. In a sense you do, but you do and you don’t. 
We are all unwittingly collaborating and being misled by rather poor facial expressions. They don't mislead me and they don't mislead the people I train on how to detect lies from facial expression. Takes about an hour to two hours to learn how to do it effectively from the face. I even have a program on the Internet the people can buy that teaches them how to spot lies from facial expression. Learning how to spot it from the sound of the voice and from the words is more complicated and there is no currently available training tool, like the one I developed for the face that's available on the internet. 
[0:16:11.0] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that. So this is a trainable skillset that somebody who has — Who’s listened to episode wants to go out and in a few hours be able to read somebody's facial expressions. How do they do that?
[0:16:22.9] PE: They go on the internet and they put in the letters M, like micro, E like a motion, T like training, and T like tea, METT, and up will come the training tool and they will pay a fee. I think it's around $50. It will take them about an hour interacting with the training tool and they’ll become very accurate in being able to spot micro-expressions. The very quick expressions that leak attempts to conceal feelings. It won't change somehow to spot false expressions. I know how to do that. I can teach people how to do that, but that's not the tool I developed. A tool I developed was just for training people to spot the micro-expressions that occur that leak concealed emotions. 
[0:17:20.9] MB: Is this something that takes continuous practice to be able to wield or is it like riding a bike, where once you’d learn this, you can continue to recognize every day and see people when maybe the twinge of sadness or anger or something kind of flashes across their face?
[0:17:35.7] PE: We did some research to find that out, and we found out that it does not decay over time. I believe the reason is that once you learn it, you use it. So you're practicing it and honing it all the time. I would like to do an experiment where I train people and then blindfolded them for the next week so they couldn’t practice and see whether they still retained it, but nobody's willing to be a subject in that research that and I'm not going to do it.
[0:18:07.9] MB: What about defending against someone you can read your kind of facial expressions? Whether that's planting false expressions or covering up your own micro-expressions. Is that something that's possible and can it be trained?
[0:18:19.6] PE: I run a training in lie catching. I don't run a school for liars. So I have not tried to train people to be better facial liars. So I don't have any evidence whether or not it's trainable. My suspicion is most people cannot learn it well enough to fool someone who's received my training in how to spot such deceptions. 
[0:18:47.4] MB: So in my poker game, I’m out of luck in terms of my ability to conceal my emotional reactions on my face?
[0:18:53.9] PE: From someone who’s been trained using my METT, my micro-expression training tool, yes. Your best bet is to wear a mask. 
[0:19:02.1] MB: Fair enough. Fair enough. So I want to now talk a little bit about how our facial expressions can actually impact our emotional state. I know you've done a lot of work about that. Tell me a little bit more. 
[0:19:14.4] PE: Well, it was a surprising finding. I didn't expect it. Those of the nicest findings. Those are discoveries. A lot of research you do is simply proof of something that you suspect or know already, but you need the evidence for. Then there is discovery research, where you didn’t know what you’re going to find, and you find something you didn't expect. Td that so about the fact, which I think it's pretty well-established at this point, scientifically. That by voluntarily making one of the universal facial expressions, you generate the changes in the body and in the brain which occur without emotion is evoked more naturally. 
You can turn on any emotion if you could make the face. The hardest one to turn on paradoxically is enjoyment, and the reason is that one of the two muscles you have to move, the muscle that orbits the eye. Only about 10% of people could do voluntarily. The muscles movements for anger, fear, sadness, discussed and surprised, everybody, nearly everybody can do, and so they could turn those emotions on if they want to. The muscles for enjoyment, everybody can do one of them, the one the pulls your lip corners up, but only about 10% of people can, at the same time, contract the muscle that orbits the outer part of their eye muscle. 
[0:20:50.2] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that muscular movement. Is that kind of widening your eyes or what exactly is it? 
[0:20:56.1] PE: There are two muscles that orbit your eye. The inner one is a fairly close circle. If you drew a circle right over your — Or above your upper eyelid, down about a half inch below your lower eyelid, that's the inner or virtual orbital muscle, which we call muscle six — I’m sorry. Muscle 7. There is a larger one, and everybody can do that. You squint, you do that. There is a larger one around that that goes above your eyebrow, around the top part of your cheek, and only about 10% of us can voluntarily contract that muscle. Unless you contract that muscle at the same time you contract the muscle that pulls your lip corners, you won't be able to turn on enjoying them. We’ll have to do something enjoyable to turn it on, not by contracting the muscles. 
[0:21:57.9] MB: I'm sitting here right now trying to contort my face to see whether or not I'm capable of doing that. Is it possible through muscular training or other activities to learn to turn enjoyment on like that?
[0:22:08.0] PE: Yeah, we could train people to do it, but I haven't spent much time doing it. It's tedious to do and it would be a much more difficult task to develop an online training tool to do that. So I run a set of techniques for lie catchers, not for liars. 
[0:22:29.7] MB: That make sense. That makes sense. So I know that that discovery led your work into looking more broadly at how we interact with and deal with our own emotions. Tell me a little bit about that journey and how you became so fascinated with our own emotional worlds. 
[0:22:46.8] PE: Well, once you open up your question of emotion, an expression is a signal of an emotion. Expressions aren't the emotion themselves. The emotions are directed by number a of circuits in our brain, which nearly all of us have if we’re not brain damaged, that are innate. But their expression is influenced by our development and what we learn in the course of growing up. It’s a duel influence, and emotions are not simply our only expressions. That's the signal of the emotion. They are memories, expectations, changes in how we think and what we could remember. Emotions act as filters. When we are in the grip of an emotion, we can most readily perceive things that fit the emotion we’re experiencing and will by enlarge March ignore things that don't. 
In a similar fashion, we can remember from our memory things consistent with the motion we’re feeling and we’ll have a hard time remembering things that are inconsistent with it. So our emotions act as filters on what we see in the world and what we can access in ourselves. 
[0:24:12.7] MB: And what led you to begin digging into the rabbit hole of emotions? 
[0:24:17.9] PE: It was there. Who could ask for more? A ripe, important problem that had not been well explored, who is waiting for me. So I took it on. It took me between 5 and 10 years to make real progress of steady work on it, and I was pleased to find something so important that had not yet been well explored, and I was glad to have the time and the funding to be able to do so.
[0:24:48.5] MB: What were some of the first of the findings that you discovered when you began your work on emotion?
[0:24:55.1] PE: Well, the universality of facial expression was the very first finding. It was the first issue I took up, and other scientists have said that the publication of universality of facial expression, my publication of that, resurrected the field of emotion, which had been left dormant for 30 or 40 years. There was probably a bit of research on it in the 20s and 30s, and then it was dropped completely in the 40s and 50s and got rejuvenated after the publication of my findings on universality. Now, it’s a hot field. There are two scientific journals dedicated just to the field of emotion, publishing research just on emotion. 
[0:25:42.8] MB: If you don't mind me asking, which journals as those? We’ll make sure to include those in our show notes for the listeners.
[0:25:47.2] PE: Well, one of them is called emotions. That's a really easy. It’s published by the American Psychological Association, and I don't remember the name of the other journal. It’s probably something like the Journal of Emotion, but I don't remember. I don't read those journals of this point in my life. I'm retired. 
[0:26:06.5] MB: What did you find in terms of emotional reactions across different cultures? Do we have similar reactions or they sort of culturally shaped? 
[0:26:15.0] PE: They’re both in part because we have emotions about our motions, and cultures differ and how —What they teach their members to feel about feelings. When you get angry, do you get afraid of your anger? Do you get excited about your anger? Do you enjoy being angry? How much does it depend on who you're angry at? These are all things that different cultures and within a culture you’ll will find differences on. 
[0:26:43.3] MB: I want to dig a little bit deeper into emotions. When we find ourselves behaving in an emotional way, how can we start to step back and not only understand that better, but kind of deal with situations like that more productively or more effectively going forward?
[0:27:01.7] PE: It won't be easy. Now, individuals different in what they call their emotional profile. For some of us we go from no motion to a moderate or a strong emotion in less than a second. We have what I’d call a fast onset. While others go from no emotion to a strong emotion. It takes quite a few seconds. Most people have a better chance of being able to control their emotions or even sidestep and not engage. Our former President Obama was a good exemplar of someone who had a very slow emotional onset. Our current president, I think, but I haven't been able to study him as much, has fast emotional onset. 
I wrote an article which was published somewhere about what are the personality characteristics we should want in our leaders and the people who can initiate a war, or at least the first steps of the war. One of them, those characteristics, is a slow, not a fast emotional onset. It's safer. They have more time to consider. Do they really want to engage? That's the major difference that I've studied. 
Now I propose that we also differ, and once we’re in a grip of an emotion, how long it endures, and that we also differ in what I call the offset. Once it begins to decay, does it take us a long time to get over the emotion or do we go back through a neutral state very quickly? I know that people differ in their emotional profile, their onset duration and offset. I don't know. Someone could do research to find out how early in life is this apparent and how consistent is it across the lifecycle. I don’t know. If I was 10 years younger, I would take that question on, but it's a 10-year question, probably take 10 years to resolve, and I don't have 10 years to live. 
[0:29:14.2] MB: You know, that's interesting. In my own personal experience, I can definitely see that I feel like I'm someone who has both a slow onset of emotions and also a slow, I guess, offset of emotion. So it takes a long time for an emotion to kind of hit me, but once it does, it really sticks with me for a while and it's hard for me to kind of move beyond it. 
[0:29:32.0] PE: You have a long-duration, long onset, long-duration. Then once it begins to add, does go back quickly or does it take a while for you to get over it as it ebbs?
[0:29:46.5] MB: I think it varies. I mean, it's not a huge amount of time, but I think it definitely — If I get put into, let’s just say a negative emotional state, it takes me a little while to kind of come out of it. I've done a lot of work on — And we’ll get into this more, but journaling and mindfulness and other strategies that have helped me understand and manage my own emotions more effectively. 
[0:30:06.5] PE: Well, having a long onset means you’ve got a better chance of being able to manage your emotions than people who have a short onset. There isn’t enough time for them to become aware of the fact that they’re in a grip of an emotion, because it’s got them in a fracture of a second, and there are people like that. We should not want such people to be our leaders. 
[0:30:31.8] MB: You're probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities that you can use to live a rich and rewarding life. That's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our incredible sponsor for this show, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 courses in design, business and more. 
You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and they offer unlimited access to all of their courses for a low monthly price, so you never have to pay per course again. They have some awesome courses on though that I personally love including mastering Evernote, getting in the mind mapping, which is an incredible skillset, learning how to draw, and much more. 
If you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare. Right now they're offering an incredible value to our listeners. You can get three months of Skillshare for just $0.99. Go to skillshare.com/success99 to redeem this offer. You can get three months for $0.99. They’ve been incredible sponsor. They’ve been supporting the show for months. Go check out their website. It's absolutely awesome. 
Now back to the show. 
[0:31:48.8] MB: For somebody who's listening that maybe has a short onset, is there anything that they can do to help widen that gap between kind of reaction, sort of trigger and reaction?
[0:32:00.8] PE: Yes, here are the steps to take. Keep a diary of regrettable emotional episodes. Those times you’ve got an emotion which afterwards you think, “I wish I have either — I wish that I hadn’t felt any emotion or I wish I hadn’t of acted the way I did act.” Just write a sentence or two about each entry in the diary. 
If you’ve got 30, take a look at them and see what's in common. What’s the common trigger? It’s setting off regrettable emotional episodes. Can you by that means to learn how to anticipate such episodes and either avoid them or prepare yourself. 
I sometimes, if I know I’m getting into what will be for me a difficult emotional episode, I’ll rehearse in my mind. I’ll play out a whole movie script in my mind of a different way of handling that. I also find that it helps to notify the other person. If I’ll say to my wife, “Is this a good time for us to discuss a difficult emotional matter?” She may say, “No. Not right now. I’m not ready,” or she may say, “Well, let's talk about that Saturday morning?” So we’re both set and prepared. 
Step one, make a diary of regrettable episodes. Step two, see what they have in common. Step three, see if you can anticipate and prepare yourself for your next encounter what will trigger a difficult emotional episode so you don't have to act in a way that you will subsequently regret. 
[0:33:41.6] MB: Tell me about has there been research or have you done research specifically around the kind of diary or the journal and why that's such an effective tool for managing negative emotions or emotions in general?
[0:33:53.6] PE: I haven't done any research on it. I thought of it too late in my career beyond the point where I had the funding for research, nor has anyone to my knowledge. Take it for what it's worth. I think it's right. I think it'll work. It makes sense from what we know about emotion, but it has not been tested in research. 
[0:34:16.8] MB: I asked mostly, because I’m really curious. I'd love to dig in and kind of understand. I found that strategy be very effective for myself personally as well, that I really would love to get into some of the science and figure out more effectively kind of what it says about that question specifically. 
[0:34:31.2] PE: Maybe someone who listens to this program will take this on for their doctoral dissertation. 
[0:34:37.1] MB: Great idea. Listeners out there,  you heard Dr. Ekman. Get on it. Another tool that you’ve talk a lot about is mindfulness. Tell me about how you came to mindfulness as a strategy for managing your emotions or managing emotions more broadly. 
[0:34:51.1] PE: It was an accident. My daughter, Eve Ekman, got interested in it and in the Dalai Lama and we threw her. I got to meet and spend actually — The Dalai Lama and I spent about 50 hours in one-on-one conversations, which in our conversations about emotion are published in a book, paperback book called Emotional Awareness, and we called it that, because the key is to develop awareness of what you're in an emotion. 
Now, emotions usually occur without having any awareness of it when we’re in the grip of the emotion. It's usually not until after the emotion that we may realize particularly when someone says, “What was wrong with you just then?” You say, “Oh! Gee, I lost my head.” What you mean is that you were unaware of being emotional. That's in the nature of emotion itself, is to keep awareness out. That's what saved your life. That's why you could drive on the freeway and avoid cars that are veering towards you in a dangerous way without thinking about it. But that very skill that allows you to drive on the freeway is the skill that means that you're not going to be aware of the onset of emotions. 
The benefit of mindfulness, which is only partially substantiated in research, and there's nothing that really contradicts it, but there isn’t as much research as I would like to see to supported it. is that that's a practice that will increase the likelihood of your being aware, of being in the grip of an emotion when you are in the grip of the emotion, not just afterwards. We don't really have a set of psychological tools for generating that kind of awareness. 
Again, if I was still at a research lab and had 10 or 15 years in front of me, I would take on doing that research, but I haven't and I don't know anyone who has. 
[0:37:08.1] MB: Fair enough. I’m just curious about what topics still fascinate you. Once again, I think that could be a challenge to people out there listening. Maybe it's an opportunity to do a little bit more homework and a little bit more digging. I'm curious, I want to know more about your experience with the Dalai Lama. 
[0:37:23.3] PE: Well, I felt once we started spending time with each other, that I've known him all my life. I felt he was a brother. I've never had a brother. I had a sister, but I never had a brother. I really felt like I’ve met a family member. So strange, because you probably couldn't find two more dissimilar people in terms of upbringing.. He's a Buddhist monk and I’m sort of a renegade non-practicing Jew. I’m raised in a Westerners, and he’s raised in an Easter tradition, and yet we really hit it off. 
He believes it's because of the previous incarnation, we were brothers. Of course, I don't believe in reincarnation. I have no explanation. He has an expiration, which I reject. He finds it amusing that I, the scientists, can't explain what he — The Buddhist has an explanation for, but that's where we are. We’ve had a wonderful time conversing and I think our book, jointly authored book, Emotional Awareness, reaches the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman and it’s in paperback. I know it's a book of dialogue and it pretty much captures, pretty well captures where our conversation went and what we learned talking toeach other. 
[0:38:40.7] MB: That's fascinating, and I'm a huge fan of the Dalai Lama and his work and we’ve had several previous guests you've also interacted with him and learned from him. So for someone who's listening to this episode that wants to kind of concretely implement the things we’ve talked about today in some way or another, what would be kind of one piece of homework that you would give to them as an exercise or a practice or a starting point to implement something that we’ve talked about today?
[0:39:09.1] PE: Go online and use the micro-expression training tool, METT. That will certainly open your eyes and make you a more accurate perceive or emotion. Do search for Eve Ekman, my daughter, and see what she's next giving a workshop. But I know that I think this coming weekend, she’s doing a one-day workshop on mindfulness here in San Francisco at a local meditation center in the Mission District, which you can find that by searching on the internet for Eve Ekman Workshops. There's a couple of things you can do. 
[0:39:53.9] MB: We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes for listeners who want to dig in and find both training tool and see if there are any upcoming workshops near them. For listeners who want to find more about you and your work, what’s the best place to find you and your various books and research online?
[0:40:11.2] PE: I have a website, and I think it's called paulekman.com, or just go on the internet and do a search for my name and it'll come up in the first few. Also, take a look at something that my daughter and I developed and put on the internet. Dalai Lama said to me, he really wanted to get to the new world we needed a map. So could you make a map of the emotions? So my daughter and a local cartographer created a map of the emotions, and if you go into any web browser put into it map of emotions, it'll come up and you'll see free of charge and it is a map of how the emotions work and it will help you understand your emotions better. There's some concrete suggestions. 
[0:40:59.6] MB: Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your incredible story journey and wisdom. You're truly one of the most influential psychologists in the field today, and so it's truly been an honor to have you on here and learn more about your groundbreaking work. 
[0:41:17.7] PE: Well, thank you for asking good questions. The worst nightmare is when you're being interviewed by someone who asks really dull questions, but you ask good ones. So thank you for that. 
[0:41:29.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 
I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 
Next, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that will ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand. Our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything, you can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 
Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm. That helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 
Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those successpodcast.com. Just hit the show notes button right at the top. 
Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen To The Episode

Show Notes

Video - 4 Scientifically Proven Paths To A Perfect Night Sleep

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic - Why You Should Sleep More

Links and Additional Research

Episode Transcript

Are you tired? If your answer is yes, it would seem relatively straightforward to assume you're not getting enough sleep.

It’s one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself.

Improve. Your. Sleep.

You’re going to spend a large portion of your like sleeping. And that’s a good thing! Getting more sleep not only allows you to wake up well rested each morning but also prevents disease and can lead to a longer (and happier) life overall.

Did you know that routinely sleeping less than 6 hours a night can increase your risk of cancer by 50%? After just one night of less than 5 hours of sleep Natural Killer Cells (which fight cancer cells) drop by 70%! After just one night!

Sleep isn't just about rest. It's about the body repairing itself, doing maintenance so to speak. Unfortunately, what has been discovered over time (and discussed in this book) is that, if you lose sleep, taking a nap, while it takes the edge off, it doesn't replace the sleep lost during the night.

Our ability to fight disease (including cancer) and obesity may be directly tied to not getting enough restful sleep. Pills don't help either. Yes, they knock you out and make it easier to fall asleep but they lack the restorative power of natural sleep and, in fact, some sleeping pills can increase your risk of cancer.

Knowing this, it must change the way you think about the old saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… because ironically adopting that mindset will get you there quicker.

Do you find that you wake up feel groggy or angry? Do you reach for the snooze button 1, 2 or even 3 times each morning? Or, do you hop right out of bed ready to tackle the new day?

What about at night? Do you struggle to fall asleep? Tossing and turning seemingly unable to count enough sheep to get to bed. Or, are you out like a light when you pull the covers over yourself?

If you want to literally improve every single aspect of your life and wake up feeling refreshed and rested each and every night this interview is for you.

To get started NOW, download our free guide below and learn 5 super simple and easy ways to maximize your sleep starting tonight!

In this episode we discuss everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examine the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pull out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is, the global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence based strategies for getting better sleep and much more with Dr. Matthew Walker. 

Dr. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has published over 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Which is currently the #1 Amazon Bestseller in Neuroscience . He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC.

Show Notes

• Global sleep loss epidemic - the average American sleeps only 6.5 hours per night

• Sleep has slowly been eroded by our society over the last 60 years

• Sleep is vital and essential from an evolutionary standpoint - you can’t just lop off 25% of the necessary sleep you need

• Studies across millions of people show one clear thing - the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

• If you sleep less, you will be dead sooner, lack of sleep kills your more quickly

• Lack of sleep is a major predictor of “all cause mortality” including cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide

• Hard science shows why a lack of sleep is tremendously bad for you

• Sleep has an image problem, we stigmatize sleep and think its lazy and slothful - people wear lack of sleep as a badge of honor to be celebrated

• Less sleep does not equal more productivity

• The 5 clear truths of sleep research and productivity

• Under-slept employees take on less challenging problems

  1. They produce fewer creative solutions

  2. They exert less effort when working in groups (slacking off, social loafing)

  3. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behavior

  4. The more or less sleep that a CEO has had, the more or less charismatic they will be

• Chronic exhaustion cost most first world nation 2% of the GDP - 411 billion dollars lost each year to a lack of sleep

• The research is very clear that under-slept individuals are not as productive or successful

• The evidence is resoundingly clear - cutting on sleep makes you less productive and less creative and less effective

• After being awake for 21 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is legally drunk

• The two principle types of sleep - REM sleep and non-REM sleep

• The different stages of sleep - the 4 stages of REM sleep

• Hard science shows that deep Sleep is critical to clearing toxins out of your brain

• Sleep is like a sewage system for your brain - it cleans all the toxins and debris out of your brain

• The less sleep you have, the higher your probability of getting Alzheimers

• Different cognitive systems in your brain also work during sleep - its like saving files to a hard drive, you have to sleep to get the save button

• The emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep - the amygdala (which controls fight or flight) is regulated by the pre-frontal cortex

• Lack of sleep can have a serious negative impact on your emotional health

• Sleep reboots body systems as well - not just the brain

• Deep sleep is one of the best blood pressure medications you can imagine

• Deep sleep regulates insulin levels and blood glucose levels

• Sleep is also essential for the reproductive system

• Sleep boosts testosterone and lack of sleep makes you 10 years older from a testosterone standpoint

• Appetite, weight, food consumption are all regulated by sleep - lack of sleep makes you eat 300-550 more calories per day, and makes you eat more high sugar and high carb foods

• Sleep also has a profound impact on the immune system - one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop natural killer cells (body cancer fight cells) by 70%!

• The link between lack of sleep and cancer the WHO recently classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen

• Sleeping 5 hours per night makes you 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone sleeping 8 hours a night

• There is not a SYSTEM or PROCESS in the body/brain that is not impacted by sleep

• The most striking omission in the health literature today is that sleep is not at the center of the health conversation

• 3 key ways sleep improves your learning

• Is it wise to pull an all nighter? What does the research say?

• The “memory inbox of the brain” (hippocampus) and how sleep is vital to creating and storing memories

• Sleep is vital both BEFORE learning and AFTER learning to store and save new memories and solidify them into the architecture of the brain

• Sleep replays information and strengthens memories

• Sleep provides a 3x advantage to problem solving compared to an equivalent period being awake

• "The 6 Unpopular Tactics for Getting Enough Sleep"

• Carve out enough time and make sleep a priority - carve out an 8 hour window to sleep every night

  1. This is the #1 thing to do - regularity is KEY - go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what

     1. Sleeping in late creates “social jetlag” which has serious negative consequences - regularity of sleep is key

  2. Keep the temperature cool - keep your bedroom 68 degrees - your body needs to drop its core temperature 2-3 degrees to fall asleep

  3. You can hack this by taking a hot bath before bed

  4. DARKNESS is key to producing melatonin. Phones, screens, blue light etc trick the brain into thinking its day time and shut off melatonin production

  5. Reading on a tablet 1 hour before bed shifts your melatonin production 3 hours later!

     1. Use blackout shades

     2. No screens 1 hour before bed

  6. Do NOT stay in bed if you’ve been in bed longer than 20 minutes. You brain is a very associative machine - being awake in bed trains the brain that it’s OK to be awake in bed. Get up, go to a different room, read a book in dim light, no screens, no eating. And only when you feel sleep return to bed, and you will re-learn the key association between making the bed about sleep

  7. Some people don’t like this idea.

     1. Meditation is a great way to get yourself to fall back asleep. The studies are very clear, very well done that meditation can help improve sleep.

  8. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings.

  9. Caffein prevents deep sleep

     1. Alcohol fragments your sleep and makes your wake up much more, leaving with un-restorative sleep

     2. Alcohol blocks dreams and REM sleep

• Sedation is NOT sleep. Knocking out your cortex is not natural sleep.

• You could be A FAR BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF mentally, cognitively, physiology if you just got more sleep

• Current sleeping pills are “sedative hypnotics” that do NOT productive naturalistic sleep, and do not get the benefits of sleep

• Sleeping pills have a far higher risk of death, cancer, infection

• CBTI - cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but much more effective long term

• Melatonin can be a useful tool to time the onset of sleep

• Does napping work?

• There is no such thing as the sleep bank - you can’t accumulate a debt and then hope to cash in on the weekend - sleep doesn’t work like that

• Napping can prevent you from falling asleep and staying asleep! Be careful!

• How does GABA impact your sleep?

• Sleep is a remarkably complex neurochemical ballet

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic: Why You Should Sleep More 

Do you ever pull an all-nighter to cram for a test, but still fail? Maybe you work 60-hour weeks but feel like you’re getting nowhere. Unfortunately, developed nations are suffering from a sleep deprivation epidemic, but science can help us see the reasons for getting a good eight hours every night.

 A common saying you hear is, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” But recent sleep studies have shown us that less sleep means our lifespans shorten and our quality of life will decrease too. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to sleep less and work more, so we need help shifting our social perspective.

It turns out, that our relatively recent attempt to shorten the amount of sleep we get runs into a lot of problems against the million-year-old necessity that mother nature has put in place. The 20-25% decrease we’ve imposed on ourselves has led to an increased likelihood of developing every major disease that kills us in the developed world.

Elucidating Sleep Science

“I think part of the problem, perhaps, is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public and I think it’s people like myself who are to blame.” – Dr. Matthew Walker 

Dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His belief is that sleep science is not understood by the public, which was part of his motivation for writing Why We Sleep.

Many people appear to be proud of how little they sleep. However, the list of problems linked to a lack of sleep include Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide, among other mental health conditions. With this information in hand, it’s necessary to remove the stigma on getting a sufficient amount of sleep (about eight hours).

Dr. Walker set out to write a book of reasons why you should sleep, rather than rules. He addresses the relationship between sleep and productivity, citing laboratory and workplace studies that have provided him with five clear truths.

Five Facts About Sleep-Deprived Workers

“It’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful.” – Dr. Walker

1. They take on less-challenging problems.

2. They produce fewer creative solutions.

3. They exert less effort when working in groups.

4. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behaviors.

5. Less sleep means less-charismatic leaders.

He also notes that a recent report demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue (due to a lack of sleep) caused most first-world nations to lose about 2% of their GDP (that’s $411 billion for the U.S.). “If we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the U.S., we could almost double the budget for education, and we could make huge in-roads into the problems we have with healthcare,” he adds.

Dr. Walker shares an analogy to represent the current nature of an office workplace by comparing it to a spin class: “Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes – there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity.”

Finally, he ends his evaluation of workplace attitudes by observing how their attempt to optimize the efficiency of every system stops at the human level. Where the budget, taxes, hardware, and software are all effective, there’s no focus or understanding of a human’s cognitive or physiological capacities and their necessity to reboot and recharge.

Sleep: The Human Recycling Period

“There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain, that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker informs us that we need eight-hours of sleep after 16-hours of wakefulness; and after 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. So what exactly is happening when we sleep?

Sleep is simply divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where we dream, and non-REM sleep; while non-REM sleep is further divided into four sub-stages. Each stage performs different yet necessary functions.

When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. Thus, one of the functions performed during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep is to clear out the metabolic toxins that have been built up in our brain. This is done through our brain’s glymphatic system (similar to our body’s lymphatic system). While asleep, this system’s performance increases by 200-300% relative to when we’re awake. (This process is known to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Sleeping also improves our learning in at least three ways.

1. Sleeping prepares our brain: A lack of sleep leads to a 40% deficit in our ability to make memories.

2. Sleeping ‘saves’ information: While asleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory. Like hitting the ‘Save’ button, it prevents us from forgetting memories.

3. Sleeping strengthens our memories: Sleep interconnects new memories together and interconnects it with pre-existing memories. This creates an updated associative network of memories.

Dr. Walker comments on the third point, “That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divined creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.” While simple problems benefit from focused thought, complex problems benefit from non-conscious thought, such as that which occurs during sleep. It’s because of this function that nearly every language has a phrase similar to “sleep on a problem,” and not to “stay awake on a problem.” He ends with the analogy, “It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.”

The emotional circuits of our brains are also modified during sleep. Our amygdala is reconnected to our prefrontal cortex when we get a good night’s sleep, which puts a brake on our emotional gas pedal. When we are deprived of sleep, the connection is severed, which essentially makes us all emotional gas pedal and no brake.

The benefits of sleep don’t end at the brain; there are many physiological systems that are rebooted during sleep as well. Deep, non-REM sleep is one of the best forms of blood pressure medicine, because it slows your heart rate. It also releases a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones, including a growth hormone that restores the cells in your body.

Sleep regulates your metabolic system, specifically insulin levels. In fact, studies have shown that one week of five-six hours of sleep a night will disrupt a person’s blood sugar enough to classify them as pre-diabetic. This illustrates the crucial role sleep plays in regulating the metabolic system.

A lack of sleep is known to age both men and women by a decade in terms of wellness and virility by disrupting the reproductive system.

Appetite regulation and food consumption are directly affected by sleep. Sleep deprivation causes in imbalance in leptin, which tells your brain when you’re satisfied with your food, and ghrelin, which tells your brain you’re not satisfied with your food. This causes you to eat 300-500 more calories a day. Not only do you eat more, but you’re also more likely to reach for starchy carbohydrates and high-sugar foods, while avoiding high-protein foods.

One night of four-hours of sleep will drop your cancer-fighting immune cells by 70%. The link between sleep-deprivation and cancer is so strong, that the World Health Organization recently classified night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen because it disrupts our sleep rate rhythms.

Five-hours of sleep per night the week before you get your flu shot will reduce your body’s antibody response to less than 50%, rendering it largely ineffective. Similarly, with five-hours you are 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone who gets eight-hours of sleep.

According to Dr. Walker, “All lack of sleep is, perhaps, a slow from of self-euthanasia.”

How to Fall Asleep Fast and Sleep Better

“I think what we know is that: Without sleep there is low energy and disease, with sleep there is vitality and health.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker begins to share five tips (and their explanations) for how to sleep better. These five tips all follow a primary, overarching requirement: Carve out an eight-hour, non-negotiable sleep window every night.

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time.

Regardless if it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, always wake up at the same time. Even if you have a bad night of sleep, just make sure you fall asleep early the following evening. Sleeping in late causes “social jetlag” where you feel tired in the evening and drift forward in time; this has deleterious consequences to your health and sleep.

2. Keep it cool.

Keeping your bedroom around 68°F (18.5°C) is optimal for most people. This is because your body needs to drop its core temperate 2-3° to initiate sleep. If your feet get cold, then you can wear socks. Also, a hot bath before bed causes mass vasodilation (more so than a hot shower); this pulls your blood near your skin’s surface, plummeting your core temperature.

3. Keep it dark.

Darkness releases melatonin, a vital hormone for the onset of sleep. Too much light inside the house (or from LED screens) before bed will trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime, shut off the production of melatonin, and prevent sleep. Dim your lights by turning half of them off in the evening, avoid LED screens in the last hour before bed, and use black-out curtains.

4. Get up if you’ve been awake in bed for longer than 20-minutes.

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or wake up, you must get out of bed if you’ve been lying awake for more than 20-minutes. If not, then your brain creates the association that your bed is about being awake, rather than asleep. If you’re trying to fall asleep but can’t, then go to another, dim room and maybe read a book (but avoid eating and screens). Only when you’re sleepy should you return to bed; that way you fall right asleep and recreate the association that beds are for sleeping. Dr. Walker, a hard scientist and skeptic, even suggests meditation, citing its support from clinical trial data and his recent conversion to the practice himself.

5. No caffeine after noon and no alcohol in the evenings.

Even people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them because they fall right asleep suffer from less-deep sleep. When they wake up, they don’t feel as refreshed, then reach for an extra cup in the morning, thus building a cycle of dependency and addiction. If you don’t stop at noon, then certainly after 2:00pm. Alcohol, on the other hand, sedates your cortex (effective knocking out your brain). This causes un-restorative sleep by waking you up multiple times throughout the night. It also blocks your REM sleep, which is critical for creativity and memory processing as well as emotional and mental health.

A common trap for people to fall into is thinking, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” But this perception of yourself prevents you from realizing that you can be a far better version of yourself, mentally, cognitively, and physiologically, if you simply start getting enough sleep.

This trap can easily occur as a result of excessive or improper caffeine consumption. It isn’t until people come off caffeine that they start to feel the benefits that normally come from high-caffeine use. “It’s like wiping a fogged window, and you can start to see clearly through it,” Dr. Walker comments, attributing the improvement to a full, restorative night of sleep. 

How to Deal with Insomnia

            “There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep.” – Dr. Walker

Sleeping Pills

Dr. Walker goes on to address the question of sleeping pills. He explains that the current class of drugs one will be prescribed are called ‘sedative hypnotics.’ Just like alcohol, these sedate (or knock out) your brain. The sleep you get on sleeping pills is not the same as natural, healthy sleep.

Additionally, these pills are associated with a far higher risk of death, cancer, and infection. Though these links have not be confirmed as causal or merely associational. He goes on to inform us that that people don’t necessarily need them, and there is a safe, non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI).

With CBTI, the benefits to your sleep are just as powerful in the short-term, but they also continue long-term as you maintain the practice. Sleeping pills, on the other hand, produce rebound insomnia, where your sleep is just as bad (or worse) once you stop taking them. (People should revisit these issues with their doctor if they’re interested in alternative treatment.) 

GABA

GABA is the principle, inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain; it works like a red light for your neurons, telling them to stop firing. Most sleeping medications work by targeting the GABA system, though their blunt nature is incapable of properly mimicking the complex neuro-chemical and neuro-physiological ballet that occurs during sleep.

Melatonin Supplements

Next, Dr. Walker discusses the uses of melatonin supplements. While they don’t actually help a young, healthy person with a stable sleep schedule, they’re great for helping someone adjust to a new time zone. By taking it 30-60 minutes before you want to sleep, it can help reset your body’s internal clock and counteract jetlag. He also notes that if people take melatonin and they feel that it helps (even if it doesn’t), then they should continue to do so.

Napping

Many people think that, if they don’t get enough sleep, then they can just “catch up” on it later, either with a nap or by getting more sleep at night. Dr. Walker states, “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate debt, then hope to pay it off at the weekend. There is no credit system.”

However, if you are sleep-deprived, then you can nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times improve a little, but you don’t overcome the higher-level cognitive issues, like decision-making, learning and memory, and focused attention. He goes on to discuss a futile tactic he sees in his students that he calls ‘sleep bulimia.’ This is where they get too little sleep during the week, then try to binge sleep during the weekend and make up the deficit.

He uses an analogy to describe a negative aspect of napping: Throughout the day we build up a chemical pressure in our brain, a sleepiness pressure, due to the build up of adenosine. The more you build up the sleepier you feel; and after 16-hours of wakefulness, you should fall right asleep and stay asleep for eight-hours, thus releasing the sleepiness pressure. However, when we nap, it’s like we open a valve and let a little of the pressure out. This makes it harder for us to sleep well at night, either by struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Echoing the placebo affect associated with melatonin supplements, if you can nap regularly and sleep well at night, then keep napping. Otherwise, you should avoid napping and build up that sleepiness pressure until you fall asleep at night.

Action Steps for a Good Night’s Sleep

To finish off, Dr. Walker suggests a simple self-improvement test: Give yourself one week of eight-hours of sleep a night. Determine if you feel better when you get eight-hours of regularly scheduled sleep versus a random schedule of five-hours one night, then six-hours the next, and so on. Then ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better? Do I notice that improvement?”

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
[DVD] Memento
[Twitter] Matt Walker
[LinkedIn] Matthew Walker
[Website] Sleep Diplomat

Why We Sleep (14min)

• The incredible benefits of getting enough and the terrible side effects of not getting enough. 

• The Brain and The Functions of learnings and memory. 

  • Sleep after learning is essential and like hitting the “save” button after learning. We also now know that it’s important even before learning. 

  • Without sleep the memory circuits become blocked up.

• Examine The Hypothesis of the All Nighter

  • 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

  • Brain activity is shot almost entirely after sleep deprivation. 

    • He describes it as like Memento the movie. (Great movie BTW)

• What is it that causes people to get good sleep and how does it affect our brain?

• What in sleep causes these benefits?

  • As we get older our memory gets work but our sleep does as well and they are related.

• Sleep is critical for your emotional and mental health

  • On less sleep these areas of the brain become irrational. 

  • Video of a subject illustrates this point. - Subject goes from angry to laughing then back to base in about 20 seconds. 

  • Without sleep you can’t take your foot off the emotional gas pedal.

• Sleep deprivation is correlated with depression and almost every psychiatric disorder. 

• The body relies on sleep as well.

  • 75% reduction in NK cell activity even after one bad night of sleep. Immune system will be shot. 

  • Lack of sleep and cancer has been shown to have a strong relationship. 

Matthew on CBS This Morning (6min)

• ⅔ of Americans do not get their full recommended 8 hours of sleep. 

• Every disease in developed nations is made worse by lack of sleep.

• Short Sleep = Shorter Life

• Brain - builds up a toxic buildup in the brain.

• Body - No immune system and activities stress chemistry leading to heart disease and cancer. 

• ALL RESEARCH BASED

• Naps - A double edged sword. Sleep is not like the bank, you can’t accumulate debt then pay it off as you go about your day. 

• Sleeping Pills - These are bad!

Secrets of the Sleeping Brain (1hr 41min)

• Long video that goes deep into some of the topics covered above. 

• Love the concept that we’ve hit on before that sleep actually allows you to integrate in ideas and learnings into what you’ve been doing prior. 

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic (6min)

• Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences. Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker provides a fascinating insight into why it is vital we start taking sleep seriously.

Episode Transcript

[0:02:21.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and a founder and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He’s published over a 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the power of Sleep and Dreams, which is currently the number one Amazon bestseller in the neuroscience category. He’s been featured on TV, radio, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, National Geographic and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:53.7] MW: It’s a pleasure to be on Matt. Thank you for having me. 

[0:02:56.2] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to begin the conversation and talk a little bit about – as I think you’ve called it the sleep deprivation epidemic, and what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep.

[0:03:11.4] MW: You’re right. There is currently a global sleep-loss epidemic. This is sweeping developed nations. It’s been underway for probably about 60 or 70 years. We know from surveys back in the 1940s that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now we know that number is down to 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week for American adults.

Back in my home country, not much better. It’s 6 hours and 49 minutes on average people are sleeping. Japan seems to be the worse; 6 hours and 22 minutes. I just give you those numbers to reaffirm first this pernicious erosion of sleep that has happened over the past 70 or 80 years as truth. But also just to take a step back, I think we have to realize that it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this necessity of 8 hours of sleep in place.

Then we have come along, and in the space of blink of an evolutionary eye; 60, 70 years we’ve locked off maybe 20%, 25% of that sleep amount. How could it not come with deleterious consequences? I think it’s been proudly confirmed that we are in a global sleep-loss state of deficiency, or an epidemic as the CDC and the World Health Organization have called it.

What are the consequences though? Because if it’s not doing us any harm, then why worry? If only that were true, there is demonstrable harm that is underway because of the sleep-loss epidemic. We can start at the big 30,000-foot level and make it a very simple statement based on epidemiological studies from millions of people. That is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.

I think that classical maxim that you may have heard. You can sleep when you’re dead. It’s always struck me as ironic, because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the evidence that you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse. 

If you dig down a little deeper you can say, “Well, if a lack of sleep kills you more quickly, then what is it that is killing you more quickly?” It seems to be just about everything. Every made disease that is killing us in the developed world has causal insignificant links to a lack of sleep. That list currently and tragically includes Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, as well as numerous mental health conditions; depression, bipolar disorder and most recently and sadly, suicide as well.

I think we’re really now starting to understand not just how deathly a lack of sleep is and the current weight of our sleep deprivation, and that elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. But with also understanding from hard science exactly why a lack of sleep produces such disease, sickness and ill-health within the brain and the body.

[0:06:31.1] MB: It’s amazing and it’s so important to think about why sleep is so vital. Yet, in today’s society it seems like there is more and more of a push to sleep less, work more, hustle more, do more. How do we combat that? 

[0:06:49.5] MW: There is. I think currently, sleep has an image problem in society, because more often than not, we seem to stigmatize sleep and we suggest that people who are getting sufficient sleep and I actually choose my words quite carefully there. As being lazy, as being slothful, those who get maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

People I think are – or some people, I should say. Not all, but some people are perhaps quite proud of the fact of how little sleep that they’re getting and where it almost as though it’s a badge of honor to be celebrated. It’s sad, because for all of the reasons that we’ve just discussed, it’s an ill-advised mentality to expose.

It’s also strange, because if we don’t always have that opinion. I don’t think any of us would look at an infant sleeping during the day and say, “Gosh, what a lazy baby.” We don’t do that, because we know that sleep at that time of life is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s fundamentally necessary. But if you look at the evidence somewhere between infancy and now even childhood, not only do we abandon this notion that sleep is necessary and important, but we give it this terrible stigma.

I think that attitude has to change, and there are many ways in which it has to change. I think part of the problem perhaps is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public. I think it’s people like myself who are to blame. I’m a sleep scientist, a professional sleep scientist for 20 years now.

I can’t go around wagging the finger at people if people have not been educated by the science that the taxpayer dollars have funded. That was part of the motivation to write the book that I didn’t feel as though there was a book after that gave people a blueprint manifesto of all of the real hard science of sleep.

There are lots of books out there that you can buy about the quick fix, these are the 10 rules to better sleep, or – I got nothing against those types of books, but for me I felt it was important because my sense is that people don’t respond to rules. They respond to reasons rather than rules, and I wanted to give and write a book of reasons for why you should sleep, rather than rules for how to sleep.

[0:09:27.7] MB: I want to dig a little bit more specifically into some of the negative implications or maybe the flipside of why sleep is so important for certain activities. For somebody who – let’s contextualize this maybe within a framework broadly thinking about, if I want to get more work done people often say, “All right, I’m going to sleep less,” or, “I’m going to pull a all-nighter,” or, “I’m going to cut down on my sleep so I can be more productive,” how does that usually pan out? What does the science say about doing that?

[0:09:59.5] MW: It doesn’t pan out very well. In fact, the opposite is true; we now know that less sleep does not equal more productivity. There have been lots of laboratory and workplace with these, and they give us five clear truths. Firstly, under-slept employees tend to take on less challenging work problems. In other words, they opt for the easy way out. Under-slept employees actually produce fewer creative solutions to work problems that they’re facing.

They also actually exert less effort when working in groups, and we’ve done some of these work. They essentially slack off. It’s what we call social-loafing. They write the tale of others and try to claim their hard work is their own.

We also know very interestingly that under-slept employees are more likely to lie, cheat and engage in deviant behaviors, such as falsifying a claims, receipts, etc., and it’s a scaling function; the less sleep that you have, the more likely you are to lie and be deviant. 

What’s also interesting is that it scales the business hierarchy all the way up to the top. We know that the more or less sleep that a business leader has had, the more or less charismatic their employees will rate that business leader.

Even though the employees themselves know nothing about how much sleep that business leader has had. They can actually see it in the expression of the behavior of their leader. You can then actually scale that up from those that have low-level studies, all the way up to the high-level studies. There was a recent round report, an independent report that demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue due to a lack of sleep caused most first-world nations about 2% of their GDP. For the United States, that’s 411 billion dollars that we lose each year due to a lack of sleep.

If you can just think about that, if we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the US, we could almost double the budget for education and we could make huge in-roads into the problems that we have with healthcare. Or we could just flat out give people remarkably high tax rebates, simply by solving the sleep-loss epidemic.

I think in response to your question, it’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful. It’s a little bit like, if you think about your workforce and you’re forcing them to come into work every morning, early and leave very late, so no one is getting enough sleep, it strikes me a little bit like a spin class at a gym.

Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes, there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity. I think we need to change our attitude in the workplace regarding sleep. The evidence is very clear there.

[0:13:04.3] MB: Especially around the creativity and the productivity aspect of that. It makes me think almost about the – an applied version of the 80-20 principle, where it’s not necessarily just more hours of work equals more output, but it’s really vital to have quality work, where you’re creative, where you’re bringing a fresh perspective and a well-rested mind. That’s when you really produce value. That’s the 20% that produces 80% of your results. All the busy work and the hustle and muscle, if you don’t get enough sleep you’re not going to be able to really be incredibly productive.

[0:13:44.3] MW: I think that that’s very true. Is there a way that we could actually break the classic [inaudible 0:13:50.0] 80-20 law that’s common throughout nature and it’s applied to human beings as well. By way of manipulating sleep could we actually force it to be that it’s 30% or 40% of your workforce that returns now 80% or 90% of the productivity by way of sufficient sleep. 

It’s just coming down to the very fact that what is the recycle rate of a human being? I think people have failed in the workplace to actually face this question and ask it. It’s surprising, because people in the workplace are wonderfully astute at trying to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency out of all of their systems, be it the budget, be it the tax, be it the hardware, be it the software.

I think we forget about the biological organism at the heart of most companies, the human beings themselves. We have to ask, “How long can an individual be awake before they decline and decline significantly in the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness?” We now know that that evidence, you need 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours – after 16 hours of wakefulness, the cognitive capacities and the physiological capacities of the body starts to decline dramatically in after 20 or 21 hours of being awake. You are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk in terms of driving behind the wheel.

There really is a recycle refresh rate of a human being, and we know that and it declines dramatically once you get past that 16. What I’m suggesting there is not 16 hours of work. I’m suggesting that this 8, 9-hour work span, then people need that downtime and they need to get that 8 hours of sleep to reboot and refresh.

[0:15:45.3] MB: What’s actually happening during that recycling period?

[0:15:49.7] MW: Well, we know firstly that there are multiple different stages of sleep that we ebb and flow in and out of, throughout a full 8-hour phase. Those different stages of sleeping, the two principle types of sleep, I should note that probably most people are aware of, or what are called non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage principally from which we dream.

Non-REM sleep actually has several sub-stages to it, stages one through four, increasing in the depth of sleep. By the way, it always strikes me as funny that scientists are not a very creative bunch. We have these four stages of deep non-REM sleep, and all we could come up with was stages one through four. Let’s set that side for a second.

We know that all of those different stages of sleep perform different functions end up all necessary. To come back to your question though, exactly what is happening at night? Well, let’s take deep non-REM sleep for a start.  The deepest stages of non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep is actually critical for essentially clearing out all of the metabolic toxins that have been building up in your brain.

Now that may sound a little bit hand-waving, but is actually very hard to get science from animal studies. When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. That’s what wakefulness is. We produce a variety of metabolic byproducts as a result of all of that waking brain cell combustion that we’re doing.

It is during sleep at night when we clear that away. What is clearing that away? Well, it turns out that we made a discovery, which is a sewage system in your brain. Now you have a sewage system in your body that you’re probably familiar with called the lymphatic system. But your brain also has one, it’s called the glymphatic system after the cells that produce it or compose the system called glial cells. 

That sewage system within the brain, glymphatic system, is not always on, at least not in highest flow capacity. It’s only during sleep and particular deep sleep at night where that cleansing system of the sewage network actually kicks in to high gear. It increases by maybe 2 to 300% relative to when we’re awake.

Why is this important? Well, one of the metabolic toxins that the glymphatic system clears away as we sleep at night is a toxic protein called beta-amyloid. Beta-amyloid is one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we know that people who are not getting sufficient sleep across their lifespan are at a far high risk probability of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The less sleep that you have, the less clearing away of that toxic byproduct. That’s one way, general way that we know that the brain gets essentially a refresh.

We also know that different cognitive systems and networks within your brain undergo a restoration. For example, we know that learning in memory systems get overhauled. We take information that we recently learned and we transfer it from short to long-term memory during sleep, which is actually like hitting the save button on new memories, so it prevents you from forgetting by cementing and solidifying those memories into long-term story sites.

We also know that there is a clearing out of your short-term memory reservoir. It’s perhaps a little bit like shifting files from a USB stick, so that when you wake up the next day, you have this renewed capacities to start learning and acquiring new facts and information all over again. That’s a more specific way in which the brain actually gets an overhaul at night during sleep.

We also know that the emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep. There are deep emotional brain sensors, very old evolutionary centers specifically a structure called the amygdala, which controls the vital flight response. That structure, the amygdala is normally regulated in us higher order primates, human beings specifically, by a part of the brain that sits just above  your eyes called the prefrontal cortex, which acts a little bit like the CEO of the brain. It makes very high-level executive top-down control decisions.

When you had a good night of sleep, that part of your frontal lobe has been reconnected to your deep Neanderthal amygdala fight or flight center of the brain. It just regulates it. It’s a little bit like a break to your emotional accelerator pedal. When you don’t get enough sleep, that connection is actually severed and there’s a consequence. You become almost all emotional gas pedal and too little frontal lobe regulatory control brake.

There are many different ways in which sleep generally and very specifically seems to regulate our brain. I could also speak about the different ways that sleep actually reboots multiple systems within the body. That’s certainly the ways in which it refreshes your brain.

[0:21:13.5] MB: I want to dig into learning productivity and the emotional aspects. But before we do, tell me briefly about the physiological and the body reset aspects of sleep as well.

[0:21:25.3] MW: Firstly, we know that deep non-REM sleep that we described is perhaps one of the best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever imagine. It’s during that deep sleep that your heart rate actually drops, your blood pressure will lower. There are a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones that are released, a growth hormone in particular to actually restore the cells within the body. It’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system.

We also know that it regulates your metabolic system, specifically it regulates insulin levels. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, your blood glucose actually starts to become disrupted. There are [inaudible 0:22:07.7] that is now taking healthy people with no signs of diabetes. After one week of five to six hours of sleep a night, their blood sugar is disrupted so profoundly that their doctor would subsequently classify them as being pre-diabetic. That’s how critical sleep is to maintaining the metabolic system.

We also know that sleep is essential for another one of the major systems, the reproductive system. Here I’ll speak frankly about testicles, because we know that men who are routinely getting just 5 to 6 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who are sleeping 8 hours or more.

In addition, men who report getting just 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. In other words, a lack of sleep will actually age you by a decade in terms of that aspect of wellness and virility. We see very similar impairment in equivalent reproductive hormones and health, of course by a lack of sleep. It’s not just males who are disrupted in that way.

There are a variety of systems within the body. It also regulates appetite and weight and your food consumption. We know for example that those individuals who are not getting enough sleep will have an imbalance in the two hormones that control your hunger and your food intake. Those two hormones are called leptin and ghrelin.

Now leptin sounds like a Hobbit, I know, but trust me they are actually real hormones. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re satisfied with your food. You’re no longer hungry. You should stop eating. Ghrelin is the antithesis of that. Ghrelin will actually signal to your brain that you are not satisfied by the food that you’ve just eaten, that you are still hungry and that you should eat more.

People who are put on a regiment of just 5 or 6 hours of sleep for one week will have a mocked reduction in leptin, the hormone that says, “You’re fine. You’ve eaten enough, you can stop eating. You’re not hungry.” A mocked increase in the hormone ghrelin, which tells you, “You’re not satisfied with your food. You’re hungry and it’s time to eat more.”

That’s why people will actually eat somewhere between 3 to 500 calories more each day when they’re not getting sufficient sleep. You should also know by the way, it’s not just that you eat more, but what you eat is non-optimal when you’re sleep-deprived. Without sufficient sleep, you actually reach for the heavy-hitting starchy carbohydrates, as well as high-sugar foods and you stay away from the protein-rich foods. In other words, you’ll find yourself reaching for another slice of pizza rather than leafy greens, kale and beans.

It’s not just that you eat more. It’s what you eat that is also detrimental too. I hope that gives people just a little bit of a few brush strokes in terms of the bodily consequences. The one that we probably haven’t mentioned though, which is perhaps most impacted is your immune system. We know that one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells by 70%, which is a truly remarkable state of immune-deficiency, which happens very quickly within just one night.

Secondly, we also know that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has now become so strong that the World Health Organization recently classified any form of night-time shift work as a probable cause energy. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer, because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We can look to more benign things too. We know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep in the week before you go and get your flu shot, you will only produce 50%, or in fact, less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that flu shot largely ineffective.

Finally, know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep a night, you are 2 to 300% more likely to capture cold, than someone who is getting 8 hours of sleep a night. This was a remarkable study where they quarantined people in a hotel and they had tracked how much sleep that they were getting in the week before. Then they flushed up the nose of all of these individuals; the flu virus. Then in the next few days they looked to see how many of those individuals succumbed to the flu, how many got infected. Then they bucketed them on the basis of how much sleep that they had in the week before, and that’s how they were able to come to that conclusion.

There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.

[0:27:25.3] MB: What a powerful statement. I mean, just that sentence alone really succinctly summarizes the fundamental conclusion that the science is in across nearly every spectrum of the body, the brain, etc., that sleep is incredibly valuable. That 8 hours of sleep specifically is really critical.

[0:27:46.2] MW: I think it is. I think what we know is that without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. The sleepless epidemic is perhaps the greatest curable disease that no one is really talking about, or effectively trying to solve. I would simply say that the lack of sleep is both the most striking omission in the health conversation of today. All lack of sleep is perhaps a slow form of self-Euthanasia.

[0:28:16.6] MB: I want to dig back into the relationship. Let’s touch on learning and memory. Tell me a little bit more about the work you’ve done and some of the research around how sleep can improve learning and memory.

[0:28:29.8] MW: Sleep actually is beneficial for memory in at least three ways that we’ve now discovered and this is the work that we’ve been doing, or some of the work that we do at my sleep center.

First, we know that you need sleep before learning to essentially prepare your brain; perhaps a little bit like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information the next day. We did a study where we tested a very simple hypothesis. Is it wise to pull the all-nighter? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

We took a group of individuals and we either gave them a full night of sleep, or we kept them awake throughout the night. Then the next day, we wedged them inside an MRI scanner and then we have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we were taking snapshots of brain activity. Then we tested them to see how effectively that learning had been.

Firstly, what we found is that when we put those two groups head to head, there was a 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep, and just a frame that in context it would simply be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably. What we went on to discover from the brain scans however was why the brain was failing to lay down those new memories.

There is a structure in our brains, on the left and the right side called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus a little bit like the memory inbox of the brain. That it’s actually very good at receiving new memory files and holding on to them initially.

When we looked at that structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who were sleep deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant activity whatsoever.

It was almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox as it were and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. If people would like to just understand what that means in terms of the hippocampus, I’m sure many people listening have probably seen the movie Memento. In that movie, that gentleman has damage to the brain and specifically to the structure of the hippocampus. From that point forward, he can no longer make any new memories. It is what we call in neurology, densely amnesic.

That part of his brain was the hippocampus and it is the very same structure that your lack of sleep will actually attack and prevent your brain from actually laying down and placing those new memories into a fixed state within the brain. That’s the first way that sleep is good for learning a memory.

You also need sleep not just before learning, but also after learning, but for something different now. Sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories. It will essentially solidify those memories into neural architecture of the brain. As we mentioned before, it actually will transfer those memories, almost like packets of information being transferred across the network, from a short-term vulnerable storage site to the more permanent long-term storage center within the brain, which is called the cortex; this wrinkled mass that sits on top of your brain.

That means that when you come back the next day, those memories are protected and safe and you will be able to remember, rather than those memories being vulnerable to being overwritten or lost, for example to the ravage of time. Which mean, that they are ultimately forgotten. 

We also know a little bit about how sleep not only transfers memories during sleep, but even strengthens those memories. It’s during sleep that the brain actually replays the information that you’ve recently learned. These are studies done in humans, but also in animals they were actually placing electrodes into the brains of rats and they were having them run around a maze.

As they were running around the maze and learning the maze, all of these different brain cells which fire in a specific signature pattern, which was essentially the imprinting of a memory and it adds different tones to them. It would sound a little bit like “babababam, babababam, babababam.” The brain is imprinting this memory as the rat is running around the maze.

Low and behold, what happens is that when you then let the rats sleep, but keep recording and keep eavesdropping on the brain, what do you think reemerges? It’s exactly the same pattern, “babababam, babababam.” The rat is replaying those memories. What’s incredible however, is that it’s actually replaying them at somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster. Rather than “babababam,” it’s actually, “brrm, brrm, brr, brrm, brrm.” It’s this high-speed fidelity replay. We think that that actually helps score the memory trace into the brain in a strengthened manner, almost like etching on the surface of glass. You’re really strengthening that neural circuit. That’s sleep after learning to strengthen individual memories, and I guess essentially future proof that information within the brain.

There is a final third way that sleep actually helps memory that we’ve discovered, which I think is perhaps most exciting. Sleep doesn’t just simply strengthen individual memories. It’s that strengthening of individual memories by the way that happens during deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, or dreamless sleep.

Sleep also then actually interconnects those new memories together and interconnects new information with all of your pre-existing back-catalog of autobiographical stored information. Essentially, what sleep is doing and this is actually the work of rapid eye movement sleep of dream sleep, is that you’re starting to collide information together within the brain. This is a bit like group therapy for memories.

What you awake with the next morning is a revised mind-wide web of information within the brain. It’s a new associative network, or at least not a radically new associative network, but it’s an updated and it’s a modified associative network. That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divine, creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.

It’s probably the reason – I mean, now know this, for example that sleep will actually provide almost a three-fold advantage in problem solving relative to an equivalent time period spent awake. That science is now very well, I think rendered and described.

There probably is a reason that you’re never told to stay awake on a problem and in every language that I’ve inquired about to date, that phrase sleeping on a problem seems to exist. It seems to transcend cultural boundaries. It’s a phenomenon that is common across the globe. I should also note by the way that we – the British, we say you sleep on a problem. I believe and please correct me if anyone knows this, but I believe the French translation is a little closer to you sleep with the problem, rather than you sleep on a problem. I think that says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French. I’ll digress before I lose my British passport.

[0:36:22.5] MB: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a funny anecdote and probably true. I’ve seen the phrase creative incubation and some research around creativity, and some of the science behind what you’re describing. To me, it makes so much sense that the more you give the brain the ability to something, and when you come back to that problem, you’re going to be much more creative. You’re going to be much more effective at solving. 

[0:36:48.0] MW: That’s right. It’s not just sleep by the way. If it’s a complex problem, simple problems tend to benefit from deliberative focused thought. But complex problems, problems where there are maybe 10, 20, 80 different variables and you could think of this as something very crass to you. What type of knife or fork set do you buy? This may be just three or four different variables. Versus, what type of card do you buy, where there is maybe 16 different features of variants that you have to choose between.

Well, the more complex a problem is, the more benefit there is to actually stepping away and stopping consciously thinking about it. That’s where the non-conscious brain seems to go to work. It seems to be able to distill amounts of information that we just can’t consciously juggle all up in the air at the same time when we’re awake. It’s just too much for a working memory. 

If you’re to think of perhaps what the extreme version of that non-conscious processing would be, you would probably design a system that looks very similar to sleep. That’s exactly why sleep provides those creative benefits. It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.

[0:39:22.9] MB: I want to segway now and get into strategies for sleeping more effectively. We’ve talked at length about how important sleep is both from avoiding a tremendous amount of negative consequences, but also in producing a myriad of positive benefits. Tell me about, for somebody who maybe has trouble sleeping, or just in general, what are some of the basic interventions that we can implement in our lives to sleep better?

[0:39:50.5] MW: These tips I suppose, and again, I’m not just going to tell you the rules. I won’t just try and explain the reasons for each of these rules. I do warn people that some of them are probably not necessarily desirable. It makes me very unpopular, but here they are.

The first overarching rule of course, is that you just have to carve out an 8-hour non-negotiable sleep opportunity every night. It sounds crass and it’s sounds hokie, but I do this in my life as well. I’m not just saying this because I’ve just written a book and I want to practice what I seem to be preaching. But it’s from a very selfish perspective, because I know the evidence so well. If you knew the evidences I do, which and I hope people will do after reading the book, you just wouldn’t do anything different. I don’t want to short a life, I don’t want a life filled disease and pain and sickness and suffering. That’s why I do give myself a non-negotiable 8-hour opportunity every night.

Once you’ve got that in place – I don’t think it’s insurmountable. People are doing wonderful things in terms of actually committing non-negotiable time to exercise, and people are trying to eat more healthily. I don’t think sleep is a lost cause in this regard. 

Once you’re getting that opportunity, then I think there are five things that you could do. If there is one thing that you do from all of these tips, it is these; regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what, no matter whether it’s the weekend, or the weekday. Even if you had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time the next day. Accept that it’s going to be a bit of a tricky day. But then just get to bed early the following evening and then you will reset.

Because if you sleep in late for whatever reason, you’re not going to feel tired until later that following evening, and you start to drift forward in time and it’s called social jetlag. That has marked deleterious consequences to your health and to your sleep. Regularity is key.

The second is temperature. Keep it cool. Keep your bedroom around about 68 degrees is optimal for most people, which is probably colder than you think, or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. The reason is this, that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about a 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to initiate sleep. That’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold, than too hot. Because at least the cold room is moving your brain and body in the right thermal direction, that it actually wants to go to for sound and healthy long sleep. 

Try to keep your temperature in the bedroom cool. Wear socks if you get cold feet. Some people complain about this, so it’s okay to wear those socks, but keep the bedroom cool. Another way that you can exploit this hack is actually to take a hot bath before bed, or a hot shower. The bath is better if you look at the evidence.

Most people think that when they have a hot bath, they get into bed, they’re nice and warm and that’s what lets them fall asleep more easily. It’s actually the opposite. When you get into a bath, all of the blood comes from the core of your body out to the surface, that’s why you get that rosy glow. It’s what’s called mass vasodilation.

Once you get out of the bath with all of that blood near the surface of your skin, you have this huge massive thermal dump. You get this evacuation of heat from the body, which plummets your core temperature, and that’s why you’ll fall asleep more quickly and more soundly.

The third tip is the light, and actually darkness more specifically. We are actually a dark-deprived society in all first-world nations. You need darkness to allow the release of a critical hormone called melatonin. Melatonin will time the normal healthy onset of sleep. If you’ve got lots of light inside of the house during the evening, and especially if you’re looking and staring at those LED screens from phones, tablets, laptops etc., that will actually fool your brain into thinking it is still daytime and it will shut off melatonin, so you won’t be releasing melatonin.

There were studies done where they had people reading on an iPad for one hour before bed. If I was doing that here in California, their data demonstrated that my release and peak of melatonin didn’t happen, or were shifted by three hours forward in time. I would essentially be close to Hawaii in terms of my internal clock timing to sleep, rather than California.

Keep it dim. You can turn down half the lights in the house in the evening. You don’t need all of them on the last hour before bed. Also stay away from screens in the last hour, and try and use black out curtains, that can actually be very helpful.

The fourth tip is not to stay in bed if you have been awake for longer than 20 minutes. This applies to whether you’re trying to fall asleep, or whether you’ve woken up and are trying to fall back asleep. The reason is this, your brain is a remarkably associative device. If you are lying in bed awake, it quickly learns that being in bed is about being awake rather than being asleep.

You need to break that association. After 20 minutes or so, if you haven’t fallen asleep, get up, don’t get too stressed, go to a different room and in dim light, perhaps just read a book, no screens, no eating. Only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed. In that way, you will actually relearn the association between your bed being about being asleep, rather than being awake.

I would note that some people actually don’t like the idea of getting out of bed. It’s dark. Maybe they’re warm and maybe it’s colder in the rest of the house. I understand that. Another way to try and help you get back to sleep that has good proven clinical trial data behind it is actually meditation. I’m actually quite hard know a scientist, and when I was looking into this evidence as I was writing the book, I was really quite skeptical.

The studies were very clear, very well done, some of them out of Stanford here just down the way from me. So much so that I actually started meditating myself and that was seven months ago, and I’m now a regular meditator. If I’m traveling going through jetlag, for example and struggling with sleep, I will actually use a meditation relaxation practice.

The final tip is the one that really makes me deeply – well, deeply unpopular, just generally as a person anyway, but this is the one that really makes me unpopular with people. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings. Forego and I kept and I’ll explain both.

Everyone knows of course that caffeine activates you. It’s a class of drugs that we call a stimulants and it can keep people awake. What people may not know however is that for those people who say, “Well, I can drink an espresso after dinner and I force sleep fine and I stay asleep.” That may be true. However, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when caffeine is swirling around within your brain during sleep is nowhere near as deep as if you had not had that cup of coffee in the evening.

As a consequence, people wake up the next morning. They won’t fee refreshed or restored. They don’t remember having a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. They don’t equate it with the cup of coffee they had the night before. But now they find themselves reaching the two cups of coffee, or three cups of coffee in the morning, which essentially is building a dependency and addiction cycle. That’s the issue with caffeine and that’s why the suggestion is stop caffeine midday and certainly after 2 PM.

Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. Sedation is not sleep. Many people will say, “Well, I nightcap, I have a quick whiskey and it puts me to sleep. It’s great.” It’s actually not true. What you’re simply doing is you’re sedating your cortex, you’re knocking out your brain essentially. You’re not getting into natural sleep.

Then there are two more problems with alcohol. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so you will wake up many more times throughout the night, which leaves you with what we call un-restorative sleep. The final thing is that alcohol is one of the best chemicals that we know blocking your dream sleep, your REM sleep, which is essential for not just creativity and that associative type of memory processing that we spoke about.

REM sleep is also critical for emotional and mental health. It is during REM sleep when we provide our brain a form of emotional first aid, and you won’t be getting that if you’re blocking REM sleep by way of alcohol. Those would be the five tips to better sleep and hopefully they help some folks. I’m also happy to speak a little bit about sleeping pills. They’re also misunderstood, but those would be for most people the five tips that I would offer.

[0:49:17.9] MB: Great advice. I try to implement as many of those as possible. One of the things, specifically caffeine is something that I used to drink at my peak. About a cup of – I mean, a pot of coffee a day. Now I basically don’t consume any caffeine. When I do, I limit myself, no caffeine afternoon. Maybe one cup of tea is the maximum. I’ve noticed a huge impact on that impact in my sleep. Sorry, were you going to say something? 

[0:49:44.6] MW: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I mean it’s immensely wise and it’s one of the problems with a lack of sleep is that you quickly reset your perception of your effectiveness and your health. You just think, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” Not realizing that you could actually be a far better version of yourself, both mentally, cognitively and physiologically if you were just to start getting sufficient sleep.

I think many people fail to realize that with caffeine especially that it’s only when they come off caffeine do they really start to feel both the benefits of all of the side effects that normally come with high caffeine use, but especially the benefits on sleep. It’s like wiping a fogged window and you finally can start to see clearly through it.  That’s the benefit of a full restorative night of sleep.

[0:50:36.8] MB: I have a couple short questions all around specific sleep strategies or tactics. Let’s start with – you touched on sleeping pills. Tell me about sleeping pills. Do they work? If so, why or why not?

[0:50:50.2] MW: There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep. The current class of drugs that you will be prescribed are called sedative hypnotics. Again, as we mentioned with alcohol, sedation is not sleep. The sleep that you have when you’re on sleeping pills, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep if you would come to my laboratory, it would  not be the same on sleeping pills as it would be if you’re just having naturalistic healthy sleep. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, and I go to great lengths and a whole chapter in the book to discuss this, is that people are probably not aware of the risks of sleeping pills. They have not been communicated to public adequately. Firstly, we know that sleeping pills are associated with a far higher risk of death. They’re also associated with a significantly high risk of cancer and infection.

Now, we don’t yet know if this is causal versus simply associational, but what I wanted to do is to try to get that information out to the public, so they at least could be armed with the knowledge and make an informed choice with that doctor when they go and see the surgery. That’s I think one of the biggest problems of sleeping pills is that the misunderstood nature about what they give you and the dangers.

People also don’t necessarily have to be taking sleeping pills, I should note. There is a safe and non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. You work with a therapist for a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, it’s just as powerful as sleeping in the short-term, but better still, once you finish that short therapy phase, you continue to maintain that better sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, when you come off those you tend to actually have what’s called rebound insomnia, where your sleep is as bad, if not worse than when you started. 

I think people can revisit their sleep issues with their doctor. I’m not trying to shame people who are on sleeping pills. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you are. I’m very sensitive to the desire for better sleep and I’m so sensitive to the issue of insomnia, or the desperate, desperate state. You should be aware of what sleeping pills are, what they do and what the alternatives are.

[0:53:15.8] MB: What about taking a melatonin supplement?

[0:53:18.6] MW: Melatonin is useful in the circumstance of jetlag to try and reset your body clock in a new time zone. You should take it 30 to 60 minutes before you want to get to sleep in the new time zone. Melatonin works to essentially time the onset of your sleep. I guess, the analogy would be if you think about the 100-meter race in the Olympics. Well, melatonin is the starting official who has the starter gun.

It’s melatonin that brings all of the different ingredients off the sleep race to the starting line, then starts the race in its entirety. It begins the sleep race. Melatonin itself does not actually participate in the race of sleep, in the generation of that sleep race. That’s a whole different set of chemicals. As a consequence, that’s why actually melatonin when you are in a new time zone and you’re stable now in that new time zone, if you’re a young healthy individual, then melatonin actually isn’t effective as a sleeping aid. It doesn’t actually help if you look at the studies.

That said, I would note that for those people who are taking melatonin and they feel as though it helps their sleep, well then I usually tell people continue on. It’s because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all pharmacology. No harm, no foul if you think it’s working for you.

[0:54:48.1] MB: What about napping? Is napping something – if you’re sleep-deprived, can you catch up with a nap?

[0:54:53.7] MW: Unfortunately, you cannot catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. This is another myth that I try to deconstruct in the book. You can’t accumulate a debt, let’s say during the week and then hope to pay it off at the weekend. Sleep just doesn’t work like that. There is no credit system, or there is no credit sleep sell within the brain.

You can if you are sleep-deprived, take a nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times will improve a little bit after a nap, but you don’t actually overcome all of the higher level, cognitive issues such as decision-making, learning in memory, focused attention, all of those types of things that we know are would buckle and collapse by way of a lack of sleep. Naps just don’t seem to be able to overcome those.

You can’t overcome – you can’t bank sleep and you can’t sleep off a debt. I see this in my students. It’s what I would call sleep bulimia, which is where they’re binging on sleep at the weekend and they’re – try and taking too little sleep during the week. It’s this binge purge kind of cycle.

I would also say naps, just more generally are a double-edged sword. If during the day when we’re awake, we actually build up a chemical pressure in our brain. It’s a sleepiness pressure. Now, it’s a hydraulic pressure, don’t worry. As I said, it’s a chemical pressure.  The chemical that builds up is called adenosine. The more of that sleepiness chemical that you have, the more and more sleepy that you will feel. After about 16 hours of being awake, you’re nice and tired and then you should fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours.

When we sleep, we remove that sleepiness pressure. It’s almost like a valve on a pressure cooker. We release that sleepiness steam as it were. This is where I come back to naps. If you nap too late in the day, you actually release some of that healthy sleepiness, which means that when it comes time to sleep normally at night, you may actually struggle to fall asleep, or at least stay asleep.

The advice would be this, if you are someone who can nap regularly and you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine. But if you can’t nap regularly and/or you’re having difficulties with your sleep at night then the advice is you shouldn’t nap, you should stay awake, build up that healthy sleepiness, and then you will have a better night of sleep because of it.

[0:57:30.1] MB: What about someone who’s in a situation, let’s say like a new parent. Is there anything that they can go through obviously, very chronically sleep-deprived state? Is there any strategy for them to be able to implement, that would help them battle through that in some way? 

[0:57:45.0] MW: Some parents describe trying to work better shifts and what I mean by that is in two ways. Firstly, some parents will try to take early, the early shift and then the late shift, the first half of the night versus the second half of the night and switch between those two. Another way that you can do that on an informed choice is try to determine whether you are a night owl, or you’re a morning type, what we call a lock. That’s a genetically predisposed. It’s called your chrono type.

If you are someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, versus someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early, that’s not a choice. That’s a genetic mandate that’s being given to you in your DNA code. You can try to ask in the couple, are you someone who would prefer to wake up early and go to bed early? In which case, could you take the morning shift, the late morning shift?

If I’m someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, well then it’s easier for me to actually take the first half of the night and then sleep for the second half of the morning and sleep late. You can think about split shifts like that. Some people will also flip-flop back and forth. Some people will say, “Well, I’ll take the next two nights and you get good sleep, then we switch over and you take two nights.” They try to mix and match it in that way too. It’s a desperately difficult situation.

In part, we would not actually design to be family units like this, if you look at [inaudible 0:59:17.8] tribes who have not been touched by the electrical influence, then they actually tend to sleep in groups. Restless legs dangling all over the place, arms intertwined. Whole families would sleep together and people would take turns in terms of caring for the young. It’s a lot to ask of parents, and those are some of the ways that you can try to overcome it.

[0:59:45.6] MB: One other question and this is out of left field a little bit. I’m curious, have you seen or studied around the neurotransmitter GABA and its relationship with sleep?

[0:59:56.5] MW: GABA is the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain. The way that most sleeping medications work right now and you can just name your favorite one and it will work in this way, is by essentially trying to activate the receptors in the brain for GABA. Those receptors essentially are like the red lights on your neurons. They stop them firing, they stop them from going. 

Drugs that try to target the GABA system within the brain are really quite blunt instruments and that’s why sleeping pills, which act exactly in this way are really not precise tools. Sleep is a remarkably complex neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical ballet if you look at it. All of these different stages of sleep, neurotransmitters going up and down and brain networks ebbing and flowing.

To think that you can essentially recreate something that is so complex and so bi-directional sleep by simply just knocking the brain out and switching it off using GABA receptors is really just – it’s an unfortunate outcome of how poor our pharmacology is in this day and age. We just don’t yet have the pharmacological precision and sophistication to mimic sleep at this stage.

[1:01:22.4] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to a listener who wants to sleep better?

[1:01:28.5] MW: I would say try giving yourself one week of 8 hours of sleep and see if you feel any better. Just give it as self-improvement test. Try it as a hack, that if you are one of those people who are into the quantified self-movement and you’re into self-experimentation then just test out all of that what you’ve just heard in the past week and just determine if you feel any better when you’re sleeping 8 hours every night and you’ve regular each and every night. Versus a staccato sleep schedule where you’re sleeping 5 hours and 6 hours and 12 hours and then 5 hours again. Just ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better and do I notice that improvement? 

[1:02:19.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and want to find you and your book online, what’s the best place to do that?

[1:02:25.9] MW: They can find the book, which is called Why We Sleep. They can find that online. Amazon holds it. You can find it from all of your major bookstores, both the major brands, as well as all of the independent. It’s on the list of most libraries too. If you don’t want to part with your money, my publisher would probably won’t like me saying that, but I read online, it’s about the knowledge of the book, not the sales.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do, you can follow me on social media. I am at sleepdiplomat, all one word. Sleepdiplomat. I’m on Twitter and also you can find me on LinkedIn. Also on the web I am at – it is www.sleepdiplomat.com 

[1:03:11.4] MB: Well, Matt. This has been a fascinating conversation. So much great information, practical strategies, tons and tons of science. Really appreciate it. Incredible insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[1:03:25.4] MW: Well, thank you and I have to say a real thanks to you too. It’s not just what people say at the end of these interviews, but I’m trying to fight this battle for sleep. I can only do so much by getting on shows or television, radio or writing a book for example. I need fantastic journalists and media and genius types to actually join and partner with me to get this message out. I too just want to thank you, Matt. Thank you for being part of the sleep mission.

I’m going to grant you now the title of being a sleep ambassador for having me on the show. Thank you very much. Sincerely, I really want to thank you. I desperately need to get this message out. This portal is a remarkable way to proclaim the virtues of sleep. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

Finding Joy In A World Full of Suffering - Lessons From a Former Buddhist Monk with Robert Thurman

This episode is a bit off the beaten path for us here at the Science of Success. Given this time of year, when many are thinking, reflecting, and being a bit more spiritual - we wanted to offer a different perspective. This episode is not as science based, but still provides a fascinating dialogue with a Buddhist monk, who was the first westerner ordained by the Dalai Lama, on life, meditation, mindfulness, and much more with our guest Robert Thurman.

Robert Thurman is a Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. Time magazine has called Robert “the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.” and named him one of Time Magazine most influential Americans in 1997. Robert was the first westerner ever to be ordained as a Tibetan Monk by the Dalai Lama and his work and books have been featured all over the globe.

• How Robert’s journey took him to becoming a Tibetan Monk under the Dalai Llama

• The human being is a learning machine

• The dogma of materialism - mind is the power that directs matter

• Inner science / buddhist science

• The basic misunderstandings of buddhism from a western perspective

• Life is suffering

  1. It’s just meditation

• Meditation without context isn’t useful

• The two kinds of meditation

• Clearing your mind of thinking / emptying the mind

  1. Analytic / critical meditation or “insight meditation”

  2. Thinking something directed towards the exploration of yourself, ideas, or things around you

• How an egotistical approach creates “guaranteed misery” - you could become the most powerful person on the planet and people still wont think you’re important

• Why enlightenment is not clearing your mind of thoughts

• The importance of focusing on and being open to other people

• You can learn if you examine yourself and your world

• The unexamined life will be frustrating

• “Dis-identifying from the thought flow” will not get you to enlightenment

• Look more objectively at your thought flow - see where thought flows arise, penetrate the thought flow, see the negative thoughts and the positive thoughts

• What thought is that?

  1. How accurate is it?

  2. Where does it come from?

  3. Whose voice is it? my mother’s voice? my fathers? my uncles? my teacher?

  4. Gain leverage on how the mind works, edit how the mind works reinforce the positive insights, de-enforce the negative insights

• Stripping away false identities and beliefs

• It’s helpful to have help of others - mobilize minds that are further along the path than you are - your the only one who can learn your reality in a viscerally transformative way - use their help and follow their methods

• How Eckart Tolle battled back from the verge of suicide - looking critically at negative thoughts

• Experiential understanding of the nature of reality - reality is beyond anyone’s idea of reality

• The experience of reality is beyond our ability to describe it

• How does the Dalai Llama keep up his joy, good humor, and happiness in a world full of so much suffering?

• The nature of life itself is blissful. Reality is good. The more you’re open to reality, the happier you are.

• Broaden your attitude and orientation, don’t deny the bad experiences

• When you’re miserable, you can’t help people. When you’re happy, you can.

• You have to put your own happiness oxygen mask on before you can help anyone else

• The habitual perception that we are our own isolated egos vs the universe

• Interconnectedness of all life

• Suffering and frustration are rooted in the false belief that you and your ego are the most important thing

• The universe is empty of any non-relational entity

• Buddhism is the opposite of ignorance is bliss, reality is bliss. You already have bliss, you have blocks of knowing and feeling and understand it. It’s YOU. You’re made of it.

• Wave particle paradox, Heinsberg uncertainty and the science of interconnectedness

• Quantum physics, buddhism and the observer paradox

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Search List] Robert Thurman Amazon book list
[Wiki Article] The Thinker
[SoS Episode] Limiting Beliefs
[Book] The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
[Wiki Article] Wave–particle duality
[Wiki Article] Observer effect (physics)
[TEDEd Video] What is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? - Chad Orzel
[Video] The Real Meaning of E=mc² | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
[Personal Site] Bob Thurman
[Book] Man of Peace: The Illustrated Life Story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet by William Meyers, Robert Thurman, and Michael G. Burbank

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

This episode is a bit off the beaten path for us here at the Science of Success. Given the time of year when many are thinking, reflecting, being a bit more spiritual, we wanted to offer a little bit different of a perspective. This episode is not a science-based, but it still provides a fascinating dialogue with a Buddhist monk, who is the first Westerner ever to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. We discussed life, meditation, mindfulness, and much more with our guest Robert Thurman.

I’m going to give you three really quick reasons why you should join our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There is some amazing stuff that’s available only to our e-mail subscribers, including a special guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything that we created based on listener demand, curated weekly e-mails that you’re going to get every single week, including our Mindset Monday e-mail, which listeners have been absolutely loving short, sweet articles and stories that we found fascinating within the last week, and a chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests and much more.

Sign up today by going to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. There is some incredible stuff that you only get access to when you sign up and join the e-mail list. You can also, if you’re on the go right now, if you’re driving around, if you’re on your phone, just text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed one of the most important evidence-based psychology principles that makes people successful; self-awareness. We looked at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau.

We talked about why self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century, and a foundational skill required to succeed in nearly anything; including looking at conclusions from over 800 scientific studies about self-awareness with our guest Dr. Tasha Eurich. If you want to master the most vital skill in the 21st century, listen to that episode.

Now for the interview. But before we get into that, I wanted to make note, the audio quality in this interview is not the greatest. We had a little bit of trouble on Robert’s end with some of the sound quality issues. I just wanted to let you know ahead of time that Robert’s audio is not perfect, but there’s some really good insights in this conversation and I felt it was still worth sharing with you.

Now for the show.

[0:02:48.1] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Robert Thurman. Robert is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and the President of the American Institute of Buddhist studies. Time Magazine has called him the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism and named him one of Time Magazine’s most influential Americans in 1997.

He was also the first Westerner to ever be ordained a Tibetan monk by the Dalai Lama. His works and books have been featured across the globe. Bob, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:21.7] RT: Thanks, Matt. Nice to talk to you.

[0:03:23.9] MB: Well, we’ve very excited to have you on the show today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your background, I know you’ve had a fascinating story. I’d love to hear a little bit about your personal journey and how that led you to eventually becoming a monk and where you are today.

[0:03:39.0] RT: Well, okay. I was a Harvard undergraduate and I decided that western psychology and philosophy didn’t quite get it right. I decided to go to India to see some deeper psychology. I had a sense it would be there. When I got there, there were a lot of really nice Indians, but I got really turned on by the Tibetans and the knowledge they have of Indian Buddhism, of ancient Indian Buddhism.

I started studying with them, and that’s 54 years ago, 55 years ago and never turned back. I found the philosophical solutions I was looking for, the openness of mind to new questions I was looking for, the yogas, the meditations, everything. The people, they were just really great. I was speaking their language in about three months, and it was like coming home.

I’m still doing that. I must say I was a monk for about four to five years. But now I’m an ex-monk and I have a big family. Didn’t damage me forever. That’s pretty much my story. Joining academia is like coming back to another kind of monastery, where you – they were the American one, you know where you’re having family and you study what you want and you teach what you want after a while. It’s a privilege. It’s a wonderful thing. The human being is a learning machine and that’s what they should be doing with their life.

[0:05:01.3] MB: I’m really curious. As somebody who’s such an expert in something like Buddhism, where do you see some of the common western misunderstanding of the core principles of Buddhism?

[0:05:15.1] RT: Well, western and eastern people do misunderstand Buddhism. It isn’t really an east-west thing. Because misunderstand themselves and they misunderstand life. Buddhism as it is in a way never really interested me, I have to say. But Buddhist science and the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of reality was what really interested me.

I think that has a lot to offer to west and east, and especially modern science is a little bit caught nowadays by the dogma of materialism. The idea that the mind doesn’t exist, that mind over matter doesn’t work. That’s a big error. Mind is actually really the power that directs matter, I would say, which Buddhist science has a very strong evidence and arguments about. That really is usual to people.

I consider I’m going ever deeper into that. I don’t claim to be enlightened or anything, but I’ve gotten in that direction and I’m sure there is that direction, put it that way. Everyone can do that. That’s what the human is built for. That’s what I like to do. I call it really a Buddhist science really, or inner science as it’s called in India.

Yoga and Hinduism has a lot of that too, because Buddhism totally influence every country it was ever in. It was in all the [0:06:27.2] countries have had a huge impact on them. Having discovered it, I think it’s going to have a huge impact here. It already has that some impact and it was gone with one. I think one thing that – the basic misunderstanding is that Buddhism teaches you and that all you can do is suffer and you can never get away from it and you’re better be resigned to it. That’s one of the big misunderstandings.

Before our Buddha discovered happiness, actually that’s what he discovered and how to get rid of suffering permanently. The second misunderstanding is that Buddhism is just meditating, and that’s also a mistake. Meditation is a powerful tool for transforming yourself on learning, but it must be preceded by scientific learning and lot of critical investigation, exploration and thinking and experiencing and analyzing your experience and seeing how your mind works.

Then when you get a bit of orientation about what you are, what reality is, then meditation enables you to really bring it down to your gut and really change your life more thoroughly. I mean, learning changes your life very much too, but to completely transform, you need to add meditation to learning.

You don’t just do meditation out of the bat. If you just meditate because somebody tells you that meditation is the solution to everything, you are basically deepening your ignorance actually. You’ll become more egotistical and you become more isolated and alienated more into yourself, which is not really a usual place to be stuck in. Not to send it wrong with including yourself, but being stuck in yourself is really not a good scene.

[0:07:58.5] MB: I want to dig into a couple different pieces of that. Let’s start with this idea that meditation without context isn’t useful. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:08:06.5] RT: Well, there is two kinds. One kind of meditation is just shutting your mind down and not thinking, which gives the person brought up in our school system a buzz, because we’ve been doing a lot of thinking. That we haven’t felt that thinking has done us a lot of good, because we still bit unhappy.

We get a buzz out of not thinking. But actually what that also does it dulls your ability to learn from experience, to teach reason from learning and from books. It gives you a palliative, it’s like getting hooked on a palliative, because you can just stop thinking and then now come down and then some people even think you’d be enlightened when you have nothing in your mind.

I was joking like to say, when Buddha entertained enlightenment, the first thing he didn’t say – he said, “That was not the answer.” What he said was, “I know everything. It’s really great. Reality really is fine and you can be – it is happiness. If you know reality, you’re going to be happy.” Unfortunately, of course just by me telling you, you can’t get there.  You have to go to work on it yourself, but you have amazing ability to learn and also to transform once you have learned. That’s the thing. That’s one type of meditation is just emptying the mind type.

Then the other type, which is more important is analytic meditation, or critical meditation, and what they call inside meditation. That’s where you’re actually are thinking something directed toward exploration of yourself, your experience and the reality around you. That’s a very good one and a very important one. If you don’t do that one, then you just do the mind empty one, then your original view of yourself and everyone has a slightly distorted view of the self, by conditioning, by instinct, by formalize and so on, which is that each one thinks, “I am the most important one.”

They don’t think that they’re being egotistical. They think that’s naturally, “Everybody thinks I’m the most important.” They think that’s just the natural way to be. But then that puts you at conflict with everybody else who doesn’t agree with you. That puts you in a guaranteed program for misery actually, since nobody else will agree that you’re the most important, and yet you will keep struggling to show that you are in some way, but still then out of it, you could become president of the United States and people will still will not think you’re the most important. You’ll get really freaked out.

The key is that if you then meditate however, without having examined your distorted self-image, your central CPU, your distorted inner wiring, then you will simply intensify your inner wiring and you will not transform yourself, you will not move to a more open-minded, open-hearted interrelated way of being where you start getting along better with others. You notice them more, because you’re less focused on yourself.

You get better feedback from them, because they notice that you’re noticing them and they like you, etc., etc., and you can be more successful. Success really comes in life not just from any big thing you do about yourself, but it comes from how open you are to other people and how you see what they need, what they want, you listen to their advice, you can see their perspective, then you can actually deal with them and others and everyone much better, and even yourself. You’ll feel much happier and you’ll feel much more capable. That’s the key thing.

[0:11:24.6] MB: There’s a bunch of different ways I want to dig into this. Let’ start with the idea of analytic meditation, or critical meditation, or inside meditation. What does that mean, and what does that look like practically?

[0:11:36.1] RT: Well, it looks like thinking something over and investigating it. It means that you don’t, when you sit, if you do sit or whatever posture, although better not to take the posture road as thinker, because it’s much too uncomfortable to maintain for a very long time, if you know what it looks like.

Anyway, when you sit down to think over something, you explore it and you’re fueled by the realization why taking a little bit confident in the great teachers of humanity saying that you as a human being are capable of understanding something more deeply. An analysis means you take things apart, you’re looking at its components, you see how it’s made, you look at its quotation, and you see its context, and you go deeper and deeper, then you look at the parts and you take that apart.

Anyway, ultimately, you can analyze everything to pieces and it will disappear. But then you know how it’s put together. You do that about yourself. Then when you do, you’ll get more aware of your moving parts inside, especially inside your mind, but your body also. Then the more you’re aware of that ,the  better you can make them function.

Of course, do really completely get at, then you do have to fit it with a one point of concentration ability. Otherwise, if you just keep scanning and you scatter yourself too much. But the scanning one is the most important one, and you can penetrate right to where you have an experiential understanding of the nature of reality.

Also, you go beyond your concepts. You use your common sense to take aim, so to speak, but once you get down it becomes very experiential and you go beyond – you realize that reality is beyond, and is but this idea of reality, which is why Buddha was so special and I think he says, “Well, I understand everything, but I can’t really explain it throughout well, because it’s beyond explanation. However, what I am confident is that if you put your own head into it, you can understand it yourself. You really can.”
Given, that’s what I love by the way when I first encountered the Buddhist teachers, was the fact that they for one, unlike the western religious people, theistic religious people they didn’t say, “You just have to believe something,” whether it makes sense to you or not, because you can’t understand it ultimately. Only God can. I did it like that particularly.

Being then the scientist tell you, “Well, you can’t really understand everything. You can understand a small piece, analyze it, write it down, make a formula. But then that will open up to you how much more you don’t know sort of routine.” Finally, also you can understand.

Both those western options and actually other cultures too are pretty much weakening of the human ability to use that marvelous super computer we have in the wetware in our brain. It’s amazing. Whereas, the Buddha said, “Yes, you can really understand. You just have to put your mind to it. You have to learn. You can use for help, find teachers. But even without a teacher you can learn if you really examine yourself and your world.”

Remember Socrates, the own examined life is not worth living. Buddha never said that. He just said, “The owned examined life will be frustrating and the fully examined life will be blissful.” He took it a little further than dear old Socrates.

[0:14:43.7] MB: Before we get into the experiential understanding of the nature reality, which I’m fascinated by, I wanted to touch on the – just to clarify my understanding of this. I understand the meditative practice of sitting there, bringing your thoughts back to breath or something like that. This analytical or this insight meditation, is this an actual meditative practice, or is this more like journaling, linking, setting aside contemplative time?

[0:15:08.7] RT: Well, it is a kind of analytic practice. You see, the mindfulness craze that has swept the country tends to be taken by people as a method by bringing back to their breath of this identifying from the thought flow, and just being there, just breathing.

In a way, it’s a version of the approached state, you could say of one point it as a mind empty. In a way, its foundational of course for inside meditation, as well as one pointed or quiescent meditation. But the way most people do it, it pretty much tapers off into quiescent meditation. Inside meditation, where it is, is when you go in and you look and see how your mind is – you come to the breath, just as a way of actually heightening your awareness of the distractions really, rather than just breathing.

That is to say you begin to see what it is that takes your mind away. You look more objectively at the thought flow. You see where the mechanisms of the thought, or how does this thought arise from the sense stimulants from that memory? You penetrate that thought though. You actually then see where there are negative thoughts and where there are positive thoughts that open you, or that is thoughts that open you, or thoughts that close you down, which are the negative ones.

Then we have the words, it’s more penetrative, where you just don’t just, “Oh, that’s a thought.” But you say, “Well, what thought is that? How is it benefitting me and how accurate it is and what does it come from? Actually, who’s voice is it in? Is it my mother’s voice, my uncle’s voice? My elder sibling who always told me I was a pipsqueak or whatever it was, some put-down voice, or some teacher’s voice, or some preacher’s voice.”

The words, you begin to really gain a leverage over how the mind works. Then you begin to edit how the mind works and you reinforce the positive insights, and you reinforce the negative ones, the habitual ones that just have you spinning.

Some of the popular mindfulness insight practitioners do that to some degree, but unfortunately, I think the most of the populous ones just do it for the mind quieting. However, I’m not against that. I think that’s fine too, because some people need mind quieting. But if they just only do that, sooner or later they will be disappointed. Just the palliative of the mind quieting has not actually made them happy. It has not actually given them a deeper genius about the nature of life, and therefore they have not found bliss and they’re still frustrated.

Then really unfortunately was all would be they say, “Well, meditating is useless and it’s all useless. I’ll just go and watch TV or something.” On the other hand, of course TV is meditating, reading a book is critical thinking. In other words, when you learn verbally, externally or having the debate or a dialogue with another person is also critical thinking.

Just when you bring it inside as a meditation into your own mind, you intensify it. Although, in the tradition, I don’t know if you know anything about zen, but they have a tradition they call Dharma Combat in zen, where you debate other practitioners or your teacher. They have this very much in the Tibetan monasteries, because they say that to honestly debate yourself, that is to have one voice inside yourself challenge another one.

Like one voice, you have one habitual voice a lot of us have is, “You can’t really do that. You’re just you. You can’t really change. You’re always the same way you are.” Then the critical voice is, “Well actually, you do change all the time.” Why do you say that? “Every time you think something, you change and pushing toward transformation and seeing yourself as a work in progress and able to really develop yourself.” 

These are two voices inside. They say, it’s difficult to be honestly truly critical with yourself, unless you are pumped up to it by being critical, emotionally debating. They have debating with others as an art forum, as a learning forum, as a pre-meditated launching forum that is very powerful actually. Particularly where they mobilize these emotions, like when you make – when you’re wronged and you fight to be right, but then actually rationally you finally realize you made a mistake, that’s how you change.

Then you can do that internally and you could strip away false images, false self-identities, false constricting self-labels and things and really develop yourself as a person. That’s really important.

[0:19:27.7] MB: How do we – going back to one of the ideas you talked about within this, how do you edit the mind to reinforce positive insights and as you said de-inforce negative insights?

[0:19:38.1] RT: It’s helpful to have help over others. You read the great enlightening teachings, or some other – that a lot of them are not in Buddhism. There is greater light in teachings in Hinduism and Christianity, especially mystical Christianity, the mystical Islam, mystical Judaism Kabbalah. You mobilize minds that are further than you along that path, and they left methods.

They couldn’t just transmit their experience unfortunately, or they would have of course, but unfortunately they can’t because you are the only one who can learn your reality in a visually transformative way. There are others who have done that in whatever tradition. You use their help and they give methods and patterns and templates of where you might want to go.

You go out into your own mind and you learn to see the note, that last time I lost my temper and had totally freaked out, the last time I got brooding vindictively about how I was going to get revenge over so and so for three weeks or a month, then they moved to another city and I just continued to brood, etc.

In other words, it’s like based on a combination of experience and learning and you start editing useless mind patterns that are completely useless to you and actually debilitating to you and they weaken you. You do that gradually by learning methods to do it, and also getting help of others to do it. There are qualified teachers, therapists and even noble friends who would really like you and therefore, dare to be critical of you.

All of that will – in the case us males, often those are females who have a very sharp intuition and can often give us pointers about where we need a little redo, a little improvement. They really can. We have to overcome our male tendency not to want to listen, because we got tired of listening to our moms at some point. We’re a bunch of chauvinists. Anyway, what can you say? That was you think, maybe not you, that I should speak for myself actually.

[0:21:43.4] MB: I mean, I think there’s a lot of different insights that come out of that. I want to come back to something, sort of a concrete, even a first step or one method or strategy someone listening can use. If they say, “Hey, I want to take a first step towards insight meditation, or more specifically reinforcing the positive insights of my mind.” What is sort of the first step?

[0:22:05.6] RT: Well, first step is a little bit to calm down and that’s what they do teach well about counting the breath for example, or you can say a mantra and bring your mind back to the mantra. It’s maybe even more effective than just counting the breath. Counting the breath is very time on earth hollowed one, so that’s good.

You begin to get a little calm, you feel better, your pulse decreases, your blood pressure calms down, your breathe will slow naturally actually. Then you’re more focused. Then don’t just drop out of thought flow that you observed in your mind, and don’t just say, don’t set out and then ignore it. But rather, start to look at the content of the thought flow.

Okay, there was a distracting thought, “What was I thinking about? Was I thinking about something that happened yesterday? Was I anticipating something I imagine might happen tomorrow? When I thought about it, how did I feel? Did I make me tense or uptight? Was I frustrated by something that happened yesterday? Am I frightened of something that will happen in the future, or do I anticipate with realization I get excited and palm-sweaty about something is going to happen?”

In other words, start to look at the distractions in fact. Then the trick as you get advanced is you keep the calm and you do it calmly. You don’t get excited by it and then get distracted from the distraction. You investigate that distraction and then you begin to apply your experience and you say, “Well, what I did that day was really not that good. How I lost my temper, how I got all jealous, how whatever it was.”

I say, “Well, I should see try not to do that.” Then another time, “What can I do? Well, instead of being jealous of that person, maybe I would a little bit take their point of view. What were they thinking during that incident? Due with, maybe they were very unhappy and dissatisfied, etc. Actually, why am I being jealous of someone who themselves is miserable?”

In other words, you begin to edit your interpretation of your experience, you edit the discursive thoughts. Don’t just drop out of them. Once you have a little bit and you drop out of them, so you have a little more common concentration then you start taking a look at them. You know the famous Eckhart Tolle. Great example was his how he saved himself from suicide.

He wasn’t doing Buddhist meditation or probably no any such thing at the time. He was just being himself. He was seeker, a philosopher, a little bit of a mistake, but he got in a really depressive cycle and he was swirling down, right down the drain and this voice was telling him – his voice which he couldn’t resist, because it was acting like it was his voice.

He should do himself in there while of course it weren’t worth living. He was really getting close to and he was suicidally depressed in other words. Then what it is, is some other voice in his – he heard another voice that was also him challenging the voice that was cycling him into depression. That voice said, “Well, why should I believe you? Telling me I’m useless and worthless and life sucks and whatever it was.” Then there started to be a little bit of a debate between them.

The more critical voice began to say to the other one, “Take a hike. Stop putting me down.” He was no longer identifying that it was his immovable voice. He had another more – intelligent, more critical voice that was free. Then sooner or later, he survived very well. He wrote The Power of Now. He became Oprah’s guru. He’s a happy guy.

It had to do in becoming critically looking at his distracting thought, which in that case wasn’t distracting. He was already nailed on that bad thought that was taking him down the drain into suicide. He found this another thought. Now he doesn’t elaborate in the anecdote when he tells that in his Power of Now book. That happened, he doesn’t elaborate whether he eventually analyzed the voice that was putting him down, did it connect to a parental voice, did he connect to where they were – was the stories of that self-image that he identified as himself disapproving of himself.

I don’t know. Or maybe he did in another book. I haven’t read into that. But the Buddhist psychology totally elaborates such things, because it codifies the experience of thousands of people over thousands of years exploring themselves in that kind of a way and improving themselves and getting rid of obstacles and so and so. That’s a very concrete example, I think is very good.

Also anyone can concretely just sit, count their breath, have a distracting thought. Mind would say, “Why am I doing this?” Sometimes it’s usually criticizing yourself for what you’re doing, or that I’ll never get anywhere to do this. Or I can’t get to 10. Or even cheating. Like okay, I lost track at four. Then I’ll jump in seven, because I’ll consider that I got those out of three. People, they even cheat themselves trying to get to 10.

There will be distracting thoughts like that, and then you calm those down. But then you say, “Well then, why am I having that distracting thought?” Then find the voice in yourself that always puts you down, that always expects you not to get the best, that always expects you to fail, expects you to always be stuck in that, and find out where does that come from and look at it.

Now the trick is doing the same thing when you go to a psychotherapist in the sense that you talk to them and the push you to keep probing into your memories and things and to locate different experiences and different forms of self and different self-narratives, and help you get that improved narrative, but just took long and laborious often with them. Sometimes not, but you can do this yourself, to yourself much cheaper and actually quite quickly and effectively.

I think really a good trick that I know and some of the really best ones, I would call them insight oriented shrinks, mindful shrinks. They have the patience to do that, because they have so many they can’t – they have any scarcity of people who are frustrated and happy. They urge them to do that to accelerate the process, and I think it works very, very well. Not every case and not everybody have lived it very, very well.

[0:28:06.4] MB: In many ways, that makes me think of something we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast in the past and we’ll include this in the show notes, but we call limiting beliefs and how to root out and remove these limiting beliefs that can be holding you back, or causing you suffering in your life.

[0:28:20.1] RT: Yeah, that’s right.

[0:28:20.8] MB: We’ll put that in the show notes for listeners who are looking for some of those concrete tools. I want to circle into another topic that you talked about, Bob, which is this idea that – the concept of the experiential understanding of the nature of reality. That reality is beyond anybody’s ability to describe it. Can you tell me more about what that is and what that mean?

[0:28:42.6] RT: That’s a really fabulous thing, which can also lead and has led a lot of people to misunderstanding. That is you and I and Austin and everybody listening, we are in contact with the nature of reality all the time. Our body is touching it, ourselves are aware of it, our peripheral awareness is aware of it and so forth.

We are not attending to our contact with reality, to our own Buddha nature, you could say, where we are merged with our environment, we’re merged with others, the boundary between us and them is not so rigid. Occasionally we have like an aesthetic breakthrough and we like either delicious apple, and for a moment we just lose our mind eating that apple. That’s being in touch with the nature of reality.
The problem we have is that our conceptual apparatus is what we pay attention to. Their conceptual apparatus, all it says is apple, delicious, nice. It just has some a fewer labels. It’s latched on. We don’t cover the whole thing. They just make it fit into our preconceived idea.

Then that removes us from being in touched with the nature of reality. Therefore, some people misunderstand by thinking that, “Oh, the mind emptying meditation is the really great one, because then I won’t recognize – I won’t use my concepts and I’ll concept-free. That means I’ll be enlightened.”

Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated, because our concepts are rooted at a deep level in the brain, in our instinct, in our culture, in our acculturation. We can suppress their manifestation briefly just by not using them, but they’re still there. They still are carving up. They happen so fast, like when you see a blue painted wall, your mind immediately sees a blue – “blue painted wall.”

Actually, your perception when you look up and see this blue surface, you don’t have code blue, but you see something. You see a surface, and actually you’re of course not seeing something out there, because buttons are bouncing off things and hitting your neurons and your brain is desperately trying to organize it, and if you’re not color blind, it organizes it into blue.

The point is, it happens so fast though the conceptual overlay, and the conceptual overlaying structure which is huge in the brain is there even when you quiet it for a while. To really liberate yourself where you can have gut experience of the whole universe, you have to use the concepts to unravel the concepts. The thing is like, in the old time when you make fire with wood, like a boy scout, when you rub a bow back and forth over a stick, or spin it with your hands, with some little dust, or a little kindling there, then the stick itself will burn.

You use the concept like a fire to stir the concepts, to where then they consume themselves and then your experience, your perceptual experience, your intuitive, direct, unmediated experience will move out into feeling at one with the things that you’re seeing and experiencing as a Buddha does.

What’s needed by that, what I love about it is yes, it’s a far development to become fully enlightened, but actually we have that full enlightenment already in ourselves, right there hidden in our fingertips. But then we don’t pay attention, because we only think we have a “fingertip,” and we don’t get down to the cellular level of experience. We don’t want to let ourselves go into that.

We feel insecure when we don’t have a description and a narrative about what we’re doing that makes us feel it’s under our control. But the problem with keeping it under out control then is boring. It’s not fulfilling. It also it’s very, very partial.

You go to a concert, or you go to a museum, or you encounter an art object, or you have a personal experience, essential experience even and some of this says, “Well, how was that, or what happened to these things?” You say, “Well, I was really blown away,” you say. What means by blown away, of course in the gangster movie is that means killed. What gets killed or blown away is once fitting once experience into a set of preconceived concepts that actually don’t allow for that much ecstasy, or that much bliss, or that much self, losing yourself in something, where you feel – makes you feel really great and you really get it.

The goal is to be like that all the time. Not meaning that they’re like dead, then you’d be like a vegetable, you wouldn’t know what was going on and you would be just wondering around, lost in the universe without knowing who you were. No.

The good thing is where you completely are aware of the network, but you’re completely free of it at the same time. Although you can use it. That’s a great thing about this experiential thing being beyond our concept. It’s know this. Shelley said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” What he meant by that was that a poet sees something everybody else sees and fit into their preconceived idea. The poet sees something completely new and different, then articulates that in a poem, using some of the old concepts, but using them in a way that then the reader or the listener gets a hint of that new experience.

Then of course, that new experience then becomes a formula and a concept, which you then slap on the thing and it takes another part to come and break past that. What he meant by legislator, that they legislate the terms or more perception. The point is our habitually conceptually dominated perception is limited and it has value, of course, but it’s limited. The direct experience of things is where we go beyond that.
That’s where we – Buddha science really likes contemporary science, which is now just western of course, it’s worldwide. That they privilege the experience, which is the empirical experiment, like experience experiment and they privilege that over the theory. They say that theories are all just hypothetical accounting for previous experiences. If you have new data from new experiences and experiments, then you revise the theory.

Therefore, you don’t try to capture reality in some absolute dogma in theory. But of course, unfortunately do and they’re a particularly thing nowadays is the dogma of materialism that has no mind and no power of mind. That is self-defeating and self-limiting and unnecessary. I’m sure your audience in the topic just then shows that you’re aware of people who want to develop the mind, they want to know about mind over matter, they want to get their own minds in order and empower them and they should and they will and we have to, because it’s up to we individuals to straighten out this messed up society, planet, what have you. I won’t go into that.

One example though I like to give, because it’s my main topic nowadays is the Dalai Lama. People always wonder how he keeps up his joy, his good humor, his friendly presence and his own personal enjoyment of life, relish of life when he’s facing this empire that’s chasing him on the planet, that’s persecuting his people, that has for 60 years has been in exile and so forth, and they’ve been wrecking this country and harming his people?

He was fixing incident, he resisted. He hasn’t give into it, but he doesn’t let it destroy his daily existence and therefore, is more capable of resisting because he stays happy in spite of the adversity. How do you do that this is the direction we’re talking about? If you could do that, it seems like he can set an example for us to be able to do that like that, then we can certainly do it with whatever level of adversity we experience.

It makes you open. For example, say a bad thing happens to you in adversity and if you close on that with your concepts and your narrative about, “That’s a terrible adversity. That’s horrible, you know.” Then you’re just going to suffer. You will intensify the suffering that you already got from the adversary.

If you are more open, where what you experience will go ahead – the pay and dimension is more than whatever your identified pain is, and there is another side to it then you can find silver linings. You can make the best of it, then you can take advantage of it actually. You can use adversity to empower yourself for more success, but you can’t do that if you’re just wrapped one concept on it and get dogmatic about it and that’s it and close your mind around it.

All of the Buddha science, the masterful psychology they have for thousands of years is all about that the nature of life itself is blissful, is reality itself is something good. It’s nirvana actually. You don’t have to go off somewhere on icebox, or a vast empty space someplace for nirvana. This is nirvana. The more you’re open to reality, therefore the happier you are. The more closed you are and the more imposing of what your preconceived idea of reality is, whereas one that someone has brainwashed you into, the more miserable you will be. It’s generally the methodology, the art, the science of how to open the human mind and heart and have a happy loving life.

[0:37:53.5] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities, so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor for this episode; Skillshare.

Skillshare is an online learning community with 16,000 courses in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. You get unlimited access to all of the courses on Skillshare for a low monthly price. You never have to pay per course again.

They have several awesome courses on there that I personally love; everything from mastering Evernote to Mind Mapping to learning to draw, if you want to get a leg up in graphic design, social media marketing, culinary knife skills, or anything else, check out Skillshare.

Right now, they’re offering an incredible value to our listeners. You can get three months of Skillshare for 99 cents. All you have to do is go to skillshare.com/success. That’s skillshare.com/success and you can redeem three months of classes for just 99 cents.

[0:39:09.1] MB: This is a topic that fascinates me and I want to dig deeper into this. How does somebody like the Dalai Lama, mind this happiness and joy in a world that’s so full of suffering?

[0:39:17.7] RT: Well, somebody comes up and insults you. That’s bad, and you’re not happy and sorry that they felt that way. Then you will take note your inventory and you realize a lot of other people didn’t. You throw some awful stuff. Gandhi had a nice way of putting it that the Dalai Lama I know agrees with. Where he said, when something terrible happens and it’s very sad and there’s so many things he said today’s goods that are really sad. Yet, you reflect on the broader pattern of life.

If somebody killed somebody, that’s – or somebody had OD’d and died, but you didn’t think about people who didn’t hurt anybody else. Somebody who helped that old lady across the street, somebody helps somebody carry their package, somebody who returned a – the other day I lost my laptop in a cab. Mohammad brought it back and he didn’t even want a reward. We had to contact him. We had to tell him how to contact us. I didn’t have to find my Mac, which I hadn’t turned that on, but we did locate him finally and they told him where to bring it, and he just rushed right back with it.

Like a 3.5 grand laptop and he didn’t want a reward. I’ve seen things like – then somebody else stole stuff. I lost this. I got ripped off on that. A lot of people who did rip me off. In other words, the Dalai Lama counts his blessings. He doesn’t deny his sufferings and he resists and he speaks out and he fights, non-violently fights to try to right the wrongs. He’s very honest and can be very blunt and so forth and can be unpopular when he has to take a stand sometimes, but he counts his blessings.

He looks at a flower on his way to a meeting where he’s going to be told, “You can’t get a Visa to go see your old friend on his 80th birthday.” He then sees the flower and he realizes his friend is looking on a flower. In other words, you brought your attitude and your orientation and you don’t fixate on the bad things, but you don’t – and you do that without just trying to live in denial of them.

In other words, you embrace that they’re there and you resist that, and you also you even are motivated not to be only focused on the bad things, because you know if you do that, you will get bad and you will be totally ineffective doing anything about it.

As you know, when you’re miserable, you’re very ineffective in dealing with people or anything. When you’re really happy, not in a hysterical way, but in a zingy way, then you’re really skilled. You can help someone overcome a tantrum, a kid who is so focused because they want that candy bar and out the window you get them thinking about Big Bird or something, or is looking out the horse out there distracting him. You’re really skillful and humorous about it, because you feel good. You share your good feelings automatically.

Therefore, it isn’t just a selfish thing. It’s a motivation to resist the bad is to be happy about the good. Then they’ll make you better able to resist the bad, because you have stronger motivation and more skill.

When someone loses their temper, then psychological studies they lose – I don’t know how they came with that exact figure, but they say they lose 85% of their judgment about how to mend, or how to deal with the situation that they’re so mad about. They had that bull in China shop that crash into stuff, they break things, they say things they didn’t mean, they overdo it, they got a big out reaction to tell the person they were trying to do something with. That’s how he does it.

[0:42:33.5] MB: I think I’ve heard a similar anecdote about the Dalai Lama, but it reminds almost when you’re on an airplane and they say you have to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help somebody else.

[0:42:43.4] RT: That’s right. That’s right. You got that. That’s a good one. That’s really good. Love is like that. You have to be happy yourself already to have genuine, according to Buddhist psychology, define love. Meaning, not that just possessive wish, but the wish for the happiness of the beloved. Because how can you wish for someone’s happiness if you have no touch with happiness yourself? In other words, “I want you to be happy, I’m so miserable.” No, that won’t work. Then say, “Well, thanks a lot. But that doesn’t make me happy.”

[0:43:15.9] MB: Another topic that I’m fascinated with is the relationship between, or the idea of the illusion that we’re our own isolated egos oppose the universe and the reality of the interconnectedness of everything.

[0:43:27.4] RT: Right, right. Well, that’s what you’re talking about there is the second noble truth, or second noble fact taught by the Buddha, which is the fundamental miswiring of a human, come from probably many previous existences as a lesser intelligent animal that I’m the only absolute thing around here. Other lives are – I could be in the matrix and they could just be illusions and I’m the only real one.

Therefore, most important to me and that’s the one that puts you in this hopeless situation of suffering, of frustration. Because nobody else will agree, universe doesn’t agree, not just people, but germs, heavy objects that falls down over mountainside, the earthquakes, fires, they all don’t agree that you’re the most important.

When you’re up against death, there is all that. As long as that’s your thing, you’re going to be miserable. That’s a second noble fact. That’s a far for a noble person, noble being defined by a more altruistic, more well-connected, more relativized person. But nirvana, the third noble truth is the fact that the universe is empty of any non-relational entity. There is no such entity that is relevant to the universe that is not related to it. That’s all that empty just means. Empty does not mean it’s faced like a nothing, that’s like space. Nothing is not a space either. Nothing is actually nothing.

Point is that Buddha’s discovery 2,500 years ago anticipated Mr. Einstein, Dr. Einstein’s one of one a century ago or so. That is that relativity, because the great teaching of emptiness itself is this is a teaching of relativity. It teaches that you are totally interrelated, I am totally interrelated. We are a nexus of interrelationship of all that’s around us, space and time and we are a work in progress, and that does not disable us from being – making ourselves best work we can, making ourselves a work of art.

Which is there is apparently no limit, because the unlimited work of art is Buddha actually. Buddha’s manifestations are a work of art, and we’re having life itself becomes art. Because it’s all related and so there is infinite energy to be drawn on, there is infinite opportunities, there is also a lot of negativities, but all the negativities are weaker than the opportunities, because the negativities come from living beings thinking they got to just get out from number one, and then therefore each of them only has one small master, which is themselves, their ego, their little ego.

Whereas, the more altruistic ones, the more enlightened ones, they are serving everybody else. They draw energy from the need of infinite number of others, not just their own needs. They’re much stronger in the long run. Even in the short run, if one understands the short run. That’s what I was like to say, Buddha turned the old adage of ignorant people on its head. Their old adage being ignorance is bliss, implying they don’t want to really know reality, because it would be too unpleasant.

In the Buddha’s case he says, “No. Ignorance is the cause of suffering and reality is bliss.” Therefore, when you understand reality, you will know your own bliss, which you already have. The final really weird one that I’m loving more and more is that since I still I’m not that blissful, I’m busy, busy, busy, but although I love it, I love being busy with bliss, but it’s still not that blissful, because I’m still stupid.

The point is that the bliss that I will eventually find of nirvana, which would be Buddhahood is my own bliss that I already have. It’s just that I have blocks in me from really knowing it. It’s not some remote thing, exotic thing I have to go to Mt. Everest to find. It is me. We’re made of it, and you too, we all are.

That’s really encouraging, I think actually. Rather than all these big put-outs. Reality sucks, you suck. There’s some guy outside, like a God or something, or at least minimally nothing that will anesthetic for you, is like space out in. Instead of all those put-downs is like, reality is bliss, you’re made of bliss, you have the intelligence to get rid of the walls and blocks between you and knowledge of yourself, your habitual identity and knowledge of yourself. It’s very cool. Be happy. How about it?

Now, you go to go.

[0:47:41.3] MB: Yeah, we’re out of time, but that remind me of one of the fundamental conclusions of modern physics essentially is the same idea that every single thing in the universe exists interdependent of everything else, and that you would completely inseparable. You can’t ever really see one thing, except as a connected or relationship in some former fashion to everything else that’s ever existed in space and time.

[0:48:06.0] RT: Absolutely. The false thing was to doing to run away from the inquisition in the church, which I applaud them doing. But still, the idea that all those relative things, the one thing that’s excluded is the mind of the living being. That’s unnecessary. The mind is just super subtle awareness, and actually it is that with which we can go beyond the way of particle paradox into the area of Heisenberg on certain the principle, into the plenum of infinite energy of the vacuum, where everything is happening, but where we can’t reach conceptually.

We can work on the surface with probabilities and statistics and invent wonderful magnificent things. But our mind is this one that is – can reach that completely, seemingly inaccessible, non-objective, Copenhagen interpretation in forced real, which is the constitutive realm of reality of infinite energy, with no need for any scarcity or deprivation of anybody.

They should get over not having that be part of their world. I love this when Henry Stapp, a great senior and magnificent quantum physics guy, who explained to me for finally for the first time I finally figured out what was wrong, why the whole science wasn’t brought back  into a thing of being accepting the presence of mind and nature by the Copenhagen declaration of Bohr and Heisenberg, because Einstein rebelled against it.

That’s not an innocent, as a harmful statement that God does not play dice with the universe. He harmed himself because he said he wouldn’t accept that there was a non-objective reality that was a deep energy level, but it was you can’t grab in there with any kind of observation, mechanical observation, because the observing act disturbs what you’re observing. The mind that observes is engaged with the object served. There is no absolute objectivity and theory can’t reach them.

He then freaked out about that and said, “I’m going to come up with a grand unified theory.” Ran back to Princeton, got  himself a big grant and never did come up with such a theory, because there is no need for that theory, because we rather need the experience. It’s waiting there for all the scientists to get it.

Actually, Dalai Lama had been a big help in having these dialogues with them, and without being too pushy about any spiritualist or religious business with them, and just talking with them on a rational scientific level. A number of them have really gotten into it beautifully. Richie David and these kind of people, they’re really great. I’m sure you have them on your show, or I should think so.

[0:50:39.7] MB: Well, Bob. This has been a fascinating conversation and there’s so many other avenues and roads and things that I want to dig into, but I know we’re out of time. For listeners who want to do some research, find you and what you do online, what is the best ways for them to find you?

[0:50:53.6] RT: Bobthurman.com. That’s www.bobthurman.com. There is like a 100 some podcast on that, and there is a lot of stuff there. Access to my books and the one I’m promoting nowadays is the Man of Peace, which is a illustrated novel biography of its own, the Dalai Lama 80 years of life. It’s like a giant comic book. It’s lot of fun.

He’s a new mutant actually. He hasn’t beaten the bad guys yet, but he will, because he’s doing non-violence and that will win over this ridiculous, self-defeating violence that no one can really use.

[0:51:29.7] MB: Well, Bob thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom, so many interesting insights. It was great to have you on here.

[0:51:35.3] RT: Thank you, Matt. I enjoyed talking with you and another time I’d be happy to, and I’ll try to be on time. Take care.

[0:51:41.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up. Including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, you can vote on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free, along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today.

Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R  to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm that helps us move up the item’s rankings and helps more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show; links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

Evidence Reveals The Most Important Skill of the 21st Century with Dr. Tasha Eurich

In this episode we discuss one of the most important evidence based psychology principles that make people successful - self awareness. We look at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau. We talk about why self awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century and the foundational skill required to succeed in anything, and we examine conclusions form over 800 scientific studies about self awareness with our guest Dr. Tasha Eurich.  

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and principal of The Eurich Group. She received her Ph.D in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Colorado State University and a BA in Theatre and Psychology. She is the New York Times Bestselling author of Bankable Leadership and INSIGHT. Her TED talk has been viewed over one million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times and many more!

• How Tasha uses evidence based psychology principles to make people more succesful

• The difference between people who plateau and people who meet and defeat challenge head on

• Self awareness “the meta skill of the 21st century"

• What does the data show is linked to high self awareness?

• Self awareness is foundational to all skills required to succeed

• What does the Science say about Self Awareness?

• Self aware people are:

• More fulfilled

  1. Better communications

  2. More confidence

  3. Have better relationships

  4. More effective leaders

  5. Run more profitable companies

• Self awareness sets the UPPER LIMIT for the skills you need to be successful in the world today

• "The secret weapon of the 21st century”

• 95% people of people think that they are self aware but only 10-15% actually are

• On a good day 80% of people are lying to themselves about lying to themselves

• Conclusions from reviewing over 800 scientific studies to figure out WHAT self awareness was

• The 2 broad categories of self awareness - the ability to see yourself cleary

• Internal Self Awareness (introspective people)

  1. External Self Awareness (pleasers)

• Those 2 types of self knowledge are completely unrelated

• Self knowledge underpins any other skill

• Self awareness is an “infinitely learnable skill”

• Research conclusions from people who began with a lack of self awareness, but then developed self awareness

• There are no demographic commonalities between self awareness

• The 3 categories of Self Awareness Unicorns

• Being in a new role / new set of rules

  1. Earthquake events - usually negative - that are so devastating that they either cause is to bury our heads in the sand, or they become a catalyst for self awareness

  2. The MOST LIKELY - everyday insights

• You have a tremendous amount of opportunities within your daily life to improve your self awareness

• The barriers to self awareness are myriad

• Internal wiring of human beings - change the way you introspect

  1. The power of substituting the word WHY for the word WHAT

  2. The world we live in today - social media, reality TV, the “cult of self”

• The cult of the self - and how our culture damages self awareness

• The challenges of excavating our subconscious / unconscious mind

• Moving forward with purpose, logic, and curiosity

• Too much Introspection can make you anxious and depressed

• To gain insight, focus on moving FORWARD

• Do your introspective practices serve you?

• Tasha’s training regimen to start to develop self awareness

• Tools for improving your internal and external self awareness

• The power of "The Daily Check-In”

• What went well today?

  1. What didn’t go well?

  2. What can I do to be smarter tomorrow?

• How you can use a “dinner of truth” to ask “What do I do that’s most annoying to you?”

• Dont’ defend, explain, disagree, just LISTEN

• The truth about feedback - you don't have to listen to or act on feedback from anyone

• How to become aware of your true strengths and gifts - ask your close friends

• WHY are you friends with me?

• Most self awareness unicorns rely on a handful of KEY people to provide them with feedback

• Someone has to truly have your back and want you to be truly successful

  1. They have to be willing to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly

• The power of “loving critics”

• Our strenghts - seem obvious to us which makes it hard for us to see them

• You must be very strategic and very focused on WHO you get feedback from

• Self awareness unicorns don’t rely on other people to approach them with feedback. They never assumed that people would tell them ANYTHING - they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms

• You need feedback from multiple sources to get a clear picture

• The easiest, highest payoff activity to get initial self awareness

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life by Tasha Eurich

• [Book] Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

• [TEDxTalks] Learning to be awesome at anything you do, including being a leader by Tasha Eurich

• [Article] The Self-Reflection and Insight Scale: A New Measure of Private Self-Consciousness by Anthony M. Grant, John Franklin, and Peter Langford

• [Quiz] Insight Quiz

• [Book Site] Insight

• [Article] An Examination of the Deaf Effect Response to Bad News Reporting in Information Systems Projects by Michael John Cuellar

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss one of the most important evidence-based psychology principles that makes you successful; self-awareness. We look at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau. We talk about why self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st-century and the foundational skill required to succeed in nearly anything, and we examine conclusions from over 800 scientific studies about self-awareness, with our guest, Dr. Tasha Eurich. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on the listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. It’s our most popular guide. You can get it absolutely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, which our listeners absolutely love. It’s short, simple, filled with links, articles and stories of things that we found interesting and exciting in the last week. 

Lastly, you're going to get a chance to shape the show. You could vote on guests, change our intro music, even submit your own questions to upcoming guests. There're some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up, join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. Join email list today. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how to master relationships. Went deep into cutting-edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors. Examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation. Look at the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships. Discussed how to let go of individualism and much more with our guest, Keith Ferrazzi. If you want to build a world-class network, listen to that episode.

[0:02:36.4] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha is an organizational psychologist, researcher and principal of the Eurich group. She received her PhD in industrial organizational psychology from Colorado State University. She is the New York Times best-selling author of Bankable Leadership and Insight. Her TED Talk has been viewed over a million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times, and much more. 

Tasha, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:04.5] TE: Thanks for having me. Great to be here. 

[0:03:06.4] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. So I'd love to start out with — One of the biggest themes and biggest things we talk about all the time in the show is self-awareness, and I know you’ve kind of describe self-awareness as the meta-skill of the 21st-century, and I’d love to hear little bit about what does that mean to you and why self-awareness is so important. 

[0:03:27.4] TE: It’s such a great place to start, because I think it's really the Genesis of really all of my passion about the subject. So I'm an organizational psychologist, as you mentioned, and what I have done for the last 15 years is use evidence-based principles of psychology to help usually executives, but people in organizations be successful and make companies a better place to work and make leaders more effective and happier and be able to engage their people. 

What I started to see him, really, over the course of that time were two types of leaders. One type of leader was successful, successful enough to get promoted, but really didn't have an appreciation of who they were. Who were they authentically? What did they value? What was important to them? Nor did they have an appreciation of how other people saw them. They inadvertently got in their own way. A lot of times with those people, it's not a matter of if, but when they crash and burn. 

On the optimistic side, the other type of person I saw or leader were people who were able to sort of meet any challenge that came their way, and the reason they could was they knew very clearly who they were. They knew their values. They knew their strengths. They knew what they didn't know, and they also had an appreciation for the effects they were having on the people around them. This is sort of what we call self-awareness. 

About four years ago, I — This is really embarrassing, but it was Christmas break and I was kind of bored. I didn't have a lot of client work and I said, “I wonder ant what the research on self-awareness really is. What do we now?” 

I started to do a review of what the science on self-awareness really said and I discovered just how little we knew. We've been talking about it in the business world so much that it's kind of this buzzword, but from a scientific evidence-based perspective, there were so many things that we were assuming that may or may not have been true. 

I basically have spent the last four years of my life going through a very in-depth program to understand what self-awareness really is, where it comes from, why we needed and, really, how to get more of it. So that’s the preface of how I became so passionate about this. 

The reason that everybody who’s listening to this can be passionate about it too, if they’re not already, is I call it the meta-skill of the 21st-century. There’s so much evidence that people who are self-aware are more fulfilled. They have stronger relationships. They’re more creative. They’re better communicators. They’re more confident. They are more effective leaders. Actually, there is evidence that self-aware leaders actually lead more profitable companies. So there’s tremendous amount of benefit. 

The reason it’s the meta-skill is basically our self-awareness sets the upper limit for so many of the skills that we need to be successful in the world right now. Things like communication skills, influence, emotional intelligence, collaboration. We can only be as good at each of those things as we are self-aware. The other thing I call it sometimes is the secret weapon of the 21st-century. So many people think they're self-aware, but they actually aren't. So people that work on it are the ones that really I've seen reap the rewards time and time again. 

[0:06:52.1] MB: You brought up a great point, which is something that I've always found really sort of fascinating and maybe a little bit sad, but the idea that the less self-aware someone is, the less they realize it. 

[0:07:04.7] TS: It's pretty disconcerting, isn’t it? 

[0:07:06.5] MB: Yeah. I mean it's kind of a manifestation essentially of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the idea that the least competent people have the least awareness of how unaware and sort of incompetent they are. 

[0:07:20.2] TE: That's exactly it, and it does extend to self-awareness. My research has shown that — Get this, 95% of people think that they're self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are. The joke I always make is that means that on a good day, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves. 

[0:07:41.9] MB: That's pretty amazing. It’s very meta in a sense. I'm curious, going back slightly, because I want to make sure we have a clear definition of this. You touched on it a little bit, but how do you actually define what is self-awareness?

[0:07:57.1] TE: We thought early on in our research program that this would be a pretty quick cursory questions to answer, but we ended up taking almost a year and reviewing 800 scientific studies to figure out what the heck is this thing we call self-awareness. People were defining it differently. They were using sometimes like conflicting definitions. We did that review of all of the research and we came up with two broad categories. Self-awareness in general is the ability to see ourselves clearly, but it's made up of two specific types of self-knowledge. 

Number one, we call internal self-awareness, and that's kind of what we think about when we hear that term most of the time. It’s being clear on our values and our passions and our personality, our strengths and weaknesses, really seeing ourselves clearly from an internal perspective. 

The other type of self-awareness, external self-awareness, has to do with our understanding of how other people see us. So that’s a completely different skillset. It's a different mindset. Surprisingly in our research, we also found that those two types of self-knowledge were completely unrelated. So somebody could be low on both, in which case they have nowhere to go but up. They could be high on both, which again is very rare. But more often than not, people tend to be a little bit higher on one than the other. You get these archetypes. You’ve got somebody who is clear internally, but doesn't understand external perceptions. I call those introspectors. Self-examination might be a hobby for them, but if you go talk to their friends, their friends would say, “Oh boy! Sometimes that person can be a little annoying, or they’re cheap or whatever,” but the person doesn't even have an understanding of that because they haven't taken the time. 

The other side of the coin, I call pleasers, and I put myself in this category. These are people who spend so much time trying to understand how other people see them, that they might actually lose sight of what really matters to them. I think it's a really interesting framework because it helps us discover what are the areas of self-awareness that we can improve that will give us the biggest bang for our buck. 

[0:10:07.6] MB: Have you found any correlation kind of between either one of those two being more or less related with kind of some of the outcomes you talked about a moment ago? Whether it’s being more fulfilled or being happy or being better communicators, etc.?

[0:10:20.5] TE: There is some evidence there that there is a little bit different effects. You start to think about some of those internal outcomes, like happiness, confidence. Those seem to be a little bit more related to internal self-awareness, and then if you look at the outcomes of that external self-awareness, things like our relationship strength or even other people's ratings of our emotional intelligence. Those tend to be a little bit more related to those external perceptions. What's interesting is for most outcomes, both of them are related. If we work on one out of the two, we might get benefits in both areas of our lives, kind of the internal part of our life and the external part of our life. 

[0:11:03.0] MB: I want to dig in to kind of how we can cultivate both of those forms of self-awareness. But before we start with that, I want to circle back, one of the topics you touched on a second ago is this this idea that self-awareness is sort of a foundational skill. It's almost an underpinning of every other skill. I think that's a really critical point. 

[0:11:22.9] TE: Exactly. Take something like communication. I cannot name a single person that I know that is a good communicator that is not also highly self-aware. To think about that internal and external self-awareness again, to be a good communicator you’ve got to know what you do well, what you don't do well. You’ve got to know what's important to you so you can be able to sort of authentically represent that. Then you also have to know the effect you're having on the people around you. You need to be able to tailor your communication to their style and their needs and their passions. It's just such a great example of where both of those types of self-knowledge are underpinning pretty much any other skill, and we could substitute so many other skills for communication, but I think that's just a good example kind of to start with. 

[0:12:13.2] MB: We've seen that — I mean on the show we've interviewed all kinds of experts from a variety of fields and I’d say the single most current lessons that we've uncovered is that self-awareness is, as you said, sort of the meta-skill that’s necessary to be successful in, really, any area. 

[0:12:31.3] TE: What I love about that is that our research has shown that self-awareness is an infinitely learnable skill. So sometimes it feels overwhelming to say, “Oh my gosh! I was one of those 95% who thought I was self-aware. Maybe I'm not that self-aware.” That’s a good thing, and what I can tell people is after that somewhat rude awakening, there is nothing but confidence and success and fulfillment on the other side of it. 

In our research, one of the things we did, it was fascinating. We found people who didn't start out self-aware, but who became self-aware and made these really dramatic improvements in their lives, in their work, and we didn't find any demographic patterns. They weren’t more likely to be one gender than the other. Didn't matter what their industry was or their job. It didn't matter whether they worked or not. It didn't matter what age they were. The only thing these people had in common were really two things. Number one was a belief in the importance of self-awareness, and number two was a daily commitment to improving it. What I love about that is it sort of makes self-awareness available to all of us. We all are equally capable of building that self-awareness. 

[0:13:49.7] MB: I'm curious, how did you cultivate that sort of — Maybe not cultivate, but those people who had as you called it kind of a rude awakening where they started to realize their own kind of lack of self-awareness. What was that catalyst and some of the research you did or the work you've done? What is really kind of broken people through that kind of fog and taught them, “Wow! Maybe I'm not nearly as self-aware as I thought I was.” 

[0:14:15.5] TE: That’s such a good question. So just for terminology, we actually started to jokingly call these people that we’re talking about self-awareness unicorns, because we weren’t sure if we’d be able to actually find any, but thankfully we did. When we interviewed our unicorns about that exact question, we sort of found that those experiences fell into at least one of three categories. So the first category was being in some kind of a new role in their lives or having to play by a new set of rules. So that might be getting married, living with someone for the first time. It might be a new job in the same company. It might be a new job in a different company. Really, any situation where you have to fundamentally change your assumptions about your environment and sort of how you fit into that environment. 

The second was something I call earthquake events, and these are those events in our lives that they’re usually negative that are so devastating that we can either bury our heads in the sand or we can say, “I need to figure out what role I played in this.” Everything from unexpected divorces, people were telling us about getting fired and they had no idea. They were completely shocked. We also found some people talked about even illnesses, really serious illnesses that they got through on to the other side, but that really catalyzed their self-awareness journey. 

Here’s what interesting. Those two types of events to me seems like they would be the most common catalyst for self-awareness. We actually found a third type of event that was twice as likely to be a catalyst than the other two, and I call them every day insights. These are basically things that if we pay attention on a daily basis, we are getting so many opportunities to improve our self-awareness in just the normal course of our lives. This is a silly example, but I think it’s really — It says a lot about this area. One of our unicorns was talking about she was in her first apartment after college and she was moving in with her best friend. They were so excited. They were unpacking their kitchen and she barked to her friends, “Don't put the plastic cups in front of the glass cups. That's just ridiculous.” 

She remembered sort of hovering outside of her body in that moment and saying, “Oh my gosh! Wow! I must be really controlling if I just said that,” and that was a huge insight for her that she was able to sort of build on and continue to examine her behavior. 

Once again, I think it's great. We don’t have to wait for these events to come to us. We can decide that we’re going to get on top of it and really be in charge of our own journey. 

[0:16:54.7] MB: I think that's a great point. Every day, life is so filled with rich experiences to think about and observe and get feedback on your behavior, your own thought patterns, the way you kind of act and behave in the world, and there is such ample opportunity if you can kind of open your eyes and start to actually look for these things. 

[0:17:16.7] TE: That’s it. It’s all about paying attention, and sort of behind that is the mindset that in a positive self-accepting way, maybe I don't know myself as well as I think. What if I didn't? What kind of a newfound curiosity might that give me about my world?

[0:17:33.3] MB: So in the work you've done, what have you seen? What are some of the barriers that people have when they try to kind or begin this journey of self-awareness? What are some of the struggles or challenges that they encounter?

[0:17:44.9] TE: Oh my gosh! There are so many. We could do our own podcast just on this probably, but maybe I can attempt to sort of talk about the different categories that they fall in just so people can be aware of sometimes these really hidden factors that get in our way. The first type of barrier are the things internally just about how human beings are wired. What we've learned since the days of Freud is as much as we want to be able to excavate our own conscious thoughts and our feelings and our motives, “Why did I really do that?” or “Why am I really like this?” Most of that information is simply not available to us. It's trapped sort of in a locked basement where we can never find the key. 

So many people — I think it's the influence of Freud that we just feel like, “Well, if I go to enough therapy or if I journal enough, these things are going to come to me.” It's not that we shouldn't introspect. Part of it is just that we often make many mistakes without knowing we’re making those mistakes. 

One sort of easy way to get around that barrier is to accept it and to say, “Okay. I might not be able to know exactly why I picked a fight with my spouse this morning, but maybe instead of asking why, I should ask more action oriented logic-based questions.” Usually what I tell people is if you can substitute the word what for the word why, that’s going to give you a lot more insight. So instead of why did I get in the fight with my spouse, I can say, “Well, wait a minute. What contributions did my behavior have to the situation?” or “What are the common situations that I find myself behaving like this the most?” or “What do I need to work on in the future so that I can be more coolheaded?” Those are sort of those internal barriers that I think we just have to change the way we’re introspecting and we’ll get a lot more benefit. 

The second overall category of barriers to self-awareness is the world that we live in. You sort of think about the rise or social media and reality TV and all of these celebrities who are famous for doing absolutely nothing. That isn’t coming without a cost, and I call it the cult of self. It’s this idea that in our daily lives, both online and offline, we’re being tempted to become more and more self-absorbed and less and less self-aware. Unless we actively fight back, we might find ourselves belonging to the cult without even knowing it. 

One really easy way to get around that barrier, again, it’s not going to do everything, but it's a good start, is to really spend some time thinking about how you're showing up on and offline. Are you what researchers call a me former? Which is someone who constantly talks about themselves, is posting all their recent work accomplishments on their Facebook page or regaling all of their friends with stories about them all night, or are you in an informer who is really trying to focus on adding to other people's lives? Posting a beautiful photograph to Facebook or asking somebody about themselves and trying to learn more about them than talk about how smart or how right you are. 

I think, again, it’s something that we just need to be aware of. Even in writing this book, I’ve become aware of so many behaviors I didn't know I was demonstrating, and that was one of them. 

[0:21:03.8] MB: Those are kind of the two largest barriers, having sort of a flawed methodology of introspection and then also getting caught up in this kind of cult of the self. 

[0:21:13.7] TE: Yeah. I think overall, those are probably the two places we can look first, and I think it’s important to remember that first barrier. We cannot excavate our unconsciousness. For so many people, that’s how they spend their time trying to get self-awareness. This is a very complicated subject and I don't want to be glib, but there are a lot of therapeutic approaches that are solely focused on excavating the in unconsciousness. 

I think I’m not saying that therapy is bad. I'm not saying that introspection is bad. I just am encouraging people maybe to be a little bit more intelligent consumers both of help that they're getting from someone else, as well as the questions they’re asking themselves. 

[0:21:59.5] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:23:05.0] MB: Tel me more about that, that kind of notion that it's difficult to excavate our own conscience.

[0:23:10.8] TE: Really there, I think — I mentioned this earlier, but the influence of Freud has not left us. There has been so much research and evidence showing that a lot of his most fundamental assumptions about his work were wrong. He was right that we have sort of an unconscious set of thoughts, feelings, even behaviors that sometimes other people can see but we just don't have access to, and it's really interesting. There's so much work that's being done on this. 

For example, we often have implicit behaviors that we’re engaging in that we have no idea we’re doing that other people do see. There was one study that said the reason for that, the researchers thoughts was that it was just because we didn't see ourselves from a different perspective and that if, for example, the researchers showed participants videos of themselves doing these things, that participants would actually notice it. Shockingly, they found that that wasn't the case. 

There’s something about us that researchers, to be honest, don't fully understand that just gets in our way of seeing so many of our internal processes as well as our behavior. I think that’s alarming for some people, especially aficionados of self-awareness, but there's also something freeing about it to say, “I don't have to spend this time talking about my childhood. Maybe I need to make peace with my past and understand my past, but maybe it's about moving forward with purpose and sort of logic and curiosity.” That’s what I would encourage people to start to change in their mind.

The one other thing I'll say just about introspection in general is that in addition to the fact that it doesn't work the way most people are doing it, it's been shown over and over and over to be something that depresses us, that stresses us out, that makes us anxious. I remember the first time I discovered this in my data, it was really late at night and I was in my office and I just analyzed a set of data. We were looking at the relationship between people who introspect and things like happiness and stress and job satisfaction. I was absolutely convinced that the people who spent the time introspect would be better off. But our data found the exact opposite pattern. 

We found that people who introspected were more stressed, they were more depressed, they felt less in control of their lives, and that sort of gets to some of these mistakes that we’re making, but it also has to do with this idea that to gain insight, we don’t have to get into all of those dark horrible places about ourselves. We can really think about moving forward. 

I think if nothing else, if somebody is listening to this podcast and is passionate about self-awareness, I’d really encourage you to think about just kind of a self-awareness audit. What are the things I'm doing from an introspection perspective that are serving me, and what things might not be serving me as well as I think they are? 

[0:26:17.9] MB: Yeah. It seems very counterintuitive, the idea that introspection can sort of fuel anxiety or depression, etc., and yet if we want to pursue self-awareness, that's kind of a very tight rope to be walking it seems. 

[0:26:32.4] TE: It is. There's a reason so few of us are self-aware. I think even the most well-intentioned students of self-awareness, they're not aware of a lot of this research, and part of what my goal has been with all of these work with the work I'm doing and the work I am representing that other scientists are doing is to kind of get the word out and say, “We can make the world a more self-aware place. We can make ourselves more self-aware. To do it, we’re going to have to examine some of those fundamental assumptions that we've been making. 

[0:27:02.2] MB: Just making sure that I understand, the idea is that focusing primarily on kind of action oriented, sort of forward-thinking applications to solve some of your sort of current challenges or problems is more effective than the idea that you should dig deep into past traumas or something like that. 

[0:27:22.6] TE: That's what my research and a ton of other people's research has shown. Again, it’s sort of a hard fact to swallow. Back early in my research program when I first discovered this, I had this moment where I said, “Oh my God! Maybe self-awareness isn't actually a good thing to have, but I think we can distinguish the process of self-reflection from the outcome of self-reflection.” 

Most people just generally assume that if I think about myself I’ll know myself better. Again, it's about being intelligent about the way we’re approaching it. 

[0:27:55.7] MB: If you don't have this off the top of your head, it’s totally fine. But I’m curious. Do you know of who some of the other kind of researchers are as well? I’d love to dig in and do some homework on my own.

[0:28:04.3] TE: Oh, sure! Timothy Wilson has done a lot of really great work on that. He has a wonderful book called Strangers to Ourselves and it's very geeky and academic, which makes me love it. In there is basically every citation that has shown some of these effects. 

Another researcher that's done a lot of really great work on this in the last 10 years is a gentleman named Anthony Grant, and he was, as far as I can tell, one of the first people to disentangle this idea of nonproductive self-reflection from productive insight about ourselves and really sort of discover the facts that just because we self-reflect doesn't mean we’re necessarily going to be self-aware. 

[0:28:45.6] MB: We’ll make sure to include both of those sites in the show notes as well. I think that's a really interesting conclusion and very important distinction to make. 

[0:28:53.9] TE: It really is, and I hope everyone that’s listening to this can help us get the word out. Again, if we want to make the world a better place, and I think probably everybody wants to do that right now given where we are, we have to start by making it more self-aware. To do that, I think it's not even just educating ourselves and changing our own behavior. It's helping other people who are open to it and interested, really learn kind of the truth about it. 

[0:29:18.5] MB: So for someone who wants to embark on that journey of self-awareness, from the work you've done, how would you kind of put together a self-awareness training regimen for them to start or some other kind of first steps that would be really productive, things to do to begin that journey?

[0:29:35.0] TE: Sure. My glib response is they should totally buy a copy of my new book, Insight. The reason I say that actually in truth is there are tons and tons and tons of strategies, and it's not just a matter of saying do this, this and this and you will be self-aware. It's about really sort of starting with a mindset that says, “I am going to be braver enough to become wiser about myself,” and I call that braver, but wiser, to start to question some of those assumptions you’ve been making about yourself or about how others see you. 

From there, you’ve got to start doing some diagnostics about my internal and external self-awareness. Where am I actually at? Everyone who's listening to this is smart enough to know that we can’t evaluate our self-awareness on our own. We have to look at how other people see us and talk to them about those perceptions. 

There's actually a really cool quiz that we put together just as a resource to support this book that's totally free. If anybody wants to take a quick quiz on that, where basically you fill out 14 questions and then you send a survey to someone who knows you well. They fill out the 14 questions and then you get a report that says, “Here's your high-level internal and external self-awareness.” I think that's a really important part of the process, because maybe you're doing great at one and you should be focusing most of your time on the other. Maybe you have room to improve in both and you make an educated decision about what’s going to help you the most. I think that's critical and we shouldn't sort of overlook that step.

Then from there, it’s a matter of saying, “Okay. What do I want to improve?” If you want to improve your internal self-awareness, again, there are tons and tons and tons of tools, but one thing that our unicorns really universally reported doing that is so easy to incorporate into your life is something called the daily check-in. What they do basically is at the end of every day, whether it's driving home from the office, whether it’s sitting in bed before they go to sleep, they ask themselves essentially three questions. Number one, what went well today? Number two, what didn't go so well? Number three, what can I do to be smarter tomorrow? 

What I loved about that was it sort of allows us to reflect in a mindful and curious way without starting to overthink some of those things in a way that leads us away from the truth about ourselves. That's one thing people can do for internal. 

The suggestion I’d have if you think you need to improve your external self-awareness. The first thing you could you is have what I call a dinner of truth. This is actually an exercise that was developed by Austin communications professor, Dr. Josh Meisner, that he's been using this with his students for years and years and years. The way it works is you find someone who you want to improve your relationship with them and you believe that you have a solid relationship, but it could get even better. You invite them out to meal. I suggest dinner in case you want a nerve-defusing adult beverage, although it’s not required, and you sit down at dinner and you ask them, “What do I do that's most annoying to you?” Then you resist every temptation to defend or explain or disagree and you simply listen.

Just in general, in terms of our external self-awareness, I think we’re overly simplistic in the way we think about feedback. We assume that anybody gives us feedback, we should listen, and any feedback anyone gives us, we should act upon. Of course, it's not that simple. We don't always have to act on everything we hear, especially if the person who’s giving us that feedback might not have the best of intentions or they might not be comfortable telling us the real truth, the ugly truth as they see it, or maybe we get feedback about a skill that doesn't really matter to us, or we get feedback about a skill that we don't feel like we can improve no matter how hard we try. It's really a matter of having that self-awareness and the self-acceptance say, “What do I want to work on and what instead am I going to just be more open about?” 

I tell a story in the book about a leader, an executive entrepreneur who started a bunch of companies who learn that he wasn't the best communicator. In fact, he was a terrible communicator, and he did all these research and basically concluded that he wasn't wired that way. But instead of letting himself off the hook, he now is more open about that with his team and he says, “This doesn't mean I don't care about you. Here's how I’m going to show you that.” That's just another tip I would give people to intelligently consume feedback just like we are going to intelligently consume the introspective methods that we use. 

[0:34:20.8] MB: I want to dig deeper into feedback, but I also want to — I love the question; what do I do that's most annoying to you? I'm curious, are there other questions other than just focusing on annoyance? Is that too kind of narrowly focused in terms of getting a clear perspective?

[0:34:37.4] TE: Yes, and I think it’s not too narrowly focused. It’s one tool and one exercise that we can do. There a lot of people in my experience, just in my work and kind of getting the word out on this book who might not be fully aware of their strengths and what they bring to the table. A lot of us are overconfidence, but a lot of us by that same token don't fully appreciate our gifts. For them, if you feel like you’ve fallen that that category, I would probably say, “Instead of doing the dinner of truth, find friends that you really feel like you’ve got a strong relationship with and ask them a different question. Ask them, “Why are you friends with me?” 

For both of those exercises, I wouldn't put anything in my book that I haven't personally done multiple times. Just like I learned from degenerative truth, I learned very new strengths that other people see in me that I frankly never even thought about before. So I think we can look at it from both of those angles and it's really a matter of saying, “Where could I stand to have the most growth?” 

[0:35:47.6] MB: I think that the great question about cultivating or sort of understanding your strengths. One of the things that I've found is that often times when someone — I personally experienced this as well. When you’re really strong at something, it seems almost obvious to you it's almost hard to sort of get clear perspective that that's something you're good at as supposed to just something that people are good at in general and distinguishing between those two things. 

[0:36:12.1] TE: I think that's so true. Imagine somebody who’s accidentally great at presenting, let’s say.   They’re sort of built that way, that they’re an amazing public speaker. If they don’t know that that’s a defining strength of how they're showing up, it doesn't give them the ability to leverage that and utilize that help them be more successful. If I don't know that public speaking is a unique strength for me, I might not raise my hands when it comes time to volunteer for the board presentation. If I did, it would help me be even more successful. I think your point is a really excellent one. 

[0:36:48.7] MB: Let's circle back to the concept of feedback. Tell me a little bit about — One of the things that we talk about a lot of the show as well is the idea that to be self-aware you need to be constantly getting information about your behavior, about your own thoughts, about your actions, etc. I completely agree at the same time that you have to be very cognizant of what the source of that information is. 

[0:37:13.5] TE: That was another very surprising finding frankly from me in talking to our self-awareness unicorns. I expected that when we conducted these interviews with them, they would report, “Oh my gosh! I get feedback all the time. I get feedback from everyone I know at work and all of my family and the person behind me and the checkout line at the grocery store.” But we actually found the exact opposite. Most of our unicorns, almost all of our unicorns relied on just a handful of people that they actively got feedback from, and the two characteristics that almost all of those people had were as follows. 

The first was the person was confident that that source of feedback really wanted them to be successful. Remember I said earlier, not all feedback is well intended. You have to be sure that somebody really has your back and they're giving you any feedback they're giving you in the spirit of your success. That’s not enough, right? 

We also have to believe that they are going to tell us the good, the bad and the ugly. The first part is the person is loving, and the second person is they’re willing to be a critic if they need to. I call them loving critics. A lot of times people have one but not the other. Everybody has that coworker who just is negative about everything, who would be a great critic, but maybe who doesn't really want you to be that successful. You might have somebody in your life that just loves you and adores you but will never tell you that that haircut you got really doesn't do you any favors. And so the unicorns were very strategic and very discerning about who they got feedback from. In my opinion, that is at least 70% of the work in terms of getting feedback, is just being a laser-focused on who we listen to.

Another thing we learned was that they — Our unicorns didn't rely on other people to approach them with feedback, and this is supported by a lot of science. There was a really cool study from the 1960s, Dr. Rosen was one of the researchers, and basically they put people in a room and created a situation where a stranger, a participant in the study really should have given somebody else in the room some bad news. They sort of mocked it up. It was a crisis about their family, but the person who needed the bad news was a confederate of the researchers. They found that when the news was bad, almost no one told this person the truth, and they really needed to hear it in the situation they concocted. 

From that, they called this phenomenon the mum effect. Our unicorns smartly never assumed that people would tell them anything. They never assumed that people would tell them what they're doing well. They never assumed that people would tell them what they weren’t doing well. Instead, they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms. 

Kind of related to that, another thing I'd say is one person's feedback is not necessarily going to be something that's reflective of how all people see you. Especially if maybe you get feedback from that nasty coworker and you say, “Okay. I don't want to dismiss this outright, because maybe there's something valuable in it for me. I’m going to go talk to a couple of my loving critics and see if they see it too.” That way, if you can find a consistent pattern either in a strength or an area for development, that is going to give you more confidence that focusing on it will impact lots and lots of areas of your life.

[0:40:53.8] MB: How could we or how have you sort of found in your work to be — How can you open people up to feedback? Especially kind of bringing back the idea of the Dunning- Kruger effect, someone who doesn't understand their own lack of self-awareness, how kind of far off the mark they are and may be resists or doesn't want to hear feedback or criticism? How can you kind of open their ears so to speak? 

[0:41:19.7] TE: That’s a question I get all the time, and I’ve gone back and forth on this and landed at a place that I think is the most reasonable place, which is to say that other people’s self-awareness journeys are not ours to navigate. What I mean by that is, it doesn't necessarily mean that we can't help other people, but it also means that we can't give them the motivation to get there if they don't have it. 

I talked at the very beginning of this conversation about this people at work who just have absolutely no idea how they're coming across. You could, if you felt like it and you were willing to assume the risk, sit down with them and tell them all of these things, but because we have such well-honed defense mechanisms, if they are not feeling the pain or if they're not ready to do something differently, it's only going to make things worse in a lot of cases. They might resent you or they might think you're out to get them there. 

There are a couple of situations that I talk about in the book where we can approach somebody very tentatively with feedback. Sometimes unaware people know that something is wrong, but they don't know that they’re a large part of the problem. Sometimes in those situations they might be genuinely curious about what's going on. 

Maybe I interrupt people in the office all the time and I’m sort of noticing that I'm having prickly relationships with people. Maybe I turn to my coworker and I say, “Why is everybody so mean around here?” That might be an entry point to the conversation, but the other thing I’ll tell people is you have to be willing to assume the risk and you have to be willing to accept the worst case scenario and think about that. If this person is so unaware and if I truly want to take that risk, am I willing to accept what happens if things go really, really south? I think that's a judgment call. There are no hard and fast rules for that, but we should always, always,always, go into that with our eyes wide open. 

[0:43:22.4] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give for somebody listing to this show that kind of wants to take the first step towards self-awareness? 

[0:43:30.8] TE: I think the easiest, highest payoff activity would actually be to take that insight quiz that I mentioned earlier. They can access it, it's at www.insight-quiz.com, and what I think is really valuable about it is it takes less than five minutes and it gives you a high-level picture of your internal and your external self-awareness. From there, that sort of opens up a whole new path and a whole new way to strategize about what you want to work on. 

[0:44:00.4] MB: Perfect. We will make sure to include that quiz in the show notes. So listeners who are checking that out can definitely access it. I think that's a great tool. One of the questions I actually was thinking about asking you was; are there any kind of tried-and-true self-assessments that you can have someone take that sort of gauges their self-awareness? So I think that's a great resource. 

[0:44:19.3] TE: That’s actually a subset, a 14 item subset of the larger, more comprehensive assessment that we've been researching and developing. So even though it's not your entirety of self-awareness, it's a very, very rigorously developed scientific tool. 

[0:44:33.3] MB: Excellent. Tasha, where can people find you and the book and your work online?

[0:44:39.9] TE: I am not difficult to find online. They can connect with me on pretty much any social media, Tasha Eurich. If they want to learn more about the book and/or take the insight quiz, the overall book website is insight–book.com. 

[0:44:54.8] MB: Awesome. Tasha, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom. We’re huge proponents of self-awareness on the show and I think that the strategies and insights you’ve shared today were super valuable. 

[0:45:06.2] TE: Wonderful. Thank you so much for advancing that cause, it was really a pleasure. 

[0:45:10.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

I’m going to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going the successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us, including our mindset Monday email, which listeners have been absolutely loving it. It’s short, simple, articles, stories, things we found fascinating and interesting in the last week. Next, you're going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to our guests and change aspects of the show, like our intro music and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. There are some incredible stuff on the email list that only people who’ve signed up get access to. So be sure to sign up. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, if you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Never Eat Alone - How Relationship Expert Keith Ferrazzi Built His World Class Network

In this episode we discuss how to master relationships, go deep into cutting edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors, examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation, the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships, how to let go of individualism, and much more with Keith Ferrrazi.

Keith Ferrazzi is the CEO and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight and the best selling author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone. Keith’s Greenlight Research Institute has proven the correlation between specific practices that improve relationships, with business success. His work has been featured in several high profile publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, Inc, Fast Company, and around the globe.

• Why you need to make the shift form networking to authentic relationship building

• The importance of leading with generosity to build real authentic relationships

• Are you still clinging to the rugged john wayne individualism and self focus?

• Keith wants to shift that to recognition that the greatest things in our lives only happen via co-creation

• Co-creation vs collaboration - it's one step beyond collaboration, going higher together

• How do we commit to growing together in the process?

• Co-elevation is an emotional commitment

• Traditional hierarchies and silos no longer serve us

• You have to put in the work to bring about co-elevation and co-creation

• Take full responsibility for all the relationships around you - take responsibility for making those people successful

• The victim mindset and how to defeat it

• For someone stuck in a victim mindset - how do they start making the shift towards responsibility?

• “What’s your blue flame?”

• What really matters to others?

  1. What drives success in their eyes?

  2. How do you serve that?

• Do you really know the blue flame of your boss? What does your boss truly care about?

• How do you become a conduit for other people to achieve their goals? (And why that’s so important)

• Focus on fully understanding what a person needs, wants and how you can serve them

• 2 Key shifts you have to make to get out of the victim mindset:

• Understanding that it’s all on you to take action

  1. Understand that it’s all about “them” (and the more broadly you define them, the more successful you will be)

• You can’t unite people, you can’t achieve greatness, unless you know how to create “us"

• Creating is the new competency of leadership

• How do you invite this community into becoming a movement?

• The 3 reason people don’t get on board with Co-creation

• Laziness

  1. Cowardice

  2. Sense of Entitlement / Ego / Vindictiveness / Indulgence

• You have no choice if you want to be successful other than to embrace relationship building

• Practice is the KEY to building successful relationships and enabling co-creation

• How success has impacted Keith’s networking tactics and strategies

• As you become successful - the question becomes more and more about filtering and where to focus time and energy

• The earlier you practice, the more often you do it, the more concrete and impactful those behaviors will be

• All around you are extraordinary people - hang out with them and build them for the long term

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Keith Ferrazzi

• [LinkedIn] Keith Ferrazzi

• [Book] Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.2] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a new downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss how to master relationships. We go deep into cutting edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors. Examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation. Talk about the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships. Look at letting go of individualism and much more with our guest, Keith Ferrazzi. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to our email subscribers, so be sure you sign up. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide called; How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s short, simple, filled with articles and stories, the things that we found interesting within the last week. Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music, submit your own questions to guess and much more. So be sure to sign up and join email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right there on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, just text “smarter" to 44222. 

In our previous episode, we explored rejection in-depth. We talked about the incredible power of rejection. Went deep into rejection therapy. Looked at the incredible results created by seeking out rejection and living beyond your comfort zone. Talked about the magic of asking why, and heard a few incredible stories from the 100 day rejection challenge and much more with our guest, Jia Jang. If you want to become absolutely fearless, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:34.4] MB: Today, we have another incredible guest on the show, Keith Ferrazzi. He is the CEO and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight and is the best-selling author of Who's Got Your Back? and Never Eat Alone. Keith’s Greenlight research Institute has proven the correlation between specific practices that improve relationships with business and success. His works have been featured in several high-profile publications including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Fast Company, and much more around the globe. 

Keith, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:02.3] KF: Matt, awesome. Thanks a lot for having me. 

[0:03:04.4] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. Never Eat Alone is probably one of my — If not my all — One of my favorite books of all time and definitely the best book I've ever read about building relationships. I constantly reread it at least once a year to kind of get a refresher and recommend it to people all the time. So it's really great to have you on the show. 

To start out, I’d loved to begin with kind of one of the things you talk about in that book specifically which is this idea that when people sometimes hear the phrase networking, they think networking is kind of a dirty word and it's got a lot of negative connotations. How do you sort of think about repositioning or viewing sort of networking and what people traditionally think about it in a new and more productive way?

[0:03:43.2] KF: I would say the simplest thing I tried to do the very beginning running the book was to shift the word network into relationship building, and that's not even enough. I mean, the idea of building authentic relationships is crucial, but in this very self-serving and narcissistic world where everyone's scared about taking care of themselves, you better lead with generosity to get someone's attention. So the addition to the principle of building real relationships is leading with generosity. 

I’ll tell you that some of my work in the most recent years and transforming large organizations has awoken me to some problems in business today. One of them is that we still are clinging to that John Wayne rugged individualism mindset of, “I'm out to take care of myself. Based on taking care of myself, I will reach out to critical individuals and enlist them in helping me take care of me.” That's the way the world works. 

I want to start shifting that to the recognition that greatest things in our lives are only going to be happening through co-creation. Co-creation is an idea that is one step beyond how you think of collaboration today. You think of collaboration as; I got something to do. I need other people. I’m going to go get buy-in, or I got something to do. I need other people, and there are resistors not I’m pissed off and I’m going to figure out how to work around them, etc. 

Really leaning in and making a contract with critical individuals that are crucial to you achieving the mission you have in this world and co-creating and what we call going higher together, co-elevating not just collaborating. Co-elevating — Committing together to go to a different level while we’re both achieving our missions. That's the next generation of real networking. That to me is such a big shift in mindset, but when you embrace it, the world opens up to you and people open up two fundamentally differently.

[0:05:55.0] MB: I think that's so great, and to be — One of the quintessential lessons from Never Eat Alone, that it seems like this idea of co-creation is almost the next evolutionary step, is this notion that relationship building is not about sort of what's in it for me. It's much more about a shift to, “How can I add value to people in my network? How can I make everyone around me as successful as possible?” By doing that, that's how you really truly build authentic relationships. 

[0:06:23.6] KF: Yeah. Like I said, networking used to be; how do I collect as many business cards as possible to get opportunity from people? Then you move that from; how do I build real authentic relationships focused and born on generosity? Kind of taking that third piece now is; and how do we commit to growing together in the process? That's the added element. The co-elevation element is not just building authentic relationships, not just leading with generosity, all of that critical, but now how do we commit to helping each other go higher? That actually is an emotional commitment that you don't see very often. 

I’ll give you a quick example. Many of your leaders, many of the people listening to this are leaders who run teams of some sort. If you ask your team members, “How many of you think you could be 10% to 20% better at what you're doing right now?” They’d probably all raise their hands. Basic humility, of course we could be. 

Now the question is, “Look to the person you're right. Do you think it's your job to help them get there? That's co-elevation. Are we really committed to helping each other go higher or we’re just getting our shit done and working with each other as best we can? That's a different level, and I feel in a world where traditional hierarchies and silos are no longer serving us, we've got to create a new work contract of co-elevation. 

[0:07:48.7] MB: So how do we do that? Tell me about a bit more about building that emotional commitment to co-creation and co-elevation.

[0:07:56.4] KF: As I mentioned, it's going to be the title of my new book and it’s the subject of my new book. The first thing you have to recognize is that you’ve got to do all the work yourself. Meaning — I have a foster son who's 19 now. When he was 12 and came into our house, he was the biggest jackass you could possibly imagine. He’s been in multiple homes before us. Absolutely concerned about his — Whether he’d be sticking here in this home and screaming at us, “You will never be my father!” and that's sort of thing. 

What if I cross my arms and said I’m going to wait for him to meet me halfway. Do you think that would have gotten anywhere? Yet in the work environment we’re constantly doing that. We don't take full responsibility for the elevation of all of the relationships that we need to be successful, and that to me is the first act of co-elevation network that you have, which is your recognition that it's on you. It’s all on you. Does that make sense to you?

[0:08:59.9] MB: That makes total sense, and I love that shift. To me, it's funny when you look across the lessons of everybody, from ancient stoics, to Navy SEALs, it seems like that focus on taking responsibility for things that maybe they seem kind of outside of your sphere of influence is actually really almost the superpower that enables you to achieve incredible things.

[0:09:22.0] KF: The opposite of that is a victim mindset, where you just sit there wringing your hands and saying, “The boss won’t let me,” or “I didn't have the resources,” or “I don’t have the time.” That's a victim mindset and you will end up being mediocre or getting fired with that. 

The key is to take full responsibility for the relationships. Then the question is; what’s the blue flame? Like if you have an individual, if somebody wanted to go create a different relationship with me in order for them to be more successful, they would have to understand my blue flame. They would have an understand what really matters to me. What's going to drive success in my eyes? How will they serve that, right?

You just going out and being of service to somebody when you are may be of service to them in a way that they don't appreciate is useless, but do you have the mindset? I was just working with a head of HR for a big company the other day. I was suggesting to her, “Do really know the blue flame of your boss?” You keep trying to push on him programs and what he cares about is making his next quarter's earnings or he's going to be fired. How are you a conduit to him making his next quarter earnings? Until you show up that way, then you don't have a right to be considered his trusted advisor and his partner. 

You’ve got to come from the perspective of fully understanding what a person needs and wants and how you can serve them in that direction before you could open up the co-creation. So it's all on you and you have to position it from the perspective of, really, it's all about them. Those are two of the first core steps. 

Go ahead. 

[0:11:14.3] MB: No keep going. 

[0:11:15.8] KF: Well, I was going to say the next step of course is now put the questions and the dialogue on the table, because if you’re going to co-create and co-elevate, then what are the questions we have to chew through? 

I've been looking recently at how my brand is positioned at the marketplace. I’ve got this new book coming out a year from now, and I've got to figure out how to build a pre-audience for my book before it comes out in addition to those who just read Never Eat Alone. For somebody to have a squarely, an understanding of, “Okay. Ferrazzi’s brand is going to build, call it, 15, 25,000 presales for this book before the book comes out. What is Ferrazzi’s business? It’s coaching high-impact teams and Fortune 500 executive organizations.” Now, we take those two things, and somebody says, “Here are the five questions Ferrazzi, we’ve got to crack the code of in order to figure out how to get your outcomes.” 

Boy, now I am interested. Somebody has got my blue flame. They’ve identified that they want to be of service to achieve it and they've given me a set of questions that become imminently obvious for me that have to be cracked in order to get there, and I might tweak that there aren’t five, there are six and here’s three additional ones and we work together. 

Now, all of a sudden you have a business partnership. You have a real partnership, a co-elevation partnership. Now, along the way I’m going to want to know from that person how do I make them successful. They’ve spent enough time really breaking down what success looks like for me. Now, I begin to awaken to their success. Does that make sense to you?

[0:13:06.5] MB: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think just the shift of — I think the two things that you pinpointed specifically, kind of the idea of if you're in a victim mindset today or you’re kind of someone who feels like you don't have a lot of agency or you're trying to get people on your team and you can't do it. The two shifts of; it's all on you, it's your responsibility to make something happen, and it's all about focusing on the other people and what they want. I think those two shifts are fundamental and it’s so crystal clear. I mean you see it across the board from a number of different spheres, but to me I think both of those are just really, really important.

[0:13:42.9] KF: Yeah. Again, this discussion I’m going to have on Friday with a news outlet, pretty big news outlet, is going to even talk about our current president and how a business president is leading the government today. The idea of an individual who got elected by micro- segmentation and understanding a very core distinct narrow audience in creating a lot of residents with that core audience is now tasked with leading a collective, but not focusing on leading the collective. 

My view is that you can't bring a country together. You can bring a company together across silos and divisions. You can’t achieve greatness in any mission unless you know how to create us. Creating us becomes a new competency of leadership, and that's what we’re talking about here. 

This co-elevation contract is the contract where an entrepreneur looks at the mission that they have and the ecosystem that they want to impact and invites that ecosystem in to a journey of co-creating something great together, going higher together. That's what entrepreneurship to me is all about, and that's internal and external with the organization. That's all on you and it's all about them. 

Then more broadly you define to them, the more successful you will be. It's not just a narrow audience of your own people. It’s not a sub-segment of your own people. It's your own people, your vendors, your customers your prospects. How do you invite this community into a movement in a sense, a movement? Your product’s got to be inviting people into a movement. Consuming your product is you being invited into being a participant of the movement of people that believe what you believe. Whether that's selling real estate or whether that's selling consulting services or a new consumer brand, you're trying to create a movement internally on your organization and externally to come together and believe something. Are you following me on this?

[0:16:06.3] MB: Yeah. I think it's a core lesson and something that — It's funny. I mean, obviously you're a master of relationship building and how to get people on your team, but you see these lessons echoed from everybody from spy recruiters, to hostage negotiators, a very similar kind of core thesis and lessons. 

[0:16:28.4] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:17:33.3] MB: I'm curious, in the work you've done championing these ideas, what have you seen kind of some of the biggest hurdles, or when people hear this, what are the reasons people don't get on board or what are some the reasons kind of people resists these ideas?

[0:17:49.4] KF: I joke that there're three reasons, and it’s not a joke. It’s true. Laziness, cowardice, or really a sense of — We can call it entitlement. It's more a sense of wellness kind of almost vindictiveness. I’ll explain what I mean. 

One of them is these relationships that, Keith, what you're talking about sounds like a hell of a lot of work. I've been very comfortable living in my silos, treating vendors like vendors, selling to customers, not co-creating with them. What you're suggesting requires a lot of work. Yes, it does, but the absence of it in this new radically interdependent marketplace will mean you're going to fail. 

If you don't open up your aperture and create a wholly different set of partnerships, you won’t succeed. So laziness, just laziness. Cowardice is if I open myself up this way, what if they reject me? What if they don't put up I'm not smart enough? What if they don't have time for me? All of those things, right? It’s these fear-based mindsets are always going to hold entrepreneurs back. 

The third is what I really — The word I think I was looking for a second ago was indulgence. I am used to not liking this person. I'm used to having a controversial relationship with this particular constituency or this customer base. Large automotive companies had an entire damaged set of relationships with dealerships for decades. That was just accepted. It's just accepted. Frankly, I considered it an indulgent to continue to think about one of your major channels as an adversary. That's like a teenager just getting comfortable with the clicks and the people that don’t get along inside of the high school. You see that operating in organizations all the time and people all the time. Whether it's your laziness or your cowardice or your indulgence, the answer is you have no choice and you want to be truly great in this world to find ways to co-create. 

[0:19:57.2] MB: What have you found has kind of worked for you in terms of getting people over those hurdles? 

[0:20:02.5] KF: Practice. I mean what we do is we don't teach this stuff. We coach it. Showing up over six months with an executive team, opening up different ways to behave with each other is crucial. So that's the key. The key is really trying to unleash a different set of experiences, and once you get people to taste a different way of being, they’ll be, “We want to try it again.” 

Small little bites, what I always say to people in Never Eat Alone is you’ve got 250 pages of tons of ideas. Try a couple of them on. If you like them, you’re going to want more. It's just very distinct experiences. 

[0:20:45.5] MB: Yeah. I think that's great advice. For me personally, I keep coming back to Never Eat Alone just because there's so much practical advice in there. I kind of implement three or four ideas from it and then I come back and I’m like, “All right. What else can I learn from this thing?” I mean that book is probably been out, what? 10 years, and I’ve read a lot of other books about relationship building and I keep coming back and I’m just like, “If I just execute what's in this book, I'm going to 10 X the effectiveness of my relationship building strategies.” 

I'm curious, for someone like you who's obviously become incredibly successful, how is that impacted either sort of positively or negatively or changed the way that you pursue kind of relationship building broadly, but specifically a lot of the tactics and strategies you talk about within that read alone. 

[0:21:34.2] KF:  Frame the question again a little differently. You’re saying how does these mindsets changed the way I've evolved in treating relationships?

[0:21:42.7] MB: Yes. Since you know since you've become more successful and grown so much since the launch of the book, how has that impacted, either in a positive or negative way, the way that you think about relationship building and the strategies you use?

[0:21:56.1] KF: Yeah. It’s interesting. In the old days, I had no currency. Nobody knew who I was. I was a poor kid from Pittsburgh, and I had to, of course, assume it's all on me. There was no assumption that anybody wanted to spend time with me, so I had to bust my ass to bring all the currency to the table. But the question is once I've had more success and there are more abundant set of individuals who would like to co-create with me. Now the question is filtering, and getting a better sense for where to put time and energy. 

I have the say that as long as I keep grounded what the core mission is and consistently put that out there to people and ask, “Is this something you share with me? Is this mission to change the way —”My view is I want to change the way the world relates through the workplace. I have found that by changing a way a leader shows up as an executive in the workplace and ends up makes that leader a better spouse and a better parent, that's where my livelihood is. If other people share that with me, then I'll find time for the co-creation. Knowing you audience better than I do, help me understand a few parting words that you think — Like what do think is on their mind having head all of these? 

[0:23:26.7] MB: I mean I think the two lessons you shared specifically regarding kind of co-creation make a ton of sense, and I think we’ve talked about a little bit some of the hurdles that involve that. One of the questions we submit to our audience when we have guests coming on board and we ask them to ask some questions. One of the questions that a listener had which may tie into this is from Maddie in Chicago, Illinois. She wanted to know for young professionals, when’s kind of the right time to start thinking about implementing a lot of these ideas? 

[0:23:56.9] KF: Well I started when I was in fifth grade. Does that count? The bottom line is this has to be a new set of behaviors that you try on and wear. We talked about earlier, how do you get this mindset to shift? Practice. The earlier you practice, the more likely that these behaviors are going to be yours for a lifetime, beginning to build that bridge network. 

I wish in retrospect — I just went to my college reunion and I was reasonable then, but I wish I'd known what I know now then, and I would’ve build much more deeper, longer-lasting relationships with a subset of the movers and shakers at the time that were at my university, because these people are running the world today and some of whom I know loosely and can certainly reach out to as a fellow classmate, but I didn't sustain those relationships. All around us are extraordinary people, hang out with extraordinary, build those relationships for the long-term, and that will be your growth trajectory and an area of opportunity for yourself. 

Matt and Austin, I appreciate your time, and thank you so much for exposing my ideas to your audience. I love what you guys are doing and I appreciate the affiliation of success. 

[0:25:10.7] MB: Absolutely. One just quick question, where can people find you and your work online for listeners that want to do some more homework? 

[0:25:17.5] KF: Yeah, please. I have a great newsletter which is free that goes out to those who really want to put these practices in place. You can reach me at keithferrazzie.com or just on LinkedIn. Sign up to follow us there. Those would be the best places. 

If you want to be a part of our newsletter, you can text my name. Just text Keith, K-E-I-T-H to 66866. So if you type in 66866 and type in my name, Keith, it will instantly sign you up for my newsletter, or go to my website.

[0:25:54.0] MB: Keith, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know we didn't have a lot of time today, but we really appreciate your wisdom, and you're one of the most insightful thinkers about relationship building and I think the advice you offered today is incredibly practical. 

[0:26:07.9] KF: Thanks, gentleman. I look forward to staying in touch and doing something again in the future.

[0:26:13.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based personal growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you're going to get an exclusive weekly curated email from us every single week called Mindset Monday. This includes articles, stories, videos and things we found interesting in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests, change the intro music for the show and much more.

Lastly, you’re going to get awesome free content from us, like our free guide How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you get for signing up and joining along with another surprise bonus guide when you join the email list today. 

There some incredible stuff just for people who are on the email list that you don't get by listening to the show, so be sure you sign up, join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you're driving around, if you’re listening to this in your car or the subway or whatever else, just text the word “smarter” to the number four 4222 and sign up today. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. that helps more and more people discover the science of success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about in this episode, and much more, Be sure to check out the show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Your Secret Weapon to Becoming Fearless with Jia Jiang

In this episode we explore rejection in depth. We talk about the incredible power of rejection, go deep into rejection therapy, look at the incredible results created by seeking out rejection and living beyond your comfort zone, talk about the magic of asking why, hear a few incredible stories from 100 days of rejection, and much more with our guest Jia Jiang. 

Jia Jiang is the founder 100 Days of Rejection and the author of Rejection Proof. In an effort to overcome his fear of rejection Jia spent 100 Days forcing himself into situation after situation where rejection was almost guaranteedJia has been featured on the TED Stage, Forbes, Business Insider, and much more.

• Jia’s personal relationship with rejection

• The misalignment between wanting to achieve and being afraid of rejection

• The only way to overcome your fear is to embrace it and meet it head on

• How to become a badass and become fearless

• Saying no with grace - how to say no with grace

• Show people alternatives

  1. Give them something else / help them to get a yes in some way

  2. Have respect

• "Everything amazing and beautiful happens outside your comfort zone"

• The amazing power of forcing yourself to constantly challenge and operate outside your comfort zone

• The importance of understanding the vast majority will stay say no to you and why that doesn’t matter

• It doesn’t matter when you get rejected

  1. The few people that say yes make a huge impact - a real breakthrough

• "How many yesses have I missed in my life?”

• You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take

• It’s not about getting a yes - it’s about EXPLORING and CREATING SOMETHING

• The worst thing that can happen is you saying no to yourself

• It’s about having fun and challenging yourself

• Jia’s advice for someone who is afraid to take the first step

• How to take the first step and overcome the inertia of facing your first rejection

• Start small, just a little bit outside of your comfort zone, and grow

• How you can even blend rejection therapy into your work and your career as well

• If you ask enough, there is no request that will get rejected by everyone

• What to do if you feel like you’re bothering people when you ask them for something

• Be curious, don’t make your goal to get a yes - make your goal to ask 10 people

• Turning no into yes, and the magic of asking “why”

• Ask people why they said no to you - find out what the reason is

• What Jia learned from asking a stranger to plant a flower in his back yard

• The power of doubt and empathy

• Humor and positivity - don't take yourself too seriously

• Give a stranger a high five!

• We go through a bunch of rapid rejection techniques you can use right now

• You can do rejection therapy for FUN - or you can align it with you goals!

• Embrace rejection - rejection means something GOOD not something BAD

• Rejection doesn’t mean you’re wrong - the stronger the rejcetion, the stronger your connection with people on the other side

• The flip side of rejection is the power of people who are part fo your tribe

• Jia’s Life Mission to the movement of rejection therapy

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [SoS Episode] How This Government Agency Spy Recruiter Hacked Psychology To Change Anyone’s Behavior with Robin Dreeke

• [Website] Rejection Therapy with Jia Jiang

• [Video] Rejection Therapy Day 3 - Ask for Olympic Symbol Doughnuts. Jackie at Krispy Kreme Delivers!

• [TEDTalk] What I learned from 100 days of rejection | Jia Jiang

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:10.6] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we explore rejection in-depth. We talk about the incredible power of rejection. Go deep into rejection therapy. Look at the incredible results created by seeking out rejection and living beyond your comfort zone. Talk about the magic of asking why. Hear a few incredible stories from 100 days of rejection and much more with our guest, Jia Jiang. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand called; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide just for signing up by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday, which listeners have been absolutely loving. This is just short, simple, articles and stories that we found interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests. You can impact the intro and outro music, things around the show, and you can submit your own questions to guests that we will ask them and sometimes even give you a callout on the show. So, if you want to ask questions to guest, if you want to be part of the list, there are some amazing stuff going on that’s only available to our email subscribers, so make sure you sign up and join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, if you’re driving around or if you’re just listening on your phone or whatever, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, just text “smarter” to 44222 or go to successpodcast.com. Either way, sign up for that email list. 

In our previous episode we explored what it takes to succeed at the highest possible levels. We got into the science and the data from years in the trenches with the world’s top performers including NFL teams, Red Bull athletes and much more to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results. We dug deep in the lifelong quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more with Dr. Michael Gervais.  

If you want to learn about the secrets of world-class performance and how you can use them in your own life, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the show.

[0:03:02.0] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Jia Jiang. Jia is the founder of 100 Days of Rejection and the author of Rejection Proof. In an effort to overcome his fear of rejection, Jia spent 100 days forcing himself into situation after situation where rejection was almost guaranteed. He’s been features on the TED Stage, Forbes, Business Insider and much more. 

Jia, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:26.5] JJ: Hey Matt, thank you for having me here.

[0:03:28.5] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. I know we’re talking about the preshow, me and Austin are both huge fans of rejection and rejection therapy and all these stuff you talk about. But before we get into the meat of that, I’d love for you to kind of share your personal story and kind of your personal experience with rejection and how that led that to the challenge to get rejected for 100 days in a row.

[0:03:50.2] JJ: Yeah. My relationship with rejection have been going back to when I was a kid. I just found out just throughout my life, I was really afraid of people’s opinions and specially their rejection. On the other side, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I want to be this fearless guy who goes out and changes the world and makes new things. Those two conflicting emotions have always bothered me for a long times. It took me a long time before I started my own company and partly it was because of this reason. I was really afraid that people will see me and rejection from family and friends and the possible failure.

So I started my company when I was 30, and then even after I started, quit my job and became an entrepreneur, also I found I was still afraid of rejection. So much so that I was rejected, it was the investment. Then I just wanted to quit right there. That’s where it dawned on me and I was like, “Wow! I can’t be this afraid anymore. If I want to be a great entrepreneur, I want to be successful at anything, I can’t that fear dictate my life.” That’s where I said, “You know what? I’m done with this. I’m done. I’m going to take rejection head on,” and that’s how I’ve discovered this concept of rejection therapy, where basically it just challenges you to do rejection. That’s what I did.  

[0:05:19.3] MB: You set out to get rejected. Was it 100 days in a row or is just 100 times? 

[0:05:25.8] JJ: It’s 100 times, hopefully in a row, but at the end it became a little bit impossible just because of all the obligations I had. Yeah, that was the original idea, that I would do 100 rejections, 100 consecutive days of rejection where I would go and look for rejections. But it’s more or less maybe 130 days or something like that.

[0:05:47.2] MB: And so tell me a little bit about some of the experiences from that and why was your solution to fear of rejection to say, “You know what? I’m going to go and I’m going to get rejected 100 times, basically 100 days in a row.” 

[0:06:02.8] JJ: You mean what’s the motivation behind it? What kind of request that made?

[0:06:08.1] MB: Yeah. Start with kind of what was your motivation for doing that, and then tell me about one or two of the experiences you had when you started doing that. What was it like hopefully for you to go through that? 

[0:06:20.0] JJ: Basically, the idea of rejection therapy is you go out and look for rejection. Most people, actually everyone runs away from rejection, they’ll try to minimize rejection. But the idea is you’re never going to cure your fear if you run away from something. The only way to overcome your fear is to embrace it, to meet it head on, and that’s what rejection therapy was about. That’s what I did. So I’m like, “Okay. I want to do this for 100 days.” 

Rejection therapy asks you to do this for 30 days, but I’m like, “You know what? I’m doing this for 100 days. I’m just going to overdose on rejection. I want to see what kind of badass I can become, if I can desensitize my fear and just slowly become fearless.” That’s my incentive, and also I use my phone to film myself getting rejected, because I thought, “You know what? I’m going to make a video blog out of this thing, so maybe the world will hold me accountable.” 

That’s what I set out to do, and I started out terrified. The first rejection request is I went out and talked to a stranger and see if I can borrow $100 from them. I was so scared. I still remember that day like it happened to yesterday. I just felt something is going to happen. That guy will start fighting me and maybe like a verbal altercation will happen and you’ll call the police. As it turned out, nothing happened. I just went out and ask him, he said, “No,” and off I went. 

But I felt so scared throughout that encounter. That night I was looking at my video, the thing about video blog is you have to experience everything twice. Filmed myself, so I need to edit and upload that video and I saw how scared I was. I said, “Okay. Going forward, I’m not going to run at the first sign of rejection. When I get rejected, which for sure I will get rejected, I would stay engaged and make jokes, have fun and negotiate.” That’s how I started this whole thing. 

[0:08:37.4] MB: I do want to dig in. Tell me about — I’ve heard a number of stories and I’ve watched your TED Talk and etc., and heard some of the experiences. Tell me about one of the kind of most profound rejection experiences that you had and maybe one that you haven’t talked a lot about in your various kind of speeches and TED Talks.

[0:08:55.6] JJ: Yeah. I’ll tell you a couple. The one is the most famous one that I did and a lot of people know about which is the Krispy Kreme video, Krispy Kreme donuts. One day I went to this donut shop and I asked them to make me donuts that looks like Olympic rings. Basically, you name those five donuts. There’s no way they were going to do it. No way. Who’s going to do that? Guess what? The person did it. The donut maker could not let me walk away with the rejection. At the time I was looking for rejection. No matter what I tried, he was like, “I think I can do this. Maybe I can do that.” 

So 15 minutes later, he gave me a box of donuts that looked like Olympic rings, and I was floored. That’s really kind of — It put the whole rejection, 100 days of rejection experiment on the map, because that video went viral. There are over 5 million views for that video and it was really — It was something that I would never forget. 

I have a lot of these examples and some of them are pretty fun. For example, one day I said, I went to Costco and I said I want to speak over through the Intercom. I want to say hi to the customers. The manager said, “No. No way.” But I said that’s where I learned how to negotiate. This is like 10 days into this, I become so good at negotiating. I’m like, “Hey, I’m a member. I’m a Costco member. I’ve spent thousands of dollars here. Everything I say will be [inaudible 0:10:31.3]. I really love your store. I’m going to just say hi to your customers and tell them how wonderful your store is.” 

Then the manager said, “Actually, if you wanted to say nice things about Costco, why don’t you write an article for our membership magazine? I’m sure they’re going to love your article.” I’m like, “You know what? I just want to speak over your Intercom. That’s all I want.” He’s like, “Well, sorry. I can’t let you do this. But you know what? I’ll buy you dinner.” How about you go to the pizza and hotdog stand and get whatever you want? Make you and your family happy. I’m so happy that you are a good customer, but sorry we can’t say this to you.”

I mean, how can you not be a fan of Costco after that? I was a fan before already, but I’m a bigger fan afterward. I’ll probably spend thousands of dollars more in Costco. The thing is I also learned that people can say no to you, and you can say no to other people, but if you — There’s a right way and there’s a wrong way to say no, right? 

So I basically went to the other side table and looked from their lens. If you say no the wrong way, like if you’re sarcastic, if you’re trying to be rude that usually doesn’t make the other person feel good. But if you can be — Like say no the right way, like this Costco manager did, he was actually showing me alternatives. He actually cared about my request. In the end, he still couldn’t say yes, but he gave me something else. He made me a fan of this guy. That’s another example that I can talk about. That really left a profound impact to me. 

Now, when I say no to other people, I try to do that. I try to throw them or show them alternatives and try to help them to get a yes even though I cannot say yes to them myself. 

[0:12:22.3] MB: Yeah, I think that’s so important and saying with no with grace and being able to say no, but at the same time do it in a way that doesn’t necessarily leave the other person kind of feeling dejected or let down. As somebody who — I kind of call myself sort of a people pleaser, I never want to say no to anybody and I never want to let anybody down. To me, trying to figure out how to do that and how to say no people, especially the busier you get the harder it becomes, but the more necessary it becomes. I think that’s a really valuable skillset and a really interesting kind of takeaway that you learn from that experience.

[0:13:00.0] JJ: Yeah. I think most of us are people pleasers, right? Because our fear of rejection, the flip side of that is the fear of rejecting other people, right? Because if you fear you’re rejecting other people, you feel like a jerk, you feel they’re going to reject you because you’re rejecting them. If you know what I mean? That’s why the skill, having the skills of saying no to people is actually pretty important. But you can say it in the right way that you don’t have to feel bad. In fact, you can make them fans of you, just like this Costco manager did.
 
[0:13:33.1] MB: In fact, you ended up being probably a bigger fan of Costco as a result of that experience than if he had just said no and kind of moved on.

[0:13:42.3] JJ: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even if the guy says no, I would not have any — I wouldn’t hold any grudge, because I’m looking for rejection, right? I wasn’t afraid of any rejection. I was expecting a rejection. But that rejection kind of made me a fan, just because how well it was given. How much respect the guy gave me. 

A lot of times when we say no to people, we just want to finish it, or we end up having to say yes, because we want to please them. If we say no, we’re like, “No.” Then we just leave, right? Think about this, help them. If we need to say no to them, help them to get a yes. Show them, “Maybe you can try this? Maybe we can try that? I’ll think different ways that you can get a yes. Maybe it’s not through me, but someone else might be able to help you.” It’s tough to be mad at you when you do that to others.

[0:14:36.2] MB: I think that that is a great example, the kind of lesson of how to say no gracefully. Coming back even to the story you told before about the Krispy Kreme donuts, the interesting thing is — And I know this personally because I am a very naturally sort of introverted person, and through essentially things like kind of rejection therapy and another kind of related learning toolkit called Social Skydiving, I really was able to get out of my shell and understand how to interact with people and realize that there’s really nothing to be afraid of once you kind of get in there. 

The amazing thing about this in the Krispy Kreme donut store, it really demonstrates it, is that people — When somebody thinks about a rejection challenge, they say, “Ooh! I would never want to do that. Oh! That sounds terrible.” Like, “Oh! I don’t want to get rejected.” In many, many instances through your 100 days of rejection and you’ve written about and spoken about, these amazing experiences come out of it and you end up building these relationships with people. You end up creating these really authentic bonds and relationships and it all starts from almost kind of a magic or an audacity of just putting yourself out there and not being afraid to look foolish and get rejected. 

[0:15:47.2] JJ: Absolutely. I think everything — I just have a theory that everything amazing and beautiful happens outside of your comfort zone. We all develop these routines, daily routines and comfort zones where we get up, go to work we go through certain emotions, hopefully get some joy and excitement out of it then go home and have our social life and whatnot, right? Doing that, we develop a comfort zone. We’re comfortable with that, but the thing is just like entrepreneurship, these type of social — You mentioned Social Skydiving or rejection therapy. These type of things where you are basically challenging yourself to go out of your comfort zone. A lot of times just amazing things happen. 

It’s just like you — Most people want to start — A lot of people want to start their own business. I live in Silicon Valley now. I’ve heard so many people telling me, “Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur.” Guess what? They this paycheck from the big company and they feel somehow they’re holding on to it, be it’s comfortable, because that’s their routine, because that’s something they want to hold on to. Real amazing things happen when you give it up, when you just walk out of that comfort zone and see what’s out there. 

A lot of times personal breakthroughs — A lot of times the breakthroughs happens in your personal life or in a business world because you get out of that comfort zone. I recommend everyone who wants to find something amazing, want to do something amazing, constantly challenge them self to go out of their comfort zone.

[0:17:23.2] MB: I think that’s why I think rejection therapy is such a beautiful tool, is because it’s such a concrete and practical way to blow apart your comfort zone and force yourself into a bunch of uncomfortable situations. As you experience and as I experience as well, like it doesn’t take very long for you to realize, “Hey, it’s not that scary out there.” On your third attempt, basically, you already had like an incredible experience where you built a bond with this women where you had like a life-changing memory basically just from going out and trying to get her to reject you. 

[0:18:00.4] JJ: Absolutely. This is not my story, I just heard stories almost every day from people all over the world try this. I know people who fell in love with their lives because they did this. I found people who started their new business. I found people who started new podcasts. Actually, I’ve known people who actually double their business, because they constantly try to do this now. They constantly force themselves to talk to customers who rejected them in the past or maybe talk to other, just cold emailing or cold talking to other people. 

This really works, because when you do that, what you’ll find is — I’m not saying everyone will say yes to you. In fact, I would say the vast majority of people, when you do this type of thing, will still say no to you, right? But what you find are, one, it’s not really bad. Our brain somehow tricks us into thinking it’s life and death. If we go out there and we’re going to be rejected and my life will be in ruins, right? Everyone in the world will laugh at me. I will just have no self-respect, self-esteem. None of that happens. When someone rejects you, you just move on and you’re like, “Wow! That’s actually not that bad.” 

But the fact that you didn’t die or nothing happened, you become more courageous. Then sometimes people say yes to you, and that’s where you get a real break through. You’ll start to find out, “Wow! If I can get a yes when I’m looking for no, what else — how many yeses have I missed in my life just because I think for sure I’d get a no?” Then you start becoming this guy at work, you’ll try everything. You start seeing everything is a possibility and that’s where a lot of amazing things will happen.

[0:19:51.4] MB: I love that quote, “How many yeses have I missed  in my life.” It’s a great way to kind of really think about it, because once you — I almost think that it’s like everybody is in this slumber, and as soon as you pull the wool off your eyes and realize that all of these kind of social rules and norms are — There’s no law of physics that makes those the case. You could go out, you can create all kind of unique and interesting experiences for yourself. You can push the boundaries of what’s possible. You can ask for things that are preposterous.

In many cases, yeah, you might get rejected, but the few instances that it happens to pan out, you end up creating these incredible and amazing experiences. I think you brought up a really, really important point, which is that it’s not about getting a yes every time, and you have to go into this understanding the vast majority of people will say no, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they say no, because the few people that do say yes, the few yeses that you get are these incredible experiences, outcomes, etc. It’s something I think is really, really important. 

[0:21:00.2] JJ: Yes, absolutely. It’s like people talk about — There’s this saying in basketball, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right? In basketball, there is opportunity cost for that, right? If you’re not taking a shot, maybe someone else is taking the shot or maybe someone takes a better shot. But in life that’s actually, that’s even true in life, that there are lot of times we’re just like, “Oh, I’m not going to ask. I’m just going to be lazy. Let me just watch TV or let me just do my thing and be with myself, right?” 

It’s not like you’re missing out by you asking, by you making these requests, by you going out and exploring, you’re missing out on something else that’s important. A lot of times we just miss out. It’s not about getting the yes. It’s about you, the fact that you are out there exploring, that you are trying to create something. 

People often say — There’s this saying, “The worst they can say is no.” We hear that all the time in sales and in career and whatnot, but I would tell people, the worst thing that had happened is not people say no to you. It’s actually you saying no to yourself. We do that constantly, on a daily basis, everything. So I tell people, “Don’t say no to yourself.” If there’s — if you’re going to be rejected, let other people. Let the world reject you. Don’t reject yourself. 

[0:22:25.2] MB: I think you made another great point, which is that it’s not about getting the yes. The yes is almost like an ancillary benefit. It’s about exploring. It’s about creating something. Being someone who’s kind of gone through similar — Probably not as intense as 100 days of rejection, but I’ve experimented with things like Social Skydiving and trying to get rejected, and it’s almost like once you — I started out being an introvert, being terrified of it, and once you start to get in there and do it, it almost becomes addictive. It’s so much fun. It’s so exciting. I was joking around with producer, Austin, before this interview. I was like, “Man! I kind of want to go out and just do 100 day rejection challenge just because I think it’d be so much fun to do it. 

[0:23:06.4] JJ: It is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun. Also, it becomes an excuse for you to do and ask for everything that you thought was cool but you’re afraid of doing or maybe you want to put up doing later. One example I give in my TED Talk is I walk into a professor’s room, a professor’s office and just ask him, “Hey, can I be a teacher? Can I teach your class?” I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I want to feel like someday I can be able to become famous or maybe accomplish enough so I can teach a college class. 

Then in that 100 days, I’m like, “You know what? I’m just going to do it. I’m just going to ask them straight up, “Can I teach your class now? Can you make me a guest lecturer or something?” I came in very prepared, put up a lot of stuff on my iPad and the professor was looking at me and he saw what I was doing. He’s like, “That actually looks pretty good. I can use you in my curriculum. Yeah, maybe you can come to teach my class for a lesson or something.” Then I did. 

It was really fun and I’m like, “Wow! I was a guest lecturer in college and I felt like a teacher at that moment.” I just felt like, “Wow! There’s 100 days, I could just ask.” By the end I’m like, “I can ask anything I want. I can ask anything I want. There’s a good chance I will get it. If I don’t get it, that’s fine. That’s totally fine.” 

I challenge everyone to do this, because by the end, it’s not about going out and getting rejected anymore. It’s just you having fun. You trying to see what’s possible and you challenging yourself to get out of your comfort zone. 

[0:24:54.7] MB: I think the hardest step to take is always that first step. I think back to people I know that are shy or even I’ve had listeners write in or reach out to me that struggle to make friends or kind of get into social situations, and I know you were terrified when you did your very first of the 100 rejection challenges. What would you say or what kind of advice would you offer to somebody offer to somebody who — “Here is all the stuff and says, “Yeah, that’s great, but I can’t do it, or I’m not ready to do it,” or “It’s just not right for me or it wouldn’t work for me.”  

[0:25:29.0] JJ: Yeah, that’s a very good point, because there are — Taking that initial step is the hardest thing. To me, it took me saying, “I’m going to do a video blog,” to actually get myself to do this. I have to make that hard commitment. Before doing this, I talked to my wife. I was like, “Do you think this is stupid and do you think I’ll get in trouble doing this?” There are all kind of those, “I’m going to stay in my lane. I’m going to be a good citizen. Does this look stupid?” 

Even for someone like me who’s set out so determined to do this, I still have to face that inertia. It’s basic law of physics. If the object is still, it takes a lot of energy to actually start moving it, but once you start moving it, the energy it takes to keep it moving is a lot lower. 

So how do you get that initial energy to get yourself moving? You do that by doing something pretty close to you or just a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Don’t go crazy. I asked someone to borrow $100. That was tough. That was actually pretty tough. To do this all over again, I would probably start with something easy, something you don’t normally do. For example, maybe pull out your phone and just message a long lost friends. Someone maybe in college, a high school friend. Just say, “Hi.” Just say, “Hey, I haven’t talked to you for a while. I haven’t seen you in a long time. How are you doing?” You can do that every day. 

You could feel there’s a little bit of awkwardness to reach out to someone who you used to know. But guess what? It’s really usually not that awkward. The awkwardness is in your head. Usually you get pretty good response. Or if you don’t get a response, so what? It’s not like — You don’t have this relationship with that person anyway anymore. It’s not like you’re ruining your relationship by doing something like this. 

So start small, or maybe write a quick email to your high school teacher or maybe your college professor telling them about your whereabouts. Just start something small and see what happens. Then once you do the first and second one, you can expand your comfort zone a little bit, go walk out, be on the street. When you see people, just say hi to them. Say hi to them. These are not that hard. These are pretty easy. 

Then you build it up and you’re like maybe you talk to someone, you shake their hand. Maybe ask to borrow $100, maybe ask to borrow a dollar. Maybe ask for a ride. You build it up. Eventually you’ll be like, “Hey, can I get a piggyback ride of you? Can untie your shoes?” You’ll get crazier and crazier, but you do it gradually. 

[0:28:19.4] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:29:24.3] MB: I love that. Even some of those examples are hilarious, right? Like asking a stranger for a piggyback ride. Until you start doing stuff like that, sometimes it works out and you end up having these like crazy, funny, ridiculous experiences that really kind of make life interesting. 

[0:29:43.6] JJ: Absolutely. Also, you can actually blend it with your work. I mean who says you have to do it on a street to strangers? What about if you’re in sales? Maybe ask for something — Maybe call your old customer. Maybe ask someone to buy — When they buy something, ask them to buy something else. Maybe get rejected, come back again the next day. Or if you’re a buyer, ask for a bigger discount. Start it with going — If you’re at a coffee shop, ask for, “Hey, can I get 10% off of this coffee?” They may ask you why. You’re like, “Hey, maybe you should offer a good guy a discount. I’m a good guy.” Something like that. 

It’s pretty harmless, but soon you’re going to start to learn, “I can negotiate off anything.” If you’re an author, if you want to be an author, if you want to be a writer, maybe just craft the email, quick email and, say, find a book agent and saying, “Hey, I’d just like to talk. What do you think about this idea?” These type of things can be related to your work as well. In that way when you do that not only you’re learning more to be fearless, but also you’re getting closer to your goals. You’re actually advancing in your careers. Try this everywhere. 

[0:31:10.1] MB: That’s great. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. It doesn’t just have to be in your personal life. In fact, you might see huge rewards from kind of integrating it into your career as well.

[0:31:19.6] JJ: Yeah. I met this musician. He lives in Nashville. Every musician lives in Nashville, right? 

[0:31:25.7] MB: I live in Nashville.

[0:31:27.1] JJ: Oh, you do? Okay! 

[0:31:28.4] MB: That’s right.

[0:31:29.3] JJ: Yeah. It’s a great town, by the way. I’ve been there multiple times. It’s such a hip town now in Tennessee. Anyway, I have this guy, he’s an independent musician and he’s like he had this album he’s working on and he’s like, “I’m going to try this rejection therapy thing.” One of his rejection requests is to ask his music heroes to appear in his album. The guy said, “Yes.” 

So he has an album where one of the songs has a feature from his music hero. To him, I don’t know — He said, “I don’t know if this album become big or not,” but just doing that fulfilled one of the biggest dreams he ever had is to be in the same song with his music hero. It just happened. I’m sure it helps. The credibility will help his music career, or just fulfill his dream. So just for ask for it. Maybe you’ll probably get a no, but so what? 

Actually, what I found is if you ask enough, there’s no request that you’ll get rejected by everyone. It’s not going to happen. You will always get a no. No matter kind of crazy ideas, what kind of bad ideas you can think about. I challenge your listeners to do this. Think about one thing that will get rejected by everyone on earth, one request. Think about, if you use your imagination to find how crazy, how evil, how bad it is. Guess what? Someone will say yes to that. 

[0:33:10.5] MB: That’s great. I love it. We always like to challenge the audience on the show — And I think rejection therapy, one of the beauties of this whole concept  is that it takes a lot of these kind of platitudes that you hear all the time. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. The worst they can say is no. All these things that people have heard 100%, rejection therapy is the concrete strategy that you can implement literally today starting right now to move yourself down that path to start getting uncomfortable to make yourself face some of these fears and push through and realize that on the other side it’s not scary anymore. In fact, it’s actually really fun and exciting. 

[0:33:52.9] JJ: Absolutely. I just have a thinking that nothing is that new. The idea, the self-improvement ideas or any ideas, I don’t think any of them are new. It’s just you have to implement it. I definitely agree with you, rejection therapy is an easy and concrete way for you to experience all these things. You don’t have to be an inspiration speaker or like a sales guru or rara kind of guy, like a Tony Robbins to experience this. You don’t have to be like a hero to have accomplish a whole lot to experience this. Start small. Start with these little rejection requests and see what happens. 

One more thing I want to add is sometimes people tell me, “Hey, I’m just not comfortable asking people things. I feel like I’m bothering them.” Now, what if you can offer to help someone something, right? What if you just, “Hey, I mean you’re in a grocery store. Can I help you to push your cart for a bit and so you can rest and you can go do shopping. I’ll push your cart.” What about maybe you offer — You’re in a store saying, “Hey, can I buy you a coffee? There’s no string attached. I just want to buy you a coffee.” Something like that, right? 

In that way you’re offering to help people instead of just asking for things. You also get out of your comfort zone. I think just keeping your balance of giving and asking while getting out of your comfort zone, you can get a lot from it.

[0:35:25.0] MB: How does somebody who — Circling back to this idea of someone who is afraid to take that first step or has had some traumatic rejections in the past, rejections that they feel like are traumatic. How do you get past that kind of taking rejection personally and feeling like it’s about you when somebody says no?

[0:35:45.4] JJ: Yeah. First of all, when you’d start doing this, you will find out that a lot of times — The whole thing about rejection therapy is you do it with a stranger, right? Then you’ll find out it really is not about you, because these people don’t know you. They reject you just because they don’t think they should say yes. They don’t think they should say yes to a stranger like that or they don’t — Rejection is really not about you. It says more about the rejection than the rejected. 

Another thing you can do is make the same request 10 different times or five different times. What you’ll find is someone will say yes to you usually if you do it 5 or 10 times. The law of large number will say maybe there’s 20% of people will actually be open to that. Then what you’ll find is, “Okay. Some people will say yes to that. Some people will say no to that. I’m the same person. The fact that there are different answers, that shows those people are different. I’m the same. They are different. They are different in terms of the way they think, the way their risk powers, their preference, how they view this situation. Maybe they’re moved of the moment, right? It doesn’t say anything about. It says everything about them. 

Marketers have this for a long time. You cannot develop a product that everyone would have. The best product, you will get rejected by a lot of people, but you would develop rabid fans, a fan-based of maybe a small group of people who love your product. It’s the same thing. It says about that fan-base. It says about that those people will buy your product pretty much as much as about your product itself. 

Yeah, try different ones. Just be curious. Don’t set your goal to be like, “I’m going to get a yes. That’s my goal.” No. Just say, “My goal is to ask 10 people. I want to see how many will say yes to me or how many will say to me.  

[0:37:52.3] MB: I know one of the stories and experiences that you had was around kind of a lesson of how to turn a no into a yes. Can you talk about that and how that kind of learning came from all of the rejections that you’ve faced?

[0:38:06.9] JJ: Yeah. When we get rejected, our natural human tendency is to do one of two things, to fight or flight. You’ll fight, you start arguing with this other person and trying to turn their head. Their no into a  yes. They’re trying to say, “If I convince you, do I actually change your mind?” Your flight is you’re running away. You’re just like, “Oh! That’s okay. Thank you.” Just leave. 

None of those is actually a good option, because if you fight, if you try to argue, if you try to outsmart or whatever, usually it doesn’t work, because when you start arguing, you’re asking someone to change their mind. A lot of times emotions and egos get involved. People start to dig in. It’s really tough to actually turn no into a yes. 

Another way is if you run, it’s even worse, because you’re at the mercy of your own judgment. You lose confidence when you just run without actually doing anything. I tell people, “If you really want to turn no into a yes, okay, you can start by asking why.” When people say no to you, ask why. Basically, try to find out what’s the underlying reason for them to say no to you. Try to solve that problem for them. Help you, help me, right? 

Also, when you say why, you stay engaged. You’re buying yourself more time. You’re not arguing, you’re not running away, but you’re buying yourself time. You’re trying to find out if you can find different ways to get a yes. There are so many things you can do to turn no into a yes. If you fight or flight, you’re going to — Those are two of the worst options and those are two things we do normally.

[0:40:02.5] MB: Would you share really briefly, because I know you talked about in your TED Talk and other place, but would you share the story of the flower? How that kind of demonstrates this lesson really beautifully? 

[0:40:14.9] JJ: One day one of my rejection request was I’m going to have bought some flower from a store and I want to talk — Knock on a stranger’s house, door and say, “Can I plant this flower in your backyard?” They guy opened the door and he was like, “Oh, okay. That’s pretty interesting. I thought you were a sales guy. No. Sorry. I cannot do this for you.” I asked, “Why?” He’s like, “I have a dog that will dig up anything I put in the backyard. I don’t want you to waste your flowers. Actually my neighbor love flower, why don’t you go talk to her.” 

I was very happy, because, one, I just got some information. First thing I learned is not about me. If I just leave, probably I’ll thought, “Okay. Maybe I didn’t dress up well. Maybe the guy didn’t like me or for whatever reason.” It turned out to be none of those reasons. He told me about his neighbor. Two, I gained some very crucial information. I got my referral. If you come in and say, “Hey, your neighbor or your friend recommended me to talk to you.” The chance of you saying yes to me actually goes a lot higher. I did go and I go talk to his neighbor. She was very happy to see me and she let me plant the flower in her yard and she’s like, “Oh! Thank you. This is so nice. This is very interesting. Go ahead and maybe do it here.” As it turned out, he was right. She loves flowers. This is few years ago that happened, and I hope that flower is still there. 

[0:41:52.0] MB: It’s just another beautiful example of how all of these magic is on the other side of doing things like this, but you can’t uncover it and you can’t discover it until you’re willing to push through that fear and push through that little voice in your head that’s telling you, “You can’t do it.” That shouldn’t do it or that something terrible is going to happen when you do.

[0:42:12.2] JJ: Absolutely. 

[0:42:15.0] MB: So kind of a corollary of that, another strategy you’ve talked about uncovering was doubt and how doubt can be a really powerful tool for kind of helping people accept some of your request. Can you talk a little bit about that?  

[0:42:28.1] JJ: A better word for doubt is empathy. You want to empathize with the other person whether maybe — Anytime you make some big request, they probably have some sort of objection or some doubt that they have about you. If you can actually mention some doubts, especially if you have a good answer for, right? If you answer a doubt and you have no good answer for it, it’s not good. 

Talk about a doubt or objection that you actually do have a good answer for, mention that, and that becomes your advantage instead of a disadvantage. If you try to hide, if you are just like, “I hope none of that conversation about doubt doesn’t happen. I hope everything is smooth sailing.” 

A lot of times that won’t happen, because people always have doubt and they won’t necessarily mention it to you. They won’t be like — They’re like, “Okay. I’m going to say no to you, because all these reasons.” Sometimes it’s subconscious. Sometimes they have that reason. They can’t even articulate it. If you mention it and if you’re like, “Actually, you know what? I can solve this problem.” If you do it before they do, statistically speaking, the chance of you getting a yes actually goes up just because you demonstrate that you’re honest, you can solve people’s problems. If you can have your doubt or people — What they think about straight up, you actually increase how much they trust you. 

[0:44:01.1] MB: We talk a ton on the show about the power of empathy and we had a recent interview with a spy recruiter for the government who core kind of lessons and strategies was focusing on other people and understanding what they need and what they want, and it’s so simple. When you put yourself in someone’s else shoes, when you make it about them and not just about you, it’s amazing how effective it can be in terms of getting them on the same page. 

[0:44:30.2] JJ: Yeah, absolutely. Empathy is — I totally agree. I think you put it beautifully. Make people understand it’s really about them. If you’re empathizing with them even with their doubt, and then people want to be returning kind. That’s what we normally do. If you do something nice for me, my natural tendency is do something nice for you. Even the nice thing is you’re empathizing with me, knowing my pain, my doubt, and it’s like, “I understand that. I’m trying to solve that for you.” Then you’d be like, “You know what? This guy, this person is nice. I’m going to do something nice for this person as well.” 

[0:45:11.2] MB: I’m really curious. You seem like a very creative guy. How did you come up with all of these different challenges for yourself and all these different ways to get rejected?

[0:45:22.6] JJ: When I started, what’s funny is after the first one — The first is like me borrow $100 from a stranger. That’s my first request. I found that was like daunting and also pretty boring asking money from someone. Then I thought, “What are some of the funny things I can do?” I started trying to have fun. What are some of the things I’d get rejected but also just — I want to entertain myself in a way, because actually it’s such a — When you think about it from a normal lens, it’s such a dry, it’s such a painful experience. It’s such a subject that you are desperately trying to avoid. How can I have that in my mind which I can face it head on on a daily basis and be able to endure this? I’m like, “How about if I just try to be funny myself? I’m just going to have some fun. I’ll get rejected, I’ll just amuse myself.” 

That’s why you’ve got like all these pretty funny requests where I would ask for a burger refill after lunch. I would walk into like a pet store trying to get a haircut, like I were a dog. I would try to walk into a shipping store and try to send something to Santa Claus. I just want to have fun. 

What I found is somehow this turned into — The idea of I’m not taking myself too seriously and I’m having fun. Wow! That translates to how people kind of relate to you, not just my readers, but people I’m making request to. They thought it’s funny sometimes. When I think it’s funny, when I don’t take myself too seriously, when they reject me, the conversation never turns nasty. It doesn’t turn like — It’s always pretty pleasant, because people are going to feel the positive energy in you even they say no to you. 

I want to say that keep that type of humor and positivity in your daily work. It’s okay. It’s okay to have some fun when you make requests even at work, even try to make a sale, even entrepreneurship. I think that’s important.  

[0:47:30.9] MB: What would be as a starting point? Obviously you’ve got tons of examples, but for somebody who’s listening, we’ve challenges them to go out and get rejected. What’s a really simple maybe one to three kind of rejection challenges they can implement as soon as they finish listening to this episode? 

[0:47:50.4] JJ: Yeah. Like I mentioned this before. The number one thing, try to do something comfortable. Try something a little bit uncomfortable, but not outrageous. Text an old friend just to get back to them, just to get back and say, “Hi. How are you? I haven’t talked to you for a while. How are you doing? I’m doing this right now. Hopefully we can keep in touch.” Just do something like that. That’s the starting point. Then talk to a stranger. Say hi to someone. Give someone a high five. Be very happy. Smile at someone. Then buy something and ask for discount at a store. If you go to a store, say, “Hey, can I get a discount,” or maybe you’re like, “Hey, can I see your warehouse? Can I see what is out there? I’ve always wanted to — I’m always curious and I’m just wondering what’s out there. Can you let me take a peek?” 

These are the things that they’re not — They’re something you don’t normally do that’s not that 100% comfortable. Guess what? When you do that, it gets you out of the comfort zone and start getting you on the path of looking for rejection.

[0:49:02.6] MB: I think a kind of an important corollary of that is everyone has a different comfort level. So if texting an old friend is something that seems really kind of easy and seamless for you, don’t do that, and then say, “Oh! I did my rejection challenge for today.” You kind of have to tailor it to something that you feel a little twinge of fear. It has to be something where you say — You have to be at the edge of your comfort zone, and if you don’t feel that inside of yourself, then it’s too easy and you need to find a challenge that’s going to make you have a little bit that doubt, a little bit of that second thinking, “Oh, I don’t know if I should do this,” because when you’re there, that’s really where the magic happens.

[0:49:42.5] JJ: Absolutely. I think In the end, I will recommend people blend in these rejection requests that you can get rejection therapy, or something on your own. Invent your own thing. I just met this guy the other day and he just told me this amazing story that after hearing my talk, he did his own rejection challenge. He would go — He sat down in a coffee shop. He just write down, what are the 100 things that would take him out of his comfort zone, but also toward his goals? He wants to expand his business. He wants to find love. He wants to — He just want to get out of the rut. 

He wrote down his own challenges and he just did that once per day and a year later he’s like — He just doubled his business. He’s about to get married and he’s inviting me to his wedding. He was near depression. He was like in such a rut and he got this out of him, because he listed the things that will motivate him to keeping going. You don’t have to take suggestions from other people. Maybe you can list your own things. 

[0:50:55.5] MB: I think that’s great, and I love — We’ve talked about it already in this conversation, but you can do this as kind of a fun adventure, something crazy to kind of do in your free time, or you can align it with the goals that you have for your life, and that’s just as powerful and can end up creating some really amazing results. 

[0:51:15.1] JJ: Yeah, absolutely.

[0:51:17.3] MB: You shared another lesson, which is that if you look at some of the most impactful people in the history of last 100 years, people like Martin Luther King, people like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, etc. All of these people achieve what they achieved because they had a powerful relationship with rejection and they were able to power through it and use it as fuel to accomplish their goals. 

[0:51:44.0] JJ: Yeah, absolutely. If you think this is where the ultimate level with rejection, whereas you embrace rejection. You know rejection actually means something good rather than doing something bad. We, in life, we’ll think rejection is something bad, something that we should avoid, and if you can just avoid rejection or minimize rejection you’re way into success, you’re are fooling yourself, because a real success that the people who really are not only successful in their own life, but also can change lives of other people, these folks didn’t do it by avoiding rejection, by trying to go through the easy route. The thing they are doing, the idea is they’re spreading they’re building. Some of the people hate them. Some of the people not only hate them, they violently hate them. 

In fact, the example of Nelson Mandela, he was put in jail for a long time. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, those people were assassinated. You cannot get any worst rejection than those, but that’s because they understand rejection doesn’t mean they’re wrong, because especially the stronger the rejection, that means the stronger the acceptance from the other side. If you can start up strong emotions from someone, that can mean you’ve got something. That means there’s the upset of those people, that people who strongly embrace you. 

Don’t be afraid of rejection. Don’t be like, “Oh, man. People hate this. I must be doing something wrong, or maybe I’m stupid. I shouldn’t do this.” Think about the people you are serving. Think that people will equally — Will embrace you with equal fervor. Think about those people. If they can find those people, if they can find your own tribe, you’re doing some amazing things for them.

[0:53:40.7] MB: For listeners who want to learn more, who want to dive in, who want to get some advice and start with things like rejection therapy, where they can find you and all of these resources?

[0:53:52.2] JJ: Yeah, you can go to rejectiontherapy.com. Since last year, I bought rejection therapy, I bought a domain, an intellectual property from the original owner, and now I own this. My goal and my life’s mission now is to make this — I want to make a lot more people use it. I want to turn this into a bigger movement so a lot of the people will share their stories with me, like this guy that I just met the other day. 

If you want to learn more, if you want to go experience this, go to rejectiontherapy.com, sign up with my blog. More important, I’m working on digitizing rejection therapy. I’m working on making this a mobile app, an interactive social mobile app where you could be challenged constantly with rejections, but also you will learn things from this app. 

I’m looking for testers. If you want to be a beta tester when I’m done with this app, you can test things out. You’d be one of the first users of this, go to my website and sign up. I think I have a popup where you can put in your name and email, then I will keep you updated with this new app I’m building.

[0:55:07.8] MB: Awesome. Jia, I’m a huge fan of rejection therapy. I love the work you’re doing. I really can’t emphasize enough how excited this kind of stuff makes me. I’ve done it in my own life. I know how powerful it can be. For anybody out there who’s scared, who is shy, introverted, has trouble making friends or being social, or who just wants to push their life to the next level, this is such an accessible, easy, simple way to get started with that, and I guarantee you, it changed Jia’s life, it changed my life. It’s something that you will find magic on the other side of it if you do it. 

Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[0:55:50.6] JJ: Yeah, thank you, Matt. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for inspiring people, I guess, to be more successful to do better and to be more courageous in their lives. This is very important. I really appreciate you having me on here. 

[0:56:05.9] MB:  Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say high, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

I’m going to give you three reasons right now why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some amazing stuff that’s going on on the email list that only people who are signed up are getting access to including curated weekly emails from us every single week, our Mindset Monday email which listeners have been absolutely loving. Short, simple articles and stories that we’ve really enjoyed from the last week. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, voting on guests, submitting your own questions to guests that we’ll ask on air, things like changing the intro and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get access to free guides including our most popular guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you join the email list today. 

You can join by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re driving around, if you’re on your phone, if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais

In this episode we explore what it takes to succeed at the highest possible levels, we get science and data from years in the trenches with top performers to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results, we dig deep into the life long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more with Dr. Michael Gervais. 

Dr. Michael Gervais - Michael is a high performance psychologist who trains mindset skills and practices that are essential to revealing one’s potential. Michael has worked with some of the world’s top performers including sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner (The Red Bull Sponsored Athlete Who Completed the Stratosphere Jump)Olympians, musicians, and more! His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more!

• Years in the trenches with top performers to get the best strategies

• The importance of rugged and hostile environments to cultivating presence and peak performance

• The value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity in order to grow

• Our ancient brain is the thing that gets us stuck, keeps us safe, and keeps us small

• The importance of stillness - the place where all of life happens

• Expressing your authentic self in harmony with other people

• There are only 3 things you can train as a human

• You can train your body

  1. You can train your craft - this varies by person - can be anything from writing to motorcross to partening

  2. You can train your mind

  3. Everything falls into those buckets when we talk about the development of the human experience

• A personal philosophy is one of the most significant anchors you can ground yourself with. Great achievers always have clarity of personal philosophy

• Line up your thoughts, words, and actions across any environment - there is a sense of power that comes from that - an inner knowing and being that is so rock solid that you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that mindset

• The life-long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy - and the 3 methodologies

• Mindfulness - being present with your inner experience

  1. Being around wise people - people who are switched on, people who are having deep convos, talking about their philosophies, having those conversations

  2. Writing - the art of writing, taking a thought and all the words in your native tongue and lock down these ideas and concepts

• Start with putting your philosophy to memory, and then most importantly begin putting your philosophy into practice

• There’s nothing new in the world of self help - the science is super clear - this is what we know to be true - you just have to do the work

• Optimism is a foundational pillar for mental toughness, optimism is about how you think about your future

• Optimism is a learned behavior - how to train it

• Relentless belief that you can focus your mind on what’s good

  1. First function - without awareness of inner dialogue you’re dead in the water - you must have meditation/mindfulness - train your inner experience to become more aware of thoughts and sensations

  2. Second - Martin Seligman - focus on 3 good things - gratitude journal

  3. Become a researcher of amazing / researcher of good in your own life

• Mindfulness is the backbone that runs through all of these strategies

• Going through difficult things doesn’t mean you will be traumatized - Post Traumatic Growth is also possible - How can you achieve post traumatic growth?

• “Small t trauma” vs “Big T Trauma"

• Resilience is at the center of growth - and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult situations

• The difficult things you go through either get you stuck or push you to the edge of growth.

• In modern life for the average person - the most dangerous thing is what people think of us

• Getting uncomfortable is a requirement for you to be your best. This can be easily demonstrated with any world class performer from music to sports to any field.

• Knowledge won’t carry us through - it's not about more information - that learning has to turn into application and action. Learning has to turn into insights - and those insights need to change your behavior

• The 4 Pillars of Recovery

• Sleeping well - the science is pretty clear - the commitment to doing that requires incredible discipline

  1. Eating & Hydration are necessary pillars - colorful vegetables & clean protein

  2. Moving well - getting your body switched on, oxygenating your system - 6-7 hours of moderate to intense movement per week

  3. Think Well - your mind is an incredible tool, but it also needs to be harnessed

• Most people cannot even fathom the amount of vulnerability necessary to get to the truth - radical vulnerability - allowing the inner stuff to be revealed - is incredible, and so hard to do - most of us retreat to our normal patterns

• Doing difficult things expands your comfort zone

• How do you strike the balance between achievement and non-attachment?

• Winning is fun, winning pays bills - but the far deeper part of that is that the process of becoming - the process of knowing that you have what it takes, the process of being creative to solve problems on the fly and make decisions is much more fun.

• Winning is a requirement to keep going - but in order to cultivate non-attachment you have to be focused on the present moment

• Practice is more important than the conceptual idea itself

• What is your “craft" and why is it so important?

• For most people who are not on the world stage - begs the question - what is my craft? It’s not as complicated as it sounds - what are you most passionate about - what is the thing you care so much about you love doing it, you put work into it?

• Get back to seeing what we do from 9-5 as a primary craft - think about your work and your job as a craft

• Social media has made us lose our way, lose our true north, lose our focus on our craft

• Taking time to think about and articulate your personal philosophy - just starting WRITING “My personal philosophy is…” in 25 words or less - what do you stand for, what are you all about? What’s your true north, your compass?

• Write down the people who have inspired you in life - and next to their names right down the characteristics that they expemplify - those characertics might be part of your philosophy

• How you can engineer your inner experience

• Mindfulness is not a relaxation training - it's a focus training

• That moment of awareness (that your mind has wandered) is the work taking place

• Minimum effective dose is 6-8 minutes, optimal dose is 20 minutes

• Compete to become the best version of yourself

• Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Wiki Page] Martin Seligman

• [TEDTalk] The New Era of Positive Psychology by Martin Seligman

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [Book] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

• [Website] Finding Mastery

• [Website] Compete to Create

• [Twitter] Michael Gervais

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we explore what it takes to succeed at the highest possible level. We get science and data from years in the trenches with top performers to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results. We dig deep into the lifelong quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more, with Dr. Michael Gervais. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. One; you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand including our most popular guide; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide, but you got to sign up to find out by joining our email list today. 

Next, you're going to get an curated weekly email from us every week, including our Mindset Monday email, which listeners have been absolutely loving, and you're going to get a an exclusive chance to shape the show, that means voting on guests, changing parts of the show like our intro and outro music and much more, and even submitting your own personal questions to our guests. 

There're some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up. You can sign up by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go right now, you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that smarter” to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed the proven strategies for building effective relationships. Why it's vital to understand the results you get in the world come from working with other people. How you can see the world from other people's perspectives, tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much more with our previous guest, Todd Davis. If you want uncover the number one strategy for achieving results and getting what you want in life, listen to that episode. 

Now for the interview.

[0:02:22.3] MB: Today we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Michael Gervais. Michael is a high-performance psychologist who trains mindset skills and practices that are essential to revealing one’s potential. He’s worked with some of the world’s top performers, including sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner, the Red Bull sponsored athlete who completed the stratosphere job, Olympians, musicians and much more. His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times and many other sites. 

Michael, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:51.7] MG: Thanks for having me on. 

[0:02:53.0] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. I’d love to start out, tell me a little bit about what is your mission? What is kind of the driving purpose behind what you do? 

[0:03:04.0] MG: Well, it’s changed, and I can work in reverse order, so I think it's probably a bit easier, but the beginnings is — Or where I am now, the mission now, is to see if we can make an impact in one in seven people across the globe. That sounds daunting and ridiculous, but we make it where it’s bite-size or snackable if you will and we’re trying to make a difference, one of five people in any organization that we work with. 

The reason one in five, the image in place is to help people be more clear about how they can train their mind to be more present. So that's the mission. If we can increase the frequency of people becoming their authentic self and by meeting the present moment when it happens and having command of their mind to do so in rugged and hostile environments, then the idea is that we’ll create a rising tide where that swell floats all boats. 

[0:03:56.6] MB: You touched on the idea of rugged and hostile environments. How does that play into the cultivation of presence? Another topic I know you’ve worked a lot on is mastery. 

[0:04:07.5] MG: Well, by trade and training, my skillset is high-performance psychology, or performance psychology. I think that it’s important to give some context to where I’m coming from, so it’s grounded in good science. Then I’ve spend years in the field and in the trenches with some of the top performance in the world learning how they, and we together, customize a mindset training or psychological skills training programs. 

The rugged and hostile environments is relative and in many of the environments I work in, they’re physically rugged and hostile. For the rest of folks, like it doesn’t have to be physically dangerous to be rugged. It can be emotionally dangerous and risky. What that means is any time that your heart starts to thump because of the interpretation that something is on the line, then by definition that becomes relatively hostile. It feels as though — No. A better way of saying that, it is the exact same feeling as if somebody were chasing you down with a knife in a dark alley when you’re required to walk across the dancehall in 7th grade and experience that vulnerability being the first person to dance or to walk across and ask somebody to dance.

All of the same ancient brain stuff from our ancestors that were passed on to us about fight, flight, freeze, mission or flow state, all of those are at play. In modern times, so many of us, we understand the value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity or getting right on the edge of this instability to grow and to become larger in our ability to manage moments. The truth is that our ancient brain is that thing that gets us stuck and keeps us safe and small in many regards.  

So that’s a long way of saying that the hostile and rugged environments is where we learn about who we really are. The way that we learn about who we are is only we really know our experience in those moments. Do we shut it down? Do we avoid them? Do we — Are so self-critical that it’s hard to be fluid in our craft, whether that’d be words or whether that’d be something more physical, like sport?

It’s the dangerous and hostile environments that teach us how well we prepared to be still in the present moment. Why is the stillness important, is because that’s where life happens. That’s where all things high-performance, that’s where all things that look like or feel like mastery take place. It’s where we’re connected to ourselves. It’s where we’re connected to nature. It’s where we’re connected to our craft. It’s where we’re connected to others. 

The essence is the whole inner engineering game is to figure out ways to become more present and to have that presence be aligned with your personal philosophy about who it is that you want to become and who it is that you’re working on being, and it’s the confluence of those variables that be more specific. Those variables are hostile or rugged environments. The personal philosophy about who it is that you’re working on becoming and the mental skills to have command of your inner experience so that you can do one thing, which is express your authentic self, and when you can do that in harmony with other people, really good stuff takes place. That’s the essence of how I spend most of my time conceptually. Thinking about those elements and how to leverage them and manipulate them in all the right ways and then to train our minds to be more calm and more confident, more resilient, more mentally tough, more nimble if you will to adjust to the unfolding and unpredictable unknown that only comes within the uncertainty of hostile and rugged environments. 

[0:08:06.3] MB: There’s a tremendous amount of stuff that I want to dig into just from that answer. I’d love to start out with the idea of really getting clear about who you are and how important it is to know who you are and how that intersects with performance.

[0:08:22.3] MG: Yeah. I think it seems like a simple question, but it’s a really big question. Let’s start with one concept above that, which is there’s only three things that as humans, there’s only three things that we can train. We can train our body, and science is pretty good there. We’ve got a pretty good handle on how to do that. You can train our craft, and our crafts vary across people. Some people, their craft is writing, and some people, their craft is motocross. There’re all different types of crafts people have. Parenting is a craft. You can train your body. You can train your craft and you can train your mind. 

Everything else in life falls in one of those three buckets when we’re talking about development of the human experience, and there’s an asterisk, and that asterisk is your spirit. There is some thought that I — I’m a scientist at heart and there’s no science that I can point to that says you can train spirit, but not put an asterisk next to it, because I think it’s possible.

Okay. There’s only those three things that you can train. Now, I spend most of my time on how to train the mind. When we talk about training the mind, it becomes almost fruitless to have mental skills, but there’s nothing to calibrate who you are and who you’re becoming, which is a personal philosophy. A personal philosophy becomes — Seriously, like one of the most significant anchors that we can ground ourselves with, and if you think about some of the most significant people in the world that have shaped the culture and the rhythm of the world, we’re very clear about their philosophy. 

Martin Luther King Jr., we know exactly what he stood for, because he talked about it, he thought about it, and his actions lined up, and that’s the essence of why a personal philosophy is really important, is to line up your thoughts, your words and your actions across any environment. When you can line up your thoughts, words and actions, there is a sense of power that comes from that. Now, I don’t mean power in a cheesy way, but there’s an inner-knowing and an inner-being that is so rock solid that you can — No. Not align. That you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that alignment. That’s Martin Luther King Jr. We knew that he stood for equality. 

Malcom X on the other side also stood for equality and they had very different tones to how they went about achieving that aim of equality. Malcolm X was widely known for by any means necessary, and Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. King, was very clear about having a non-violent approach. 

There’s dials that get embedded in one’s philosophy, but the philosophy itself becomes the compass for how to line up your thoughts, your words and your actions.

[0:11:14.8] MB: That’s so powerful, and I think it’s critically important point. I’m curious, for somebody who’s listening that kind of wants to ground that experience, how would you recommend starting out to uncover or discover what your own personal philosophy is or starting to get to the core of that?

[0:11:34.2] MG: It’s a lifelong quest, and it’s starts by getting clear, and there’s three methodologies to get clear that both science and ancient wisdoms would teach us. It starts with a basic principle, and the basic principle is that everything you need is already inside you. It’s not about going and asking other people for their philosophy, but it is helpful to have your eyes open to be curious about what other people’s philosophies are so that you can be more connected to what it is that they’re searching for and how they’ve organized their life. I’m talking about people of wisdom and passion and people that had great influence that you think is remarkable. Okay. That’s the first part. 

The second part is if everything you know — Everything you need to know is already inside you, how do you reveal that? There’s three methodologies, and the first is mindfulness. So that is the practice of being present with your inner experience. We can down as much of that conversation as you’d like. The second form is being around wise people, being around people that are switched on and having those conversations about deep stuff, about their philosophy, about how they have cultivated their philosophy, about how their philosophy has changed overtime and being able to bounce deeper type conversations across the people that have wisdom. If you’re not fortunate enough to know somebody that’s wise, that’s okay. There’re certainly people in your community that like are on the ball. Maybe they don’t have wisdom and they haven’t revealed it yet, but they’re certainly on the ball and they’re switched on. That’s the second; those types of conversations and building that community. 

Then the third is writing. The art of writing, of being able to take an esoteric thought and all the words in your native tongue to be able to lockdown as a forcing function to say, “This is the word or sentence or phrase that best describes this feeling or thought or concept that I’m trying to articulate.” It’s something incredibly powerful about that forcing function to take all the possible words that swirl on our head and pick one or two or a phrase of words to articulate ourselves. Those are the three ways, but it starts with a premise that everything you need is already inside you. Your work is to reveal that, and that happens by being, by listening, by having conversations and by writing.
 
[0:13:58.2] MB: What has your own journey been like to uncover your personal philosophy?

[0:14:04.8] MG: I’ve had wonderful experiences with this and I’ve been fortunate enough to have some mentors. I needed mentors when I was younger I should say, and so I was fortunate enough to have some really amazing people that helped guide me. One of those folks challenged me and said, “What is your philosophy?” and I had no idea what it was and I just couldn’t articulate it, and I tried. Just like most people that say, “Well, the things that are most important to me are —” But that’s not what it is. It’s like there’s something much deeper, and that deeper calling is to say, “I know it’s this.” The way to get to that clarity are the three approaches I just talked about, but also having somebody say, “Hey, listen. I really would love to know your philosophy.” There’s something really important about at the accountability that that person cares, they’re interested and I’m going to do this with them, or they’re calling me out on the carpet. That’s what happened to me. Somebody called me out and said, “I thought you had done this — You said that you’ve done this work and I thought you did, but it’s clear you haven’t.” I said, “Okay.” 

What ends up happening for me is I went based on that kind of — I wouldn’t say it was embarrassment, but I let myself down. I let my mentor down. I just went on a quest to really try to figure it out, but it took me two years and it was two years of searching and I was reading and I was talking and I was writing and I was listening. I was doing all the things that I shared with you earlier.

Then one day I was reading a chapter in a book and it just spilled out of me, and so I don’t think that what I’m describing is the absolute, most efficient way to do it, but that’s how it happened for me. Then when I realized, like this is me looking back with hindsight, that there’s some particular phases that we go through, there’s the searching phase of trying to understand it, and then there’s the phase of like shaping it, paring it and saying, “These are the words.” 

What I’d suggest to people is that you want to be able to so crisp with your philosophy is that you could get it out at knife point in a dark alley. That means that it’s got to be just a handful of words, or certainly less than 15, that maybe you start with a whole page and then you pare it down to half a page and then you pare it down to 25 words or less and then maybe you could get it done to just a handful of words that really get to the center of your compass in your life. 

Okay. Then the next is taking that work and putting it to memory. Little extra here is that when it happened for me, is that when it just spilled out of me, it was so right and so true, because I’ve been thinking and searching and really wrestling with it sometimes in the background, but sometimes in the foreground of my daily rhythms, that I only needed to edit two words in my statement. That leads me to this next phase, which is putting it to memory. For me, it was so crisp that I didn’t need to put it to memory. It was just there for me. 

Most people need to say, “Okay,” and they need to practice it, like, “Okay. What are those words? That’s right. Okay. It was these words. All right.” There’s just a memorization process. 

Then the fourth phase is to put it into practice, and so we’ve got to wake up in the morning in some kind of way and practice it. If you want to be good at it, especially in rugged and hostile environments to have that alignment, that true north that only a philosophy can offer us, is that we have to wake up and practice it. 

Then we want to practice mental skills to support us to be about it in hostile and rugged environments. That’s it. It’s not complicated. I think that there’s something very important about simplicity and it feels like I know I’m on to something when it’s really simple, but it’s hard to do and it just seems like that’s what I’ve learned from both being in the trenches with world’s best and variety of domains, that it’s not complicated to know how to shoot a basketball or do whatever the skill is in whatever sport we’re talking about when nobody is looking, but it’s extremely hard to do it when there are more people looking and there’s pressure involved. It’s even more difficult to do that in repeated fashion. That’s how I think about it.

[0:18:18.4] MB: Yeah, I feel like many of the most important things in life are simple but not easy. 

[0:18:24.2] MG: Yeah. A thousand percent. There’s something nauseating about the self-help world. It’s like, “Jesus! There’s nothing new.” It’s a fantastic field waiting for people to help them become their very best. The science is phenomenal saying, “Listen. This is what we know to be true. You just have to freaking do it. You got to put in the lonely work and roll up your sleeves, be really clear about your philosophy. Train your mind to know how to be confident in any environment.” That’s mechanical. That’s so mechanical, but the practice in the doing of it, it’s just not easy. How to become in any environment, completely possible to do, but we have to practice. How do we practice? If you want, we can go through those mechanics, but I’m sure that most of your listeners already know the answers on how to do that. 

[0:19:16.2] MB: Let’s briefly touch on that. Tell me kind of just in an overview sense what are those core mechanics and mental skills that are necessary to command your inner experience?

[0:19:27.0] MG: Yeah. Okay. Once we’ve locked in and we’ve got our compass for our philosophy and we’ve got a sense of, “Okay. I’m going to do the hard work,” and you make that commitment. It’s hard work to do. Then you can move into training the mental skills, which are the not complicated. It’s generating a sense of confidence, calm, the ability to lock in and focus in the present moment. The ability to trust yourself in difficult, rugged environments. Those are four, right? Calm, confidence, focus and trust. 

Then there’s some psychological framework stuff to work on as well, which is a fancy phrase for how you think about your future. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? We want to double down on optimism, because for us what we’ve learned, and science supports this as well, is that it’s part of a foundation, if not the center pillar for mental toughness. To create a life of high performance, let alone mastery or peace and meaning, we need — We require to be mentally tough. If the center of mental toughness is the belief that the future is going to work out and I have the capacity to figure it out, that’s a fancy phrase for self-efficacy. Then optimism is really important for us. That’s trainable. Optimism, pessimism are learned behaviors and if we want to be more mentally tough, we need to train optimism. 

Then the last two are being able to focus on what’s in our control, be very clear about that. Then the last is developing a sense of grit. Grit is a simple term, but it really means living with passion and a sense of resiliency to persevere for the long-term haul, for the long trek if you will towards your potential. 

If I make it more clear, it’s calm, confidence, focus and trust, optimism, control and grit. Those are the key mental skills that I spent a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate. If you’re going to do all of that, working to line up your thoughts, words and actions on a regular basis in safe environments all the way up to hostile events, and that’s what kind of natural training progression looks like. We start in a quiet, safe environment and then progressively get louder with more risk until it becomes more hostile. Then at some point, there’s the possibility to dissolve that hostility and dissolve that pressure if you will. That’s much more nuanced, but that’s left for people that are truly at the tip of the arrow to figure that out. 

If we’re going to do all of that work, then the last pillar, if you will, for a programmatic approach to progressive improvement would be getting your recovery program locked down. On the world stage, we do not talk about working hard. Everybody works hard. Everybody is freaking hard worker on the world stage and they’ve got this incredible talent to go with it. It’s exciting and it’s fun to work hard. 

We talk more about science and the art of recovery so that we can work hard on a regular basis and we down burn ourselves out in ways emotionally, physically or sometimes spiritually so to speak that we can’t go the distance. We got to push up against the edge, and if you’re going to push up against the edge of instability and doubt and physical limitations, then we’ve got to figure out the right way to recover our mind and our body.

[0:22:46.1] MB: I want to dig in recovery, but before we do, one of the things that I’ve thought about a lot is how do we balance optimism with the kind of acceptance of negative emotions and experiences? That’s something I think personally I’ve struggled with is, is kind of how do you balance spending time accepting and dealing with and thinking about past trauma or current negative emotional experiences with what you just talked about in terms of how powerful optimism is as a psychological framework and a key component of mental toughness and performance.

[0:23:20.9] MG: Okay. Yeah, it’s good. Everything that I just talked about, the wick that runs through it is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a particular well-being in the present moment without judgment. It’s a definition that was coined by Jo Kabat-Zinn. 

To answer your question, optimism is about how you think about your future. Now, if you’ve been burned, and I don’t mean physically burned, but that could be the case too. If you’ve been emotionally burned or let down or you’ve been through some really tough stuff you’ve seen or smelled or heard things that are traumatic or difficult for you to deal with, that that can and will likely impact a sense of optimism. Okay?

If you’re been through some really tough stuff, it makes sense to have mechanisms to protect yourself from experiencing those difficult emotions. Again, so how do we train optimism? The first thing we need to do is recognize that going through difficult things doesn’t mean that we’re going come out the other side of it traumatized. There’s a lesser known research about — What I’m talking about is post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma. Being traumatized is kind of a feature of that obviously. That there’s less research or less widely known research around post-traumatic growth, so that means it is possible to go through really heavy situations and come up the other side stronger, to come out the other side with the sense of growth. How? It’s really important. How?

It’s not as simple as I’m about to describe. I don’t want to pretend that this is not nuanced. It’s very nuanced when we’re dealing with emotional stuff that’s heavy, and I mean, shit a Ph.D., which is about 14 years of study doesn’t prepare us even enough to deal with what I’m about to say. It requires many more years in the field on top of that to deal with people that have been through traumatic experiences, but there’s trauma with a big T and there’s trauma with a small T. 

Let’s just say we’re dealing with trauma with a small T. It means maybe you’re publicly embarrassed. It doesn’t mean that you saw body parts or you almost died yourself. Trauma with a small T is more common. 

That means you maybe are publicly embarrassed or you let down some other people or there’s some sort of embarrassment or smaller traumatic experience that took place. If that was the case and that experience was fused with emotion and that fusion of emotion and physical experience becomes capsulated in such a way that we don’t want to experience it again because it was so hard, everything that you do looking forward would be to naturally protect yourself from that. 

We have to undo. We have to rewire that experience. How do we do that? That’s the complicated part. That’s where you want to get in touch with somebody that really has a deep understanding of how the mind works, a psychologist or a properly trained clinician, to understand how to unpack that, at the same time create the sense that resiliency is at the center of growth. 

We don’t become these amazing human beings without being resilient, and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult shit. At some point, we have to have this meta-analysis, this observation that the difficult things that I go through are either going to keep me stuck or push me right to the edge of growth. That becomes very important. 

Now, from that point, the idea of optimism is a purposeful decision to think about what could be amazing in the future. We have to spend time to train that, because if our ancient brain and our traumatized brain with a small T, but big T for trauma, is working to protect us. It literally feels like we have to override our DNA, and this is why psychology is so freaking powerful and wonderful and complicated, because our software, our mind is driving our brain, our hardware. 

If the software is not strong enough, the hardware wins, the brain wins. The brain is designed for survival. So if we want to go back to any of our — Let’s say, glitchy experiences in us becoming our best version of ourselves, it’s either because our software has been traumatized or it’s glitchy or the hardware is doing its job, and it’s doing its job to protect you from all the things that could potentially be dangerous. In a modern life, the things that are most dangerous are what people think of us. 

Certainly, that there are physically dangerous elements that take place. There are dangerous and bad people that lurk in dark places. That is true. For most of us, the worst thing that we experience is what other people might be thinking about us. We have to face down our glitchy software to upgrade it or know that our hardware is working to keep us safe and small and stuck and just okay, and we have to override that hardware by purposely training our mind to find what could be good as supposed to what our brain wants us to do is scan the world and find what could go wrong. It’s the combination of the balance of those two, because it’s ridiculous to think that nothing could go wrong. We do need to entertain those thoughts, but it’s that purposeful balance and double down or tripling down on what could be amazing and saying, “Okay. If that’s an outcome that could be amazing, what do I have to do to position myself right now in this moment or over the next week or month or years to see if that thing is actually possible.” That’s where all of the mental and physical and technical craft-base work goes into play.

[0:29:08.5] MB: If optimism is a learned skill, how can we cultivate and train it?

[0:29:14.9] MG: Okay. It starts with a decision, like I’m going to focus my mind on what could be good and what could be amazing. It’s a relentless belief that that’s possible. Then once that’s in place, then we back into how to train it, and there’re two functions of it. The first function is, without awareness of our inner dialogue, we’re literally dead in the water. 

It begins with an awareness of your inner experience. How do you train awareness? Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way to train your inner experience to become more aware of your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations and the stuff outside, the external environment. 

It starts with awareness. If you don’t know your thoughts, you can’t change them. The second is there’s some really great research out of UPenn that Martin Seligman designed, and that study reflects — They put people through — I can’t remember. Thousands of people. I think it was 4,000 people that put them through a study. I could be mixing up my research right now. He put thousands of people through a study and they asked them for seven days to just focus on three good things and at the end of the day just write those three good things down. 

What they’ve found is people came into that study that were depressed. It stabilized their depression. What they’ve found is people that were not depressed, overall life satisfaction and wellness increased after just 7 days. That’s on a bunch of research around optimism training and gratitude training. That would be the most mechanical, the easiest way, evidence-based practice to start is wake up in the morning, become a researcher of good. Just do that. Become a researcher of amazing and a researcher or good. Then at the end of the day, write those things down. At the end of the day you’d have a sentence and a parenthesis right next to the end of the sentence. 

Literally, I’ve got so many athletes and folks out and artists and folks I work with that they’ll send me a text as an accountability measure at the end of the day and it will say something like, “A woman held the door open for me.” Period. Then a parenthesis, it would say connection. Like they felt connected. The parenthesis is the emotion or the piece that made it special, and then the sentence is the thing that actually took place. It’s got to be real. It’s got to be something that happened and it’s, by the definition, has to be good or amazing if we’re so bold to be able to make that list. 

It forces our brain to scan the world and find what’s good as supposed to all the things that could go wrong. It’s simple. It’s mechanical and it’s evidence-based. 

[0:31:53.2] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:32:58.1] MB: Let’s transition back to talking about recovery. You mentioned how important recovery is and talked about a little bit of the art and science of that. Tell me more.

[0:33:07.3] MG: Okay. If you’re going to get on the edge, if you nudge your head and say, “Yes. I understand that getting uncomfortable, I’ve heard it over and over again, that getting uncomfortable is a requirement for me to be my best.” 

Then what that means is that you’re physically taxing your body on a regular basis. If we’re doing that, then we’ve got to put in the right recovery mechanisms so that we can replenish. There’re four pillars of recovery. The first is sleeping well. The science around that is pretty clear. We all know it. We all know that most human beings, 68% of human beings need to between 7 and 8 hours of sleep pm a regular basis. That’s not new. Grandma told us that. 

However, making the commitment to do that does require an incredible discipline and it requires organizing our lives in such a way that we value recovery, because we’re working at our capacity on a regular basis. 

Knowledge is not going to carry us through. It’s not more information, and it sounds counterintuitive for me to say this, but the idea of listening to — And I have a podcast and I love it and I’m clip just like you to learn. At some point, the learning has to turn into application and then that application has to turn into insight. Then we have that insight, we can reveal our potential easier. 

It moves from not knowing and hearing again that, “Oh, I should be getting 8 hours of sleep.” It’s having a fundamental pivot and orientation in your life to say that, “I’m freaking getting after it, and because of that I need to be disciplined and organize myself to ensure that I have at least 8 hours in bed on a regular basis.” That’s one. Sleep is the first pillar. 

Eating and hydration is the second pillar, and that’s mechanical as well. I’m not going to tell you more information that is going to be helpful other than you know that having colorful foods on your plate and having clean protein is essential. Colorful foods, I don’t mean like Skittles. I mean like all the different colors that mother nature offers us, and having handfuls of clean protein on a regular basis are really important. We can dig down in the weeds and to go deeper in that, but that’s a basic frame. If you’re not doing that on a regular basis and eating on a regular basis every three to four hours, then you’re kind of blowing it. The hydration piece is essential as well. When we are dehydrated, one of the first things that happens is we dehydrate our brain. I actually say the first thing, but we know that dehydrated people also had a shrinkage in volume in their brain, because so much of our cellular structure happens up in that three pounds of tissue in our skull. Eating right and hydration, that’s the second pillar. 

Then the third pillar is moving well, and that’s just a function of getting your body switched on and oxygenating your system. Basic guidelines are like 6 to 7 hours of movement, moderate to intense movement a week. It’s probably not quite enough if you’re really trying to get on the edge. 

The reason we want to get our bodies moving in that way is because it oxygenates our system, it gets our blood flowing, it gets all of the joints and the muscular and the skeletal tissue, all of that stuff is working and it helps enhance our brain for lots of different reasons. Also, it’s one of the ways that helps promote before lifting heavy things, and I say this with an asterisk, if you’re going to lift heavy thing, make sure that you’re skilled and qualified to do that with a coach, a sports performance coach or your local exercise guru, whoever that might be, and lift heavy stuff. It helps promote growth hormone. It helps promote the testosterone, and both men and women need those especially as we get into our 20s and 30s and 40s. We need to make sure that we’re taking care of those two hormones. That is all part of it. 

Then the fourth pillar is the think well. If you did all those three pillars, if you kicked ass all day, got right up into the edge of your capacity by doing difficult things, whether it’s emotional or physical and you’re in the amphitheater so to speak on a regular basis and you recover for the first three pillars, but you wake up in the morning and you pull your sheets off and the first thing it happens is that you drop into a state of anxiousness or worry or frustration that somebody drank the last — I don’t know. Say, milk or orange juice or whatever. The image in my mind is that you to the refrigerator and somebody drank all of the juices that you wanted. I’m not a fan of juices, that’s why I’m kind of stammering in this part of it. That if you wake up with a mind that’s anxious or frustrated, you just undo all of the recovery that you put in place. 

Our mind is an incredible tool. It’s also a weapon that can be used against us if we don’t put the right harnesses on it, and those harnesses begin with great awareness. Again, awareness can be cultivated, it can be trained, and mindfulness is one of the center pillars for increasing that awareness. 

[0:38:09.8] MB: You actually kind of tossed out a phrase that I think is a phenomenal insight, which is the idea that getting uncomfortable is a requirement to be your best. I think so many people get trapped in their comfort zone and it ends up really kind of stifling much of their growth potential. 

[0:38:25.4] MG: Yeah, for sure. I mean that’s one of the things that we can easily learn from world-class in anything, whether it’s music. The amount of artist, world-class artists — I’m spending some time right now with an artist who — I don’t want to say who it is for confidentiality, but has over 200 hits, and I mean hits. He’s a writer/producer and artist himself. When he goes on stage, he sells out in 15 minutes. He books at about $1.8 a night and works about 50 nights a year. I mean mega influencer of the world.

The amount of vulnerability, the intensity of vulnerability to get to the truth, I don’t think most people can even fathom what it takes to get to the truth. That level of radical vulnerability to allow the inner stuff to be revealed is incredible and it’s so hard to do. That what most of us do is we retreat to our normal patterns. We drive almost the same way every day to work. We eat from the same restaurants. We think the same patterns. We talk about the same silly shit with our friends on a regular basis, really getting on the edge, whether that’s physical. 

Great athletes have taught us this for years and coaches, world-class coaches have this insight; practice has got to be real. It’s got to be on. We’ve got to get switched on and get the most out of ourselves so that we can learn, so that we can figure out and push our capacity. I’m holding my hands, like I’ve got my hands around a balloon. If I breathe air into the balloon, which is doing difficult things, the balloon stretches and there’s a new capacity. There’s more room to play when the capacity gets bigger, when the balloon gets bigger and there’s ways to do it emotionally and there’s ways to do it physically. There’s no such thing as mental uncomfortableness. Thoughts are thoughts. 

Thoughts become challenging as soon as we have an emotional experience to them. There’s emotional uncomfortableness, which is really vulnerability. Then the physical stuff is much more mechanical and much easier to do. It’s about getting your heart rate up and your lactic acid and the [inaudible 0:40:53.3], or the chemicals in our body that are difficult to deal with. It’s about getting our wind up and breathing heavy, because we’re out of capacity from an oxygen standpoint, and from my lactic acid [inaudible 0:41:06.1] standpoint, when our muscles feel like they’re shutting down. You can do that by long distance stuff or intense burst of stuff. That’s how you do it physically. The whole purpose of that is to be able to have better command of your mind in those difficult situations and command of your craft, whatever that craft is, physical or mental. 

[0:41:26.4] MB: I want to come back and dig into craft as well, but there’s another topic that I’m curious to hear your insights on. One of the other psychological frameworks you talked about was focusing on what’s within your control, and kind of the corollary to that is something that I think that I think a lot about is striking the balance between pushing and really trying to achieve a lot and also kind of the concept of non-attachment, non-attachment to the outcomes. How do these high-performance you work with and how do you think about sort of striking that balance between not being attached to outcomes and at the same time still striving to achieve great things? 

[0:42:01.8] MG: Yeah. The concept of non-attachment is very much — The origins of that are very much in a Buddhist practice. I think that it’s hard. What you just described sounds wonderful and is really, really difficult to do. However — Before I get to the however, almost everyone I know wants to win. They know, they understand the invisible handshake that winning is really fun. If you don’t win enough, you don’t get to keep going. That visible handshake is for me or for an athlete or a coach in world-class organizations is that if we don’t win in the first — Let’s say in the NFL. If coaches don’t win the first four games, the owners can just fire you. That’s kind of the tolerance. 

Imagine if you’ve got four weeks to get it right and it doesn’t work right. You’re gone. You have to win. It’s a requirement. Winning pays bills. Winning is certainly fun, but it’s far deeper than that. The far deeper part of it is that the process of becoming, the process of knowing that you have what it takes. The process of being creative to solve problems and make decisions on the fly is much more fun. It’s just like when we match up against our competitors and we get to see how well we prepared, that’s the real reward. The winning part of it is a requirement to keep going to get another shot at it. 

Okay. How do you get into the non-attachment piece? By thrusting yourself completely into the present experience. Our minds are wired in such a way that we cannot process two new things at the same thing. It’s called serial processing, and that’s how we think at least we’re wired.  

If you can’t process two new things at the same time and you make a conscious decision and you have the ability — Anytime you have an ability, that means you can get better at it. You make a decision and develop the ability to put your mind in the present moment to focus on the most relevant task-at-hand, then that’s where we experience non-attachment. Non-attachment is a byproduct of full absorption in the present moment.

[0:44:27.2] MB: That’s a great insight, and I think that makes a ton of sense. That balance is something that I spend a lot of time kind of thinking about how do you strike a balance between those two things. Thank you for sharing that insight.

[0:44:38.4] MG: Yeah, good. I’d say it’s not going to probably do you much good thinking about it. The next phase is if once you have some clarity around it, is practicing it. How do you practice being fully connected to the present moment just this next thing is you might actually be practicing it on a regular basis through these conversations and in your podcast is by listening deeply. 

If you’re just listening deeply to this conversation right now, you’re practicing single pointed presence, like just this word, just this word again and you’re here now again in the present moment and again in the present moment and doing that for 15 seconds, 20 seconds and locking in for another 30 seconds once your mind wanders, maybe even doing it for one second at a time. That’s how it works. I’d say practicing it is far more important than thinking about just the conceptualize piece of it.

[0:45:31.7] MB: Another really good insight and very true — I’m a very cerebral person, so I naturally gravitate towards the ideas, but I think the practice is integral and critical.

[0:45:42.4] MG: Yeah. These are all abilities. That means wherever we are with them, we can get better. What I love about the space of psychology and the space of mindset conditioning and training is that it’s wide open right now and our potential as humans is untapped and we’re moving into a digital world where our ancient brains are not primed properly for it. So we have to train our minds to pursue our potential. We have to train our minds to override our DNA and that DNA function is to survive. If we can train our minds and we’ve got a clear purpose of our philosophy and connection to our philosophy, the world becomes so much more playful and wonderful. It doesn’t mean it’s not easy. It’s like hard, and there is real danger in the world. It’s a fantastic time right now for the science of psychology and the application of it. It’s phenomenal.

[0:46:36.2] MB: I want to circle back to craft, which we talked a little bit about earlier. Tell me — When you say craft, kind of what does that mean and how does thinking about that factor into the work you do with top performers?

[0:46:49.5] MG: Craft is — It’s so easy to look at an athlete and say, “Oh, I understand their craft. Their craft is dribbling a basketball or throwing a football or throwing a javelin or whatever. That’s super simple.” You look at an artist, you’re like, “Oh, okay. His craft or her craft is playing the guitar or singing.” 

For most people that are not on the world stage or are not professional at what they do, it begs the question what is my craft, and it’s not as complicated as it sounds. The way to think about your craft is what are you most passionate about? What is the thing that you care so much about that you love doing it? You put work into it? It could be a hobby, but that can be your craft. 

I’d also suggest that it’s really important for us to get back to seeing what we do from 9 to 5 or whatever that rhythm is for work for people to seeing that as a primary craft even if it doesn’t have the same type of passion around what it feels like to spin some pottery or to play music on a guitar as a hobby, but to see what we do and how we spend most of our time as a workforce, as that being our primary craft, that’s a really important distinction between being a laborer and being a craftsman. Even if it’s a factory worker, even if whatever — It does not matter. What we’ve found form research is that people that have a deep connection to purpose and meaning in life, they see that the simple bolt that they’re attaching on the factory line to the nut that is eventually one day going to turn into an automobile where people can have some freedom to move around or it’s going to turn into whatever piece of technology that provides creativity for people, that connecting to the deeper part of what they’re doing is significantly important to overall well-being, to happiness, to joy and to purpose in life. 

That science has been around a long time, but what’s happening right now is that the modern pace of instant access and the need for comparing our Instagram highlight reel to other people’s Instagram highlight reel is that we’ve lost our way and we’ve lost our way about what is our true north, what is the craft that we’re working on refining and why are we here. What is the purpose for us to be here, and it’s a difficult conversation that only you can answer for yourself. I would encourage us to take a good look at how we spend our time and to think about the things that we do through the lens of being craftsman.  

[0:49:38.4] MB: The idea of seeing your job as a craft makes me think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and especially the notion of quality from that book.

[0:49:46.2] MG: Yeah. It’s a classic book. It’s really good. Yeah, certainly, he has pulled on that thread quite a bit. If you haven’t read that book, I highly encourage to take a look at it for sure. 

[0:49:58.2] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give somebody listening to this episode so that they could concretely implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today?

[0:50:06.6] MG: Okay. Certainly, taking time to think about and articulate your philosophy, your personal philosophy. How do you do that? Just start writing and just start feeling the words that start thumping when you say, “My personal philosophy is,” and just kind of sense and feel your way through that. That would be a phenomenal and significant investment in yourself to see if you can articulate in 25 words or less what you stand for, what you’re all about, what it is that is your true north, your compass for what you’re doing here in life. That would be a phenomenal thing to do. Maybe even go research other people’s philosophies just to get your juices rolling. 

Then let me add one more thing, and I want to give your listeners two things. That would be one, and if I could add to that, it would be you could even write down the people that have inspired you in life, whether you know them or not, write down their names. Then write next to the names, write down the characteristics that they embody, that they exemplify. Those characteristics will also be part maybe of the words that you choose for your philosophy. That’s a significant contribution to your overall inner engineering, right? We do get to engineer our inner experience. 

The second would be an investment in mindfulness. Mindfulness has been around for 2,600 years. I feel like we’ve moved past the conversation with folks about what it is and why it’s important. I feel like that pop culture has done a great job there. Mindfulness, the actual practice of mindfulness is so powerful and so wonderful to increase our awareness of our inner experience, our thoughts, our emotions, our body sensations as well the awareness of the unfolding world around us so that we can pivot and adjust, that investing in a mindfulness practice will be a second very significant investment in one’s potency in life or efficacy in life. 

How do you it? Mechanically, there’re thousands of mindfulness practices, there are thousands of ways to meditate. Mechanically, if we start it off with some training wheels, it would be as simple as mastering your inhale. Breath in and take a nice deep breath in and maybe that breath lasts for about four to five seconds, somewhere in that range, and master it. How do you master the inhale, is when your mind wanders away from it? Just bring it back. Bring it back to the inhale, and when your mind wanders away again, bring it back. If you ask yourself, “Am I doing it right?” That’s the wandering mind. Just bring it back. 

Then notice the tension at the top of the inhale and master that tension, that pause at the top. It’s not radical, but it’s just enough to say that I’ve got a full breath. Then master the exhale. If the exhale is longer than the inhale, overtime, you’re going to get the benefit of a bit of relaxation. But mindfulness is not a relaxation training. Mindfulness is a focus training. 

As soon as your mind defocuses, moves away from the present moment, which in this case is the breath, your breath, that the moment that you’re aware that you’re away from the most important task at hand that you set up for yourself, the breathing, that moment of awareness is the moment of the work taking place, and so you gently bring it back. It’s like that, “Yes! I’ve realized I’m away. Okay. Come back.” That’s the mechanical part of refocusing back to the present moment. 

If you set a timer and if you follow good science, somewhere between six and eight minutes is a minimal effective dose, and my teacher from, I guess it’s about 20 years ago, is rolling his eyes right now if he’s listening saying, “Mike, are you still thinking about timing yourself? That’s not what it’s about.” 

An optimal dose according to science is somewhere around 20 minutes. It’s not like it’s completely hard science. We’re still trying to figure it out and there are some great researchers that are doing that right now, but somewhere between six and eight minutes is a minimal effective dose and the upper limits are somewhere around 20 minutes. That is what a mental mindfulness practice would look like.

[0:54:19.0] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:54:22.6] MG: Brilliant. The head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Coach Pete Carroll, who I think is going to go down as one of the great coaches of our era is — That’s an NFL team for people that are not familiar with the National Football League, that he and I about four years ago we created a joint venture where we’ve taken his insights and best practices on how to switch on a culture and my insights and practices on how to train the minds of people that want to become their very best. It’s essentially what we’ve been doing together up at Seattle Seahawks, how to cultivate culture and how to train the minds of people inside of it, and we’ve created a business out of it. 

So you can go to competetocreate.net and those two words are the center of our personal philosophy. His personal philosophy is always compete, to become the best version of yourself, the best dad, the best wife, the best coach, the best friend. Then mine is philosophy is the word create is important, which is every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece. 

We took our two set of philosophies and spun it into a business, and that’s competetocreate.net. You can also find me at findingmastery.net, which is a podcast we spun up to have conversations about mastery and with world’s best and a variety of different domains. Them more mechanically on social media to @michaelgervais, it’s G-E-R-V-A-I-S, and on Instagram is @findingmastery.

[0:55:52.7] MB: Michael, this has been a tremendously insightful conversation. There are so much that we got into and so many fascinating insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these knowledge and all these practical insights with the listeners.

[0:56:05.5] MG: Matt, thanks for having me on. Like what you’re doing is a fantastic expression of people being able to share what they’ve spent their life figuring out and I felt honored to be in the conversation with you and I hope that some folks have found this fast conversation to have maybe one little gem in there that they can practice and apply, and so thank you for the opportunity.

[0:56:27.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say high, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. One; you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emailed content from us every single week including our Mindset Monday email, which is short, simple tidbits, articles and stories that we've been loving for the last week. Next, you’re going to get an exclusive listener-only chance to shape the show, that includes voting on guests, changing parts of the show, like our intro and outro music and even submitting your own personal questions that we will ask in interviews with our guests. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get that completely for free along with a surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're driving, if you're on the go, if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter”, that's asked “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Proven Practices For Building The Ultimate Competitive Advantage with Todd Davis

In this episode we discuss the proven strategies building effective relationships, why it’s vital to understand that the results you get in the world are a result of working with other people, how you can see the world from other people’s perspectives, tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much more with Todd Davis. 

Todd Davis is the Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Franklin Covey and author of the new book Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work. Todd is responsible for Franklin Covey’s global talent development in over 40 offices in 160 countries and previously served as director of innovations, developing many of the company’s core offerings.

• The culture of an organization can make all the difference

• The nature of relationships between people becomes a companies ultimate competitive advantage

• Todd’s lessons from working with and coaching hundreds of companies and executives

• What did Sarte mean when he said that “Hell is other people?”

• The ultimate way you are measured is by the results you get

• You get your results WITH and THROUGH and other people

• What we see determines everything we do, and what we do determines the results we get

• Consider stepping back and understanding that their may be a different way to view things - that can powerfully impact your relationships

• Ask yourself “have you considered the other person’s perspective?”

• An exercise can you use right now to start to see the world from other people’s perspectives

• The power of examining your real motives

• How to avoid the pitfall of self deception

• Journaling exercise you can use to understand your real motives

• “The Five Whys” - keep asking why until you get to the root cause

• The most effective, successful, and influential people start with themselves first

• Be the change you seek in others

• Your circle of influence vs your circle of concern

• Why you should focus your time, energy, effort, and resources on things that you can impact and control

• The power of asking “Can you help me understand something?”

• Start with humility - the power of having humility in dealing with tough conversations

• Proactive, effective people don’t wait for feedback, they actively go and seek it out

• The 4 common reasons why we don’t seek feedback (and what you can do about them)

• A great opening line for dealing with tough conversations and situations

• Seeking validation vs actually seeking feedback

• How to “behave your way to credibility”

• The 2 key components for credibility - character and competence

• The importance of taking the long view when building credibility

• An exercise you can use to build your credibility over the long term

• The single biggest mistake of influencing other people - not “walking your talk”

• Make sure someone deeply understands your intent

• How to communicate effectively with someone who is in an emotional state

• When emotions are high - that’s not the moment to start addressing the problem

• With people - "fast is slow and slow is fast"

• Take the time to let someone share, just try to understand them

• The socratic method of influencing people - if you ask the right questions, seek understanding, and uncover the real issues - you can solve serious problems

• Todd shares a personal story that deeply impacts the lessons we discuss in the show

• In the end, relationships are the most important thing.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The SPEED of TRUST: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M .R. Covey,‎ Stephen R. Covey, and‎ Rebecca R. Merrill

• [Book] The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook by Stephen R. Covey

• [Book Site] Get Better: 15 Proven Practices To Build Effective Relationships at Work by Todd Davis

Episode Transcript

[TRANSCRIPT BODY HERE][00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode, we discuss the proven strategies for building effective relationships, why it’s vital to understand that the results you get in the world come from working with other people, wow you can see the world from another person’s perspective, the tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much, much more with our guest, Todd Davis.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the  homepage. First, you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide how to organize and remember everything. What you can get completely for free, along with another sweet bonus guide. But you got to sign up to discover what it is by join the e-mail list today. Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this e-mail; it’s short, simple, a few articles and stories that we found interesting in the last week.

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, you can change our intro music, which we voted on a couple weeks ago in e-mail list. You can even submit questions to upcoming guests. Be sure to sign up, check out the e-mail list. There’s amazing stuff that’s only available to subscribers who are on our e-mail list and you can sign up just by going to successpodcast.com, putting your e-mail in right there on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, just text the word ‘smarter’ to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We covered memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert and went deep into the tactics of accelerated learning. We talked about the importance of mastering the fundamentals and got into tons of highly specific and actionable advice that you can use starting right now with our guest, Jim Quick. If you want to master your mind and your ability to learn, be sure to listen to that episode.

[0:02:42.0] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Todd Davis. Todd is the Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at FranklinCovey and the author of the new book, Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work. He’s responsible for FranklinCovey’s global talent development in over 40 offices in a 160 countries and previously served as director of innovation, developing many of the company’s core offerings. 

Todd, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:03:10.3] TD: Thanks, Matt. Pleased to be here.

[0:03:12.1] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on. I’d love to start out, when – there’s so much knowledge in the book. When you talk about the idea of effective relationships, what does that mean?

[0:03:25.6] TD: Well, I think it’s a widely held belief and a true on that culture matters. The culture of a team, of an organization, of a company can make all the difference. It’s how we define culture. We say all the time that people are our greatest assets. That’s true. It’s actually the nature of the relationships between those people that I’ve seen become an organization or a team or a company’s ultimate competitive advantage, if you will.

It’s important to have the right people on the bus, as Jim Colin says. Then it takes it to a whole different level when you focus on and have really effective relationships between that talent.

[0:04:09.1] MB: I think that’s a great point. It really underscores, it’s not just about finding and sourcing great people, but the way that they work together is really essential to achieving any kind of results.

[0:04:20.4] TD: Exactly. The speed with which you can work, and the trust levels are high when the interactions, when there is no hidden agenda, all of those things play into really the bottom line of the company or organization when you can have effective relationships.

In my role, in my career really for the last 30 years, I’ve observed and coached leaders at all levels in organizations. From the literally hundreds of principles and tools and paradigms contained in FranklinCovey’s world-class solutions, I’ve seen because of the role I’m in, I’ve seen time and time again those specific behaviors or practices that really accelerate relationships. Therefore, people’s influenced, or you’ll trip them up, including myself. A lot of these came from my own mistakes and trial and error. That’s what I’ve honed down into this book you mentioned 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work.

[0:05:22.4] MB: I want to dig into a number of the practices, but before we start, I want to zoom out and talk more about this notion that you talk about the idea that you get most of your results with and through other people.

[0:05:39.4] TD: Right. In fact, I was just doing a keynote in Florida yesterday talking about a play that some people have heard of, is written by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called No Exit. The play begins with these three people in the afterlife. They find themselves, these three souls I guess we’ll call them, find themselves in this room with no door and where the windows are completely bricked up, thus the title No Exit.

Does it surprise us to learn that the structure really irritate each other. Because they irritate each other, they try to change or fix each other and that doesn’t go so well and it only serves to escalate their frustration.

While it’s only a play, think about it, how often do we find ourselves with other people who irritate or who annoy us? We try and change, or fix them in some sentimental way. Well in the play, these three characters start to realize that hell isn’t fire and brimstone, or the torture chamber they had imagined. But in fact, hell is other people, and people who won’t do what we want them to do.

Why is this important into your question? Well, while we’re all measured in a lot of different ways and we have different responsibilities, and so lots of different ways to measure us, the ultimate measure for every one of us regardless of your role, your job, is by the results we get.

How do you get your results? Unless you are a pro golfer, or maybe you run a company where you’re the only employee, the rest of us, you and I, all of us, we get our results with and through other people.

Relationships are critical to all the very important goals that we need to achieve. That’s the point is that we get our results not by ourselves, but within through others. It behooves us to really focus on how to make those relationships more effective.

[0:07:30.2] MB: Such a critical thing to understand. Unless you’re essentially a chess player, or pro poker player maybe, something where you’re solely competing just on individual ability, the vast majority of everything that you do in life, really one of the core competencies necessary to do that is to deeply understand and be able to interact with an influence to other people.

In many ways, that’s what we focus on in the show and why the show really – our podcast even began initially was the fascination of mine of like, how can I build a really robust toolkit for influencing and interacting with others?

[0:08:11.5] TD: Such great point. Every day and my role as chief people officer, I’m working with people. I just had an experience this morning incidentally with an e-mail that was sent to me by an irate account executive that works for us. This person is furious with this other person. Not that we shouldn’t be upset, not that we shouldn’t voice our concerns and try to help each other improve, but if we could just embrace the principle that you just shared, we get things done through others.

If we can embrace that and work with that and not fight against it, and not have this – it’s not intentional, but think, “Oh, I’m on my own in this. I got to drive this whole thing. I am the super starter, whatever.” But no, we embrace the fact that we all work together. Those people that do that are much happier, much healthier and most importantly are more effective, not just in their professional live, but in their entire life and their personal lives as well.

[0:09:06.2] MB: What is that conclusion that we get our results within through others. How does that impact our behavior?

[0:09:14.9] TD: Well, it’s a mindset really. It all starts out with a mindset. Of the 15 practices, you could – if you pick up the book, you can go to any one of the practices that resonate with you and hopefully be all will, except for start with practice one. Because practice one, which I call wear glasses that work, is all about the way we see the world. What we see determines everything we do.

Of course, we all know what we do gives us the results we get. But it all starts with the glasses that we’re wearing. In fact, I remember as a young child receiving my first actual pair of glasses, real glasses, I was in the 2nd grade. This might sound silly, but I put those on and for the first time, I could see the leaves, the detail of the leaves upon the trees.

I thought honestly before that situation with the real glasses, I thought that that green blurry mass is what you and everybody else saw when they looked up on the trees. That’s the challenge is that we see things and believe that the way we’re seeing them is accurate. Sometimes it is. I’m not saying straw out all of your strongly held opinions, but consider stepping back and understanding that there might be a different way to do things.

It starts with relationships, realizing that we’re part of a much bigger piece of the picture here. When we can have that mindset and that paradigm, if you will, then we’re in a position to look at everything that we do differently, our behaviors. In fact, this person I was just referring to this morning with this e-mail, stepping back – I’m not saying don’t be frustrated and saying, “Hmm. I  wonder why this person gets frustrated. But I wonder why her response was that way. I wonder why she’s choosing to do things this way.”

Well, we can start to ask ourselves those questions working in what we call our circle of influence would become much more effective and get to a solution much quicker than those people who just want to stew and rant and rave.

[0:11:09.2] MB: How do we start to put ourselves in other’s shoes, or see the world from other people’s perspectives?

[0:11:17.5] TD: Yeah, great question. I was doing an interview a week or so ago and I was asked the question. This person said, “If people were waiting to talk to you –” it’s not like I have a doctor’s office or anything, and nor am I a psychiatrist. But they said, “If people were waiting to talk to you and you had a sign out in your waiting area, what would that sign read?” That really got me thinking.

I came to the conclusion that the sign I would put there would read, “Have you considered the other person’s perspective? Have you considered the other person’s perspective?” So that’s the — [inaudible 0:11:49.5], but that’s the point is that taking time to consider a different way to look at things. So the practical application of that, when I coach people and I’ve used this for myself many times, coach people to do is look at a situation or a relationship that’s not going as well as you like to, a circumstance or a person.

Let’s say I’m really odd with this person. I’m frustrated for how many reasons. I have them go ahead and list the reasons. Write it down. You don’t need to be with somebody to do this, but write down all of the reasons that make this situation frustrating, or this person frustrated to you.

Then what I ask them to do is go through that list of reasons, those words or descriptors, encircle those that are facts. They say, “Well, how do I know if they’re facts?” Well, for my activity here I say if they’re facts, you could share this with five other people, know the situation, know the people and they would agree with you that those things you circled are facts.

Now we’d have to back up a little bit. “Okay, well maybe I circled 10 of them. But maybe seven of them would fall into that.” Okay, great. Even if nine out of 10 fall into that, look at the one, or those that aren’t circled. Those are your opinions. Now they’re strongly held opinions and they may be accurate, but nevertheless, they’re opinions.

Take the time now to consider, “What if I were to look at this opinion in a different way?” It sounds really basic and elementary. I tell you, it’s magic when you do this. You all of a sudden realize, “Boy, I’ve been saying all along and believing that Marietta is really lazy.” I made that name up. Marietta is really lazy.

We’re never going to give her anything that we got to have that on timer, because she’s really lazy. If I go to the activity I just shared with you and I think, “Well, I don’t know that everybody else would agree with that.” Then I start to ask myself, “Why am I so convinced Marietta is lazy? Maybe she’s not lazy. I think there’s something else going on that I haven’t taken time to consider. Maybe she’s not engaged in this project for a different – or maybe there is –

You see all the considerations that I can start to give that now. Again, sounds really elementary. It works wonders to help us start to see maybe a different set of lenses we might want to put on regarding a person or a situation.

[0:14:00.6] MB: I think that exercise really underscores the importance more broadly of self-reflection in this whole process and the idea of taking responsibility for your own results and outcomes. Putting the burden on yourself to be the person who pushes yourself, who takes that banner and tries to create the change you want to see.

[0:14:25.5] TD: Yeah. You’re exactly right, Matt. In fact, practice number nine – By the way, in the book each of the chapters and practices, they end with an application, a practical application like the one I just shared with you. But practice number nine to your point is called examine your real motives.

You just hit on it. It’s stepping back, only you know what your real motives are. No one can tell you what they are. You are the only one that knows what your real motives are. If I’m in a meeting and I feel like I need to talk or share an opinion is because I believe that that thought that I want to share is really going to contribute to the subject, or the problem we’re addressing.

Or am I feeling a need to talk, because everybody else is talking. Gosh, I want my boss to know that I’m a smart person too, because I’m trying to get up with something intelligent to say. That’s again a reflection point of saying, “What is my real motive here?”

Well, to the earlier point with lazy Marietta, and if your name is Marietta and you’re listening, I’m not talking about you. What is my real motive? Examine your real motive. Is my motive to help if I’m a leader, to help grow and develop people, including Marietta has on my team? Or is my motive to be the superstar that brings this on time. I don’t care what I think of others, if my motive to maybe label people, because like wasn’t doing that intentionally, I realize that’s making me feel better about myself.” All of those things are absolutely what you say just a reflection, stepping back and deciding what are my real motives here?

[0:16:00.2] MB: I think that’s critical. One of the things that we talk about on the show and I think probably one of the core lessons that really if you listen to a lot of episodes will show itself again and again is this idea that self-awareness is really one of the cornerstones of improvement and achieving the results that you want to achieve.

To me, a lot of times when especially someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience examining their own motives and ideas, I think they can easily fall into the trap of self-deception. How do you avoid that pitfall when you’re trying to understand what your motives are?

[0:16:38.1] TD: Well, the application for that on examining your own motives is just that – so look at a high-stake situation and write out – I really caution people and coach people too to write these things out. At least type them out and I find it to be more effective to write it out. It’s the change, or the magic really happens when you actually write the words out, not just think about them.

Write out a high-stake situation and then write out the outcome that you want. Then ask yourself why you want that outcome. When I say at least five times, you may have heard of the five Whys that came to light in the Toyota production era, where they were trying to get the root cause on the assembly of a different problem back in the 80s.

It’s called the five whys. There’s no magic about the number five, but it might be three, it might be 10. But you keep drilling down into and why am I feeling that? Why is that? You get down to a root cause. Once you know your real motives then you can say, “Which motives serve only me and which motives serve the whole? Me and others. What happens if I act on just self-serving motives?”

We had a situation several years ago where we were going through a restructure and we met as a leadership team. One of the leaders over a particular part of the business is going to be impacted and several of his people were going to be displaced.

We all agreed this was the right thing to do, this restructure. I talked, and we’ll call him Steven. I said, “Okay. So Steve, so you’re going to get with your, say 10 people and talk about what’s going on.” He said, “Yup.” He had eight weeks about go for this change when it happened.” About two weeks later, I called him and say, “Hey Steve. How’s it going?” He’s, “You know, Todd. I want to revisit this.” I said, “Well, what are the people saying?” “Well, I haven’t talked to them yet.”

I was shocked. I said, “Steve. We’ve eaten into two of the eight weeks for these people to be able to network and start looking for other activities. Help me understand why.” He said, “Well, I’m not sure if I agree with it.” “Well, you agreed with it two weeks ago.” Anyway, long story short, we started drilling down and I said, “Well, Steve why do you discreet?” “Well, I don’t discreet it, but these are hard conversations.” “Why are they hard conversations, Steve?” “Well, because it’s going to disrupt people’s lives.”

What do you and it sounds obvious, what are you concerned about disrupting people’s lives? Well, we drilled down to Steve saying, “It’s the right decision. I’ve always had a difficult time with hard conversations. I’ve always avoided them.” At that point it’s, “Steve, would you like me to join you in these calls? I’d be happy to do that.” He just breathed a sigh of relief. That’s a quick example of try to help someone or we can use the same process just helping ourselves. Get to what is the real thing that’s driving why I’m feeling a certain way, or why I’m acting a certain way. You got to be honest with yourself and drill down in what I call, in what we call the five whys.

[0:19:30.9] MB: I think that’s awesome. I’m a huge proponent of just continually asking why, peeling back the layers until you really get to that core understanding. Because in almost every case, the initial reason that maybe you’re telling yourself you’re doing something, or you think you’re doing something is almost always underpinned by a number of deeper and deeper layers of things and what’s really going on.

[0:19:54.4] TD: Exactly.

[0:19:55.1] MB: I want to circle back and talk a little bit more about this idea of taking responsibility for your own results in the world, and the sense that – I think you’ve talked about this and write about this in the book, but the idea that it’s not just enough to hope that other people embrace these philosophies, but you have to be the one to say, “I’m going to make these changes in the way I interact with people and be the first person to take that step forward.”

[0:20:27.1] TD: Yeah. Back to the play that I begin the book with, and these folks that are so busy in this – in hell, so to speak, this room that’s all bricked up. They’re so busy trying to change each other, and that only is making things worse.

One other important element in this play, for those of you who have seen it, there are no mirrors in this room. The others doors are bricked up, or the windows are bricked up, no doors, and  there are no mirrors. The point that’s being made is you don’t take the time to look at in the mirror and start with ourselves.

Honestly, the most effective and successful and how you define success and influential people in the world start with themselves. Gandhi said it best, “Be the change we seek in others.” It doesn’t meant that others don’t need coaching. It doesn’t mean that others don’t need to be put on a performance plan, or need help in certain areas, but we start with ourselves. We start modeling that very behavior that we’re looking for in others.

I’ve seen it in my many years of life. It happens every time if I could start to model, or make sure I’m modeling the behavior that I want in others. It makes the difficulty of the dive much easier. That’s the premise there in starting with ourselves.

I talk in the book about what we’ve used a lot for a long time at FranklinCovey, being within your circle of influence versus your circle of concern. You picture these two circles, the influence circle is inside the circle of concern. The circle of concern is much broader, because as human beings we’re concerned about a lot of things.

What can we actually do something about? Where do we have influence? Now we often have more influence than we think, but – sometimes we throw on the talent, “Why can’t we just change that?” That’s not good. On the other hand, most of us, many of us spend our time, our efforts, our energy, our resources on things that we can’t influence or control.

Those people who start with themselves, even again referring back to this e-mail I saw and swearing from this irate account executive. I’ll be talking to him later today and we’ll have a great pleasant conversation about what can you influence? I understand the frustration. I can appreciate why you’d be frustrated. Let’s think about what she, the person who is upset with, what might be her reasoning for that. Let’s start to analyze that. What are some things you could influence?

I can appreciate you’re mad. What could you actually influence here and what would be the best way to influence that? Instead of going over and yelling at her or sending her an e-mail, what if the conversation started with, and I’ll call her Sarah. “Sarah, could you help me understand something?” That’s a great way to begin any conversation when you’re odd with someone.

Instead of saying, “I want you to know I’m really upset. Or I want you to know I see this really differently and I’m bugged, or whatever.” One of the best phrases to use is, “I wonder if you can help me understand why we’re seeing this so differently or why you’re choosing [inaudible 0:23:24.7]. I’m sure there are pieces of information I’m missing.” This is language that I use naturally and I coach others to use all the time.

I’m sure, and this is practice 15. I’m jumping around here, but practice 15 just start with humility. Boy, you got to have a big dose of humility if you’re really going to step back and try to understand the situation. I begin conversations like this with, “I wonder if you can help me understand why you chose to handle this situation this certain way. I’m sure I’m missing something here. We worked together a long time. You’re a really talented person. I’ve heard a lot from you, so I’m not – this isn’t making sense. I’m wondering if you could help me understand that.” Boy, you just lowered everybody’s defense mechanism and you can now start to get to a root cause.

[0:24:07.2] MB: What a fantastic question. It’s funny, I was dealing with a situation yesterday that I think that would’ve been the perfect question to just create a really open dialogue about what is the issue, why is this not happening and can we all collectively without people getting defensive, etc., get down to the root cause of the issue. I think it’s a fantastic and really simple tool that immediately takes down the defensive barriers and opens up just a much more meaningful dialogue.

[0:24:38.2]TD: Thank you. I’d love to tell you it’s because I was just born a genius, but it’s really, you know, you’re excellent at it to doing podcast and everything else you do. I just have years of repetition in this. Again, I want to make sure that the listeners don’t think, “Oh, this guy thinks he’s so smart.” I don’t, other than this has been my world for the last 20, 30 years of helping shape conversations so that we can actually move things forward. I’ve just learned from trial and error and lots of experience. It’s my one claim to expertise, if you will.

[0:25:16.7] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities. That’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography.

The cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don’t have to pay per class. They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to Mind Mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw.

If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills if you’re into cooking and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single science of success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That’s pretty awesome.

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month.

[0:26:21.5] MB: I want to dig into another practice that I find really interesting is talking about and focusing on the truth and making it safe to tell the truth. Can you tell me a little bit about that practice?

[0:26:32.4] TD: Yeah. Practice 13 is make it safe to tell the truth. The whole premise of the book is getting better, for us to get better. Somebody asked you today, is this a book I buy for people that I have got challenges? Well, you could do that. But again, only if you’ll look in the mirror first.

The whole premise is for us to – where can I get better? Where can I improve? How we do that if we don’t know in which areas we do need to improve. Practice 13, make it safe to tell the truth. The meaning behind this is make it easy for other to tell you the truth. Matt in fact, let me ask you, when was the last time you received some feedback? More importantly, when was the last time you asked someone for feedback?

[0:27:14.5] MB: I mean, this is – I’m a huge fan of seeking the truth and always looking for the truth and trying constantly to get feedback. I’m constantly asking people for a candid feedback and trying to develop relationships with the people that I work with to really have very clear lines of communication.

I was just going to say, it’s something for me that I’m really obsessed with, because I think that feedback can only help you. I don’t get defensive about negative feedback. All I want is all the information that I can gather, so that I can make the most effective decisions and choices possible.

[0:27:51.0] TD: I need to take you out on the road with me on all of these keynote speeches I’m giving, because you are the poster child for someone who sounds like makes it safe to tell the truth. That is not the norm, and it’s great. I really admire and respect you why you do so well in what you do.

We tend in general to be hesitant to ask for feedback, and it’s because we’re vulnerable. We don’t want to hear what we’re not doing so well. In general, we’re vulnerable. We don’t like to give ourselves feedback. I stood on the bathroom scale this morning. That was some feedback that I didn’t want to give myself. Raises it more when we seek it from others.

I will have people share with me all the time, my leader neighbor tells me, “Give me any feedback.” Well, that’s a challenge. Proactive effective people don’t wait for someone to give them feedback. They do what you’re doing. They actively go out and seek it and their intent, their real motive is to get better.

What I found is that there are four – probably many more, but four common reasons why we don’t seek feedback more often and why we don’t make it safe to sell the truth; to tell the truth. The first is we assume bad intent when we should be doing just the opposite. You don’t assume bad intent if we’re at lunch and I say, “Hey, Matt. You got a spinach in your teeth.” You’re not thinking, “Why are you trying to be so critical of me?” That’s just feedback, because I care about you and don’t want you to be embarrassed with spinach in your teeth.

Yet, if I say to you, “Hey, I noticed that in meetings, you tend to dominate discussions and doesn’t give people a chance to share.” Well then, we start to feel defensive on this subjective feedback. Don’t assume bad intent. Assume good intent. 99% of the time, people just want to help. That’s one of the first things I see.

The second thing is what you’ve already talked about; ask for feedback. You need to ask for feedback, not wait for it. That sounds like an obvious, but it’s the way we ask for feedback. For example, if I’m giving a presentation and I noticed my friend Matt in the audience and I walk up to you right after the presentation, a thousand people are there and they say, “Hey, Matt. Good to see you. What did you think of my presentation?” What are you most likely going to say?

[0:30:04.3] MB: It was great.

[0:30:06.4] TD: Yeah. You better. Okay. That’s what most of us would do. But think about this, what if I – the day before the presentation I call my friend Matt and I say, “Hey, Matt. I know that you’re going to be in this presentation tomorrow. Could I ask you a favor? Would you mind taking down some notes of what you see that I could do better?”

I mean, sure I’d love to hear what you liked about it. But I’m really drilling down on where I could even improve better my presentation and delivery style. Would you mind doing that, and then maybe we could together later in the week and you would mind sharing those things with me.

Both scenarios I’m asking for feedback, but very different intent. You can see that one, I’m just seeking validation, what is so good about it. The other one, sounds  like you do on a regular basis, I’m truly interested in getting better.

A third area or step that I find is critical is evaluating the feedback. One reason I found that people don’t ask for feedback is they think they have to implement all of it. That’s not true. Only you are the one that decides what you will and will implement.

Evaluating a feedback. Certainly listen respectfully. My gosh, you ask the person for the feedback, write it all down. Then you evaluate the side what resonates with you and the role that you’re in and what you’re trying to accomplish. Then the fourth step is just to act on it. Acting on it doesn’t mean implementing  it, acting on it means you digest it, you consider it, you thank the person, you follow-up with them. It’s really the key in making it safe for them to continue to be telling you the truth by the way you follow-up.

I like to remind people it’s important to remember that as nervous as we might be, some of us in asking for feedback, they’re just as nervous in giving the feedback. Take that into consideration, if you’re truly interested in getting better and you want to have a huge group of people, like it sounds like you do, Matt; that will willingly give you honest, sincere feedback in an effort to help you get better at what you do.

[0:31:58.2] MB: I think that’s so critical. You touched on a really key point, which is this idea of knowing the source of the feedback and evaluating it, because I think it is important to understand that I think all feedback is relevant information, but it’s not necessarily true in all cases. Or maybe the source giving you the feedback isn’t qualified to be giving you certain types of feedback or information.

I think it’s really important to also understand truly what are the intentions of the person giving you feedback, what are their qualifications and their credibility to be able to give you meaningful input on whatever particular thing you’re sort of looking for feedback on.

[0:32:37.8] TD: That’s a really good point. Certainly, when people volunteer feedback, that’s really critical. It’s also critical when you ask people for feedback, but you need to be really careful here too. If you ask someone for feedback, you want to evaluate who you’re asking for this feedback. Do they know anything about creating podcast? Do they know anything about giving keynotes? You want to choose carefully.

Stephen M.R. Covey, he is the son of the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey of course is the bestselling author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His son, he wanted to certainly emulate and follow in his father’s footsteps, in his character and in his business sense and all that, but not in his public speaking.

Stephen M.R. Covey, the son, had no interest in that. He wasn’t very good at it. Well, many years ago, he came out with his own bestselling book, The Speed of Trust. He therefore found himself having to do keynotes. Sometimes alongside his world-renowned father.

He said by his own emission, he wasn’t good at it. He called in a couple of his trusted colleagues and asked them to go to his next speech and give him feedback. Well, he tells me the story. They gave him, it was like 42 pieces of feedback. 42 things he needed to do differently. His next keynote was like three days later.

Well, he tried to implement them all and he said it was a disaster. He said it was the worst speech of his life. He stepped back, and just to your point, he carefully evaluated what of those 42 things really resonated with what he was doing and trying to accomplish and what didn’t? While he heard it all and appreciated it all, he picked three or four things and really honed in, worked on those and picked a few more things, never attempting to do all 42 things.

He has become one of the really most sought-after speakers in the world particularly on this topic of trust. That is the importance as you mentioned, of really evaluating and analyzing the feedback that you’re given.

[0:34:22.2] MB: Yeah. I mean again, I think that one of the things – I do want to say, by no means am I a perfect receiver of feedback in all cases, and we all have our own cognitive biases and  blind spots and everything else. But I think the quest to find and gather information that can help you improve, and the flipping the switch from trying to hide your mistakes and weaknesses to bringing them into the light and understanding that information about them is going to help you get better, or gap fill, or be able to overcome and improve on those weaknesses is a fundamental shift that I think really makes a huge difference between who gets stuck in the patters of self-sabotage and people who actually go out and achieve tremendous results.

[0:35:08.6] TD: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

[0:35:11.3] MB: I’m curious – I mean, what are the other practices – that jumped out of me that I thought was really interesting was this idea of behaving your way to credibility. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means and how we can create credibility for ourselves?

[0:35:26.9] TD: You bet. In fact, all I ask you is think of someone in your life who just they jump to the top of the list when you think of someone who is really credible. Without sharing with me who – their name. It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t know it anyway. But what are the reasons? Give me this three or four reasons why you’re thinking of someone right now who is really credible in your life.

[0:35:45.6] MB: They do what they say, they achieve a lot of results, they get stuff done, they don’t make a lot of excuses.

[0:35:54.7] TD: Yeah. Great reasons. Great reasons. Credibility, those are absolutely reasons that someone is credible. These reasons and more fall into two buckets, and you got to have both to be credible. It’s character and it’s competence. They do what they say they’re going to do, character; they get great results as you said, competence.

Plenty of one, or an overabundance of one does not make up for a lack of the other. You’ve got to have both for it. An example I like to use is we might be best friends and I remember your birthday every year and I know your – all of your favorite places to eat and you let me watch your dog when you’re out of town, but yet when I offered to pack your parachute for your first skydiving lesson, you might at least want to know how much parachute packing experience I have, would just done by the way Matt.

On the other hand, it would be interesting for you to learn the person who did pack your parachute had recently been acquitted of a manslaughter charge, because of a technicality. They might have all the parachute packing certifications in the world, but if something’s off about their character, it gives you cause for pause.

It’s a combination of character and of competence. Like I say, one doesn’t make up for the other. You got to have the character, the integrity and then the skillset. Then something that I really emphasize in this particular practice and chapter, because I’ve seen it time and time again, in fact I saw it with myself. I learned this lesson the hard way is you take the long view.

So often, I see people who want credibility overnight, or they want the credibility because, “I know I can do it, so gosh, you should know I can do it. You should just know that. You should trust me.” While there is another practice called extend trust, we don’t extend trust naively. Taking a long view means being comfortable with the fact that establishing or increasing our credibility with someone takes time, and it’s through a track record of both character and competence showing up time and time again. That’s the essence of behaving your way to credibility versus trying to talk yourself into or out of the situation you behave your way into.

[0:38:07.8] MB: I really like the tandem approach of you have to have both character and competence. I think that really clearly encapsulates what creates credibility as a great insight.

[0:38:20.7] TD: Thank you. For the practical application on this, which I like to use a lot with people is – in fact, I’m just working with someone last week on this and they’re – hadn’t lost credibility, but they really need you to increase their credibility in the role they’re in with some key stakeholders.

What I coach them to do, and this is in the book as well is look, identify at least three character qualities and competency qualities in this particular role that you believe are important to that person with whom you’re trying to increase credibility. Then write those down, then rate yourself on 1 to 10, 10 being high, how you would rate yourself in each of those.

Now take that list to the person with whom you’re trying to increase your credibility and just be openly transparent with them and say, “Hey, I know you like me and you trust me, but I really want to increase my credibility with you in this particular area or this particular project, whatever it is.”

Here are the things I have identified that I believe would be important to you. I may have missed some. Would you do me a favor? Would you look at these enemy that I’ve missed, looked how I’ve rated myself and would you please go ahead and rate me? Again, I’m trying to get better, so I don’t – don’t need to rank me 10 in all of them, especially if you don’t believe that.

On anything that she or he rate you lower than a nine, now you know where to start and you can say to the person, “Okay, I saw that you gave me a nine in timeliness, Debbie. Can you tell me what would you need to see – Do you mean, am I late to work? Tell me what you see there.” It opens up the dialogue. You actually have a roadmap now on where you need to focus to get better and increase your credibility in this case.

[0:39:52.9] MB: I like to dig into the other side of the coin now and talk a little bit about what do you see the biggest mistakes or pitfalls you see people making when they try to influence others, or even when they try to implement some of the practices that you’ve written about.

[0:40:08.7] TD: Well, the biggest and most obvious and this won’t be – shouldn’t be new news to anyone, it’s when I’m trying to influence you to do something differently than I am doing. In other words, I’m not walking my talk. Pretty tough to – it’s the do as I say and not as I do problem.

I’ve got to be modeling, and not perfect. Nobody is perfect in any of these every, but I’ve got to be seriously attempting to model the various things that I’m trying to influence you. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is to make sure the person understands your intent. I’ll tell you because of the role I’m in, I began a lot of conversations when there is a performance issue, or when there is a worry about someone, I begin a lot of conversations with, “I want you to know my only intent is to help resolve this situation, or to help you be successful in your role.”

I begin any performance conversation, we have a formal performance process here, if we get to that point, we’re still and really struggling in your particular role; good people. Always good people, but maybe a mismatch for the role, or maybe just haven’t had direct feedback that they need to have.

I will begin the conversation with, and it’s very sincere from the heart, “You know, Matt. I want you to know that my only intent in this conversation we’re having with you and your leader is to help you improve and be wildly successful in your role.” Now if you can say that it comes from the heart, boy does that start the conversation in the right place.

I think making sure that the other person understands your intent is to just help them, not to be critical, not to try and show them the door, not to make yourself look smarter than they are, but just to help. You just want to help.

[0:41:56.2] MB: This is something I think that I’ve dealt with personally in some instances. If someone’s in a defensive or emotional state, how can we try to effectively communicate our intent to them in a way that takes down those defensive barriers?

[0:42:13.4] TD: Well, I think when emotions are high, I don’t think I know, when emotions are high, that’s not the moment to start addressing the problem. The late Dr. Covey used to say, and I just love this because I’m reminded of it every day; with people, fast is slow and slow is fast.

When emotions are high, the first step is to take time to understand them. Practice 10 is talk less, listen more. That’s particularly relevant when emotions are high. Like this person I’ve been referring to, this accounting executive that’s upset. I’m going to spend probably the first 15 minutes of our conversations saying nothing other than, “Hey, help me understand the situation.”

We as human beings, we need what I like to call psychological error. We just need to feel understood. If we can feel understood, then we can get to a place where we can start to resolve a problem or address a situation. But we jump past that first part Matt, because we’re fixers. We want to help. We’re busy. We want to just get to the solution.

In the end, it ends up taking a ton more time when we jump to the solution, versus taking whatever time is necessary upfront to really just understand. Years ago, one of my teenage daughters was wanting to move out of our house. We’re good parents, so she had no reason to do that. I was concerned about her moving out. She’s just out of high school, but who she was moving in within the situation.

We would discuss it. Not really argue at that point. Then I was on a international business trip for 10 days, and I came home to find out she had moved out. Well, mom was gone. I was pretty upset. She come over for Sunday dinner with the rest of the family. We’d have dinner and then we’d start a discussion and we’d go back five minutes and then the argument starts, that why did she do this and can’t believe it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We just argued. End in tears. Week after week this is what happened. I’m embarrassed to tell you, I worked here at FranklinCovey at that time. I’m out teaching this stuff and pretending that time to live this stuff, I guess I have to say. Well, I still remember the Sunday afternoon when we were falling into the same pattern. After dinner, I just thought, “Todd, you got to do something different here. This is not working.”

Well, I admit it comes natural to me now, it didn’t at the time. It was forced. I remember it, my daughter her name is Sydney, we went out on the backswing. She said, “Okay, let’s have it.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Why I made this big mistake.” I said, “You know what, Sydney. You make your own decisions. I just love you and you seem really stressed.” “Well, I’m not stressed.” I said, “Okay, well that’s okay.”

Then we sat there and talked. She talked. I just bit my tongue. She started to share with me one of her roommates was irritating her. All I said was – Well, I wanted to say, “Well, I told you this would happen.” All I said was, “Boy, that must be really frustrating.”

It was like a light switch went on. Then she started to share more, and I had to keep biting my tongue and just say, “Wow, I bet that’s hard. Or I be that’s difficult.” This volume of information opened up. Believe it or not, it’s like out of a movie. At the end of her time sharing she said, “I don’t know what to do, dad.”

Well, those had been the words I’ve been longing to hear for I don’t know how long. But even then, I bit my tongue, and instead of jumping in and saying, “Well, here is what you do. You move out of that situation.” I said, “You know what, Sydney you’re a smart girl. I know you’re going to figure it out.” Then she started pushing, “How do you think I should do this?”

Again, sorry for the personal example. But boy, I’ve just seen it time and time again in my life, it will take the time to let someone share and really just try to understand and not agree, or disagree, not to suggest or fix, just to share. Then we open up a pathway to start resolving the situation.

[0:46:06.0] MB: It’s a really powerful example and thank you for sharing it. I think it really grounds a lot of these lessons for the listeners. You know, it’s funny. I sometimes call it the Socratic method of influencing people, which is one of the things I’ll do if I can’t – if I’m trying to influence someone subtly is just keep asking them questions, “Well, tell me why you’re doing it this way, and tell me why that’s the case, and tell me –” Eventually, you can – you start to pull out all the reasoning and the logic and all the thought process behind it.

Many will see for themselves, “Oh, maybe that doesn’t really make a lot of sense the way that I’m doing it.” If they have the realization themselves, it’s infinitely more powerful than you trying to force it into their heads.

[0:46:48.5] TD: Someone said to me, and I wrote about this in the book. Someone said to me – they’re leaving my office once, they said, “Man, you just know – you come up with the answers for everything.” I just laughed. I said to this person, “I didn’t come up with anything. You came up with the answer. It’s just what you said. If you ask the right questions and not in a manipulative way, not because you’re trying to stir them, you’re just trying to help them, what you just said, uncover what the real issues are.

90% of the time, they’ll solve or at least get on the pathway to start solving the situation, or solving the problem. If they feel hurt, if they feel understood, if they feel like there was someone who really just wants to understand and not fix or change them.

[0:47:29.4] MB: I’m curious, what’s the most effective relationship that you’ve ever had and why?

[0:47:34.3] TD: Wow. I have not been asked that question before. If my wife listened, I better say with her. Yeah, the most effective relationship is a good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for 21 years now. Why is it most effective? It’s most effective, because through our friendship, we’ve really – we have very different personalities and that we’ve taken the time to understand each other.

Communication is very quick, because we know what each other is thinking. I want to be careful here to say, well does that just happen? I think so. I think it’s been developed over time, because of what we just finished talking about. Taking the time to really understand someone, what drives them, what motivates them, what are their hopes, what are their fears, what are their aspirations in life.

I think when we take time, I don’t want to make this to a referring, but in the end really, we’re all about relationships, I think, or we should be. I don’t know that much else matters when all set and done. I mean, yup results matter and work matters and all of those things. But in the end – in fact, someone asked me today what was one final thought I could give?

I was reminded of a bumper sticker I saw – quite a while ago I was following a motor home towing a boat, and I think I’m exaggerating this but I swear they have some ATVs up on top, all these toys piled on all these trailers, or all these trailer. The bumper sticker, and it’s a popular one, people have seen it. It said, he and I’ll political correct here and say, or she, but he or she who dies with the most toys wins.

Well, I would love to have every one of those toys that I was following. I honestly Matt, thought to myself, for me anyway, he or she who dies with the most meaningful relationships wins. That’s just my philosophy and it’s what makes me happy and it’s what makes me effective in my various roles that I play.

[0:49:35.9] MB: I think that’s a really important lesson. I mean, if you look at and study people who are in the last moments of their lives or talking about their regrets, etc., it seems like relationships are really recurrent again and again and again, kind of come back to end of life, people think that the most important things in their lives were there relationships.

[0:49:57.0] TD: I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t feel that way.

[0:50:00.2] MB: That’s a pretty deep note, but I want to transition on a much more surface-level question, which is something we ask as we’re wrapping up many of our interviews. What’s one piece of actionable advice or homework you would give to the listeners as a starting point for implementing some of the practices we’ve talked about today?

[0:50:19.9] TD: Well, practice 15, the last practice in the book is ironically titled Start with Humility. I had an idea many years ago of writing a book on leadership about humility, because I had worked with or for so many great leaders, and some that weren’t so great. But the common thread among the great ones were many things that went in to their great leadership, but it was this foundation of humility.

I was putting together some material for this, just the beginnings of it. One day it came to me. I thought, “I know what the title is. The title is going to be Lead with Humility.” I Googled it to make sure there wasn’t a book already written on that. Well in fact, there was.

Not only was there a book titled Lead with Humility, but it was written by Pope Francis himself. It’s actually written by another author, but he uses Pope Francis as his example through all of the great leadership qualities, start with humility. I didn’t write that book. I decided not to go toe-to-toe with the pope.

It is the last chapter in the book, because we can look at all of these areas we think we need to improve, or we do need to improve. We can focus our energy and our efforts on all of these things. But if we’re lacking in humility – humility is not a weakness. Humility is a strength. It’s the greatest strength we can have. Humility is the thing that helps us forgive, it’s the thing that tells us no matter how successful we are, we didn’t do it on our own, it gives us the courage to be honest with co-workers, it reminds us to be patient with ourselves, to know that all of us are in this process of getting better.

That’s my parting thought on this is that we need to really ask ourselves, understand what our real intent is, what our real motives are and make sure that it’s based or grounded in humility that we don’t think of ourselves as all that and more, but that we’re all here to help each other continually be getting better.

[0:52:18.3] MB: Where can listeners can find you and the book and your work online?

[0:52:23.1] TD: If they will go to getbetterbook.com, that’s www.getbetterbook.com, they’ll have links to an information on everything that we’ve talked about and a lot more.

[0:52:34.6] MB: Well, Todd thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing not only some really impactful stories, but also some great and actionable advice. Really appreciate having you on here and you sharing all these wisdom.

[0:52:47.1] TD: Well, I appreciate being invited. It’s been great to get to know you better. Thank you so much.

[0:52:52.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday. This is articles, stories, links, things that we found interesting in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, you can vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to guests that we’re going to have on the show that we may ask on the podcast, vote on things like new intro music and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get free guides that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another sweet bonus guide to surprise, so you go to sign up to get it by joining our e-mail list today.

Again, you can just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222.

The greatest compliment you can give us is referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts, everything and much more, be sure to check out our show notes as well. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 
Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

How To Learn More In Record Time - Speed Reading, Concentration, & Memory with Jim Kwik

How to Learn More in Record Time: Speed Reading, Concentration, and Memory

November 16, 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen to the Episode

Why You Need to Hear This

Watch the Episode

The Science of Becoming a Super Learner

Show Notes, Links, and Additional Research

7 Brain Hacks

Reviews of Jim’s Work

Get Help

Episode Transcript

The Science of Becoming a Super Learner 

Do you ever read a page of a book, then stop and realize you don’t remember a single word you just read? Or maybe long sentences take you so long to read that you forget how it started before you even get to the end. Fortunately, we can greatly improve our reading and learning abilities with just a little bit of knowledge.

  A lot of people believe that our abilities, potential, intelligence, and memory are all set in stone. However, in the past 20 years, we’ve learned more about our brains than we ever have. The things we are taught in school are essentially a lie, but by rethinking and altering a few false, core beliefs, we can smooth the path towards mastery.

The good news is that we’re underestimating what we’re actually capable of. That means we can only get better. A few, simple brain hacks will improve our minds and capabilities for the rest of our lives.

From Head Injury to Brain Coach

“My goal is: I want to be a personal trainer—a brain coach if you will—to help people to tap into more of that potential so they could be more productive, have higher performance, and have greater peace of mind in a world where we’re driven to distraction.” – Jim Kwik

 Jim Kwik is a brain coach and the founder of Kwik Learning and SuperheroYou. He has worked with high-profile companies, like Nike, and individuals, like Oprah. His work helps improve people’s reading and learning speed, memory, and brain performance. However, he hasn’t always had a high-octane mind.

His abilities are actually preceded by an early-childhood head injury which made him slow to understand, ruined his focus, and left him with no memory. Though it took him three extra years to learn to read and he struggled through school, it didn’t stop him from becoming the super learner he is today.

When he was about 18, a heavy workload and lack of self-care led him to the hospital again. There, a fall down the stairs left him with another head injury—but this time, it woke him up. He started studying meta-learning (or learning how to learn).

 A deep dive into adult learning theory and multiple intelligence caused a light switch to flip on in him. This gave him a laser-focus, effortless retention, and improved reading abilities. By reading two or three books a week, his grades improved—with his grades, his life improved as well. He thought, “I can’t believe this is not taught back in school,” so he started tutoring.

 One of his first students read 30 books in 30 days. She did it because her mother was given 60-days to live. In the books she read, she was looking for answers to help her mother. Six months later, her mother was alive and getting better, which she attributed to the information her daughter shared from the books she read.         

Learning: Mankind’s Superpower

Jim believes: If knowledge is power, then learning is our superpower. He comments about how modern workers are paid less for brute strength and more for brain strength. In our knowledge economy, knowledge is profit; so the faster you learn the faster you earn.

He laments about how people suffer from digital overload and dementia. The amount of information available on our smart devices easily distract us and decreases our use of memory. Thus, the issue is: How do we churn through so much information, retain it, and apply it usefully? The answer and goal are at the heart of Jim’s work.

How to Learn Faster

“I think people first have to start with what’s important to them, meaning that motivation is really a key drive towards learning.” – J.K.

 Jim doesn’t simply focus on speed-reading, though he believes everyone can double or triple their reading skill with a few brain hacks. Due to his childhood struggle with reading, he spends a lot of time on smart reading, or how to comprehend and retain more information when reading.

He challenges the audience to read one book a week, then brings up that the average person only reads one or two books a year. A book written by an expert contains decades of experience, and that wealth of knowledge could be learned in just a few days.

Jim recalls when Warren Buffet shared with Bill Gates that he had probably wasted 10-years of his life by reading slowly. Between processing information and reading emails, blogs, websites, books, newspapers, and magazines, we stand to save a lot of time by improving our reading speed.

He breaks down some simple math. If you currently read four-hours a day but double your reading speed and save two-hours a day, then you would save 730-hours a year. Even if you only save one-hour a day, that’s 365-hours a year—or nine 40-hour workweeks.

When Jim was discussing the future of education with Bill Gates, he brought up meta-learning and Bill Gates brought up technology, but a third person asked, “Is there anything missing?” And Jim believes the key ingredient is motivation. Because many people know what they should do, but they still don’t do it.

H-Cubed: A Success Formula

“I would say when it comes to reading, which is one of the focuses here, if you want to boost your comprehension, first of all, have a purpose for why you read.” – J.K.

Jim talks about the Three Hs: Head, heart, and hands. You can visualize, affirm, set goals, and have a vision in your head, but if you aren’t acting with your hands, then nothing will change. So he usually looks at the “heart” of this formula, or your “why” for learning.

 “Where your focus goes, energy flows,” he says. As the symbol of emotions, Jim views the heart in this formula as a representation of the fuel for your car, because your emotions and purpose will compel you to do anything, such as speed reading.

 He sees many people wasting time studying something that isn’t relevant to them and not filtering it out appropriately; so first, you should be clear on your outcome. He says, “If you have the greatest interest and higher levels of motivation, then automatically, your retention and focus are going to be boosted and enhanced.”

He believes we grossly underestimate our own capabilities, and half of success is just mindset. Instead of a fixed mindset, we should adopt a growth mindset. If you say you can’t do something, then you need to tack on a simple, three-letter word at the end of the statement: “Yet.” Otherwise, you limit yourself and prevent any growth from ever happening.

GPA: Another Success Formula

“The average CEO reads about four or five books a month—about a book a week.” – J.K.

 Jim shares another formula for success: GPA (or Goal, Purpose, and Action). He parallels this with the previous formula: Goal is in the head, Purpose is in the heart, and Action is in the hands. To take this out of the abstract, he applies this to reading by setting a goal of reading a book a week.

He comments how the median word-count for books is 64,000 words. For the average reader reading at 200-words per minute, that’s 320-minutes to finish the book. Across seven-days, that’s about 45-minutes a day. Not only does this show you the power of reading every day, it also demonstrates the power of breaking down big goals into smaller, more attainable goals.

To compound the benefits of reading daily, he also comments on the power of winning the first hour or two of your day. Instead of playing on your phone, which distracts you and wires you to be distracted all day, you can build momentum by doing something productive that wires you to be reactive.

Mental Fitness

“There’s two things I do every day: I like to run, and I like to read.” – Will Smith

When he coached Will Smith, Jim noticed that he did two things daily: One physical, and the other mental. If you’re trying to improve your mental intelligence, then improving your mental fitness might even be more important. Like a personal trainer at the gym, Jim wants your mental muscles to be focused and have energy, agility, flexibility, and lots of power.   

Visual Pacers

“Using a visual pacer will boost your reading speed 25% to 50%.” – J.K.

Whether you are tying to improve your reading speed, focus, or comprehension, a visual pacer will help all three. It’s as simple as using your finger, a pen, or a computer mouse to underline the words as you read. This works because your senses of sight and touch are closely linked, just like smell and taste, so your eyes are attracted to motion (in this case, the motion of your finger or other pacer).

Jim suggests you test it for yourself. Just read anything for 60-seconds without your finger, then count the lines you read. When you’ve done that, reset the timer, and do it again, but underline the words this time. When you count the number of lines you read this time, it will be about 25-50% more. Also, when you ask someone to count the number of lines they just read, they’ll use their finger to count the lines! That’s because it improves your focus.

 However, it’s really about reading for maximum understanding and comprehension. Simply reading fast or slow and trying to retain every bit of information isn’t always the answer, it’s dependent on your desired outcome from reading. Most people don’t retain anything when they read slowly; that’s because their minds get distracted and tired. When you read fast, your mind focuses on the reading material more and boosts comprehension.

Sub-Vocalization

“If you have to say all the words to understand what you’re reading, you can only read as fast as you could talk—not as fast as you could think.” – J.K.

While visual pacers help you read faster, sub-vocalization makes you read slower. “We don’t have to say words in our mind to understand them,” Jim explains. Ninety-five percent of the words we read every day are called “sight words.” That means we don’t have to pronounce them to understand them, because we’ve seen them so often.

Rituals, Routines, and Habits

“Excellence really comes down to a set of rituals and routines and habits.” – J.K.

Have you ever noticed that Mark Zuckerberg always wears the same t-shirt? According to scientific research, that’s because we can only make a certain amount of good decisions a day before we develop “decision fatigue.” Jim found this out when he was doing research on surgeons, as the number of mistakes they make increases as their starting times begin later in the day. Why would you waste one of your good decisions on what you’re going to wear?

Jim believes discipline gives you freedom, contrary to the idea that it takes it away. If you’re doing the hard things, then life gets easy; but if you do the easy things, then life gets hard. He then brings up Dr. BJ Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University, and a specific model to undo bad habits: BEMAT (Behavior Equals Motivation, Ability, and Trigger).

If your desired behavior is to read every day, then you need a proper incentive (or motivation), the ability to read, and a trigger. The trigger is what many people ignore. The trigger is a reminder for your desired behavior. Jim explains that he does squats every time he’s on an elevator—the trigger is getting on an elevator, and the behavior is doing squats.

 To help start the habit of reading every day, just say to yourself, “I’ll pick up a book and read one word.” This is a tiny, easily manageable task. And since the book is already in your hand, you’re most likely going to read a few more words, then a paragraph, and finally a few pages. That one word is just the first domino that builds momentum for bigger, better habits.

The Pomodoro Technique

“Reasons reap rewards.” – J.K.

 After 30-45 minutes of an activity, such as reading, there are huge dips of focus due to primacy and recency. Primacy is a memory principle that says you tend to remember things from the beginning, such as the first few people you meet at a party. Recency says you tend to remember things from the end, such as the last few people you meet at a party. What happens in the middle though?

 While everyone knows there’s a learning curve, they don’t realize there’s also a forgetting curve. This curve also causes us to forget up to 80% of what we learn within two days. An answer to mitigating how much information you lose in the middle is the Pomodoro Technique. With it, you take a five-minute break every 30-45 minutes.

 By splitting up a 5-hour party or work session into 45-minute chunks, you have more beginnings and ends with fewer lost, middle chunks. Ideally, during your five-minute breaks, you’ll choose to do the things that are good for your brain, such as movement, deep breathing, and hydration.

The Power of Teaching

“We learn best by co-creating it with other people.” – J.K.

Jim shares another simple brain hack to boost your comprehension: Read something, then talk about it with someone else. “That’s why book clubs are so powerful, because learning is not always solo,” he adds. When you teach someone something, it’s no longer random information from a third-party, now you’re making it personal for yourself in an effort to make them understand.

He also suggests learning something with the intention of teaching it to someone else, because, “You get to learn it twice.” This will help you accelerate your learning since it makes you more active, ask more questions, and take better notes because you have a stake in it.

Reticular Activating System

Jim recalls a time when his sister kept sending him photos of pugs. He finally asked her why she kept sending him these dog pictures, and he realized her birthday was coming up and she wanted one. After that realization, he started seeing pugs everywhere he went. That’s because of our reticular activating system.

It turns out, if you have a question, then you start seeing answers everywhere because it acts like a magnet that pulls all the relevant information to you. It’s not that the people around Jim suddenly got pugs, it’s that they were always there; but he only just started noticing them. Once she made it important to him, he started seeing them everywhere.

Mind Maps and Taking and Making Notes

“Is it because they’re geniuses that they journal all the time or is it because they’re taking notes and journaling all the time that makes them a genius?” – J.K.

Jim explains the concept behind mind mapping, which is essentially a bubble map with a main idea in the middle, all the associated ideas branching out from it, and even more associated ideas branching out from those. It takes 20-pages worth of notes and puts it into one-page view, so you can see all the associations and relationships between the information.

Next, he explains the difference between taking and making notes—two useful tactics for learning. Taking notes is where you capture information, strategies, or ideas. This is a factual copy of what you’ve learned. Making notes is writing your own impressions of what you’re capturing, what questions you have, and how it relates to what you already know. This is a creative attempt of combining the new information with your preexisting knowledge.

Jim suggests taking a piece of paper, splitting it in two with a line down the middle, then putting “Taking Notes” on one side and “Making Notes” on the other. The thoughts you have when your mind wanders while listening to a podcast or any speaker are excellent for making notes.

Learn Faster with FAST

· Forget – Forget what you know (or think you know) and have an open mind, forget what is unimportant, and forget your limitations.

·  Active – Be active when you learn by asking questions and taking notes.

·  State – Change your state by adding emotion to your learning process, and you will learn faster.

·  Teach –Teach what you learn, so it will benefits others as well as yourself.

 Jim shares this acronym as another strategy to learn faster. He explains that multi-tasking is a completely debunked myth. When you switch between tasks, you get a dopamine reward each time for the novelty, which only tricks you into feeling like you’re being productive. In reality, it takes you 5-20 minutes just to regain your focus and flow.             

He also explains that all learning is state dependent. A state is a snapshot of the mood of your mind and body—your emotional state of how you feel. This is important because it’s key to quick recall. “Information combined with emotions becomes a long-term memory,” he says. He compares this to how a song or smell can take us back to a distant memory.

Lastly, he says we should be a thermostat, not a thermometer. While a thermometer simply reacts or reflects the environment, a thermostat sets a standard or goal and the environment raises to meet that standard. The standard you set is how you feel about things, and that change in how you feel will help you learn faster.

Action Steps

“Every 30-days, take on a new challenge—because when we’re green, we’re growing; and when we’re brown, we’re rotting.” – J.K.

As a starting place for the audience, Jim invites everyone to listen to his podcast. They are 10-minute long podcasts and provide brain hacks for free. Next, he encourages everyone to “schedule it.” Whatever it is that you talk about doing it, you have to write and down and make it real. It takes the invisible and makes it visible on the calendar.

He adds that he has a very large “Not to Do” list, such as not using his phone for the first hour of his day, as well as a “To Learn” list. He encourages us to dedicate our lives to learning by picking subjects and skills that we’re interested in. Finally, if you want to grow to your fullest potential, then you have to schedule time for yourself.

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We cover memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert and go deep into tactics for accelerated learning. We talk about the importance of mastering the fundamentals, and get into tons of highly specific and actionable advice you can use today with our guest Jim Kwik. 

Jim Kwik is the founder of Kwik Learning and Superhero You. Jim is a brain coach in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning. Jim’s methods and work have been utilized by with several high profile companies including Nike, SpaceX, and GE, as well as individuals such as the Clintons, Oprah, Richard Branson and more.

• We’ve discovered more in the last 20 years about the human brain than we learned in the 2000 years before that

• How Jim went from growing up with learning challenges from an early childhood head injury to become an expert in accelerated learning and speed reading

• How to read 30 books in 30 days

• How we can actually retain what we read

• Knowledge is not power, its only potential power

• The one super power you want to master in the 21st century (learn faster)

• Traditional speed reeding, skimming, skipping words, getting the gist of something is not enough - its about fully capturing and retaining the information

• The average person reads 1-2 books per year, but the average CEO reads 4-5 books per month

• What Bill Gates said the #1 super power he would pick would be

• Warren buffet said he wasted 10 years of his life reading too slowly

• How you can gain 2 months of productive time per year

• Why motivation is such a critical component of accelerated learning - have a purpose for why you read

• "H-Cubed” - 3 things you need for motivation to have accelerated learning

• The fastest way to read something is not to read it at all - figured out what your end goal is

• How you can remember names more effectively & become a great connector

• If you forget someone’s name, you show that they’re not important to you

• Self Awareness is a super power

• “Smart reading” - what’s your goal for reading these books?

• How to give a speech without notes

• Half of success is just mindset, then get the mechanics right

• Brain Hacks for Speed Reading

• “Leaders are readers” and why Jim thinks you should read 30 minutes per day

• 12 things Jim does every morning to jumpstart his brain

• Mental fitness is as important, if not more important, than mental intelligence

• If you read 45 minutes a day, on average, you should be able to read a book a week

• Using a “visual pacer” and how that brain hack can help you instantly double your reading speed

• The adventure of lifelong learning

• One of the biggest traps in the personal development field is the “next new thing”

• People who are truly on the path to Mastery focus on the fundamentals and get REALLY REALLY GOOD at the BASICS

• How to get a 20-50% boost in your reading speed right now

• Excellence comes down to a set of routines, rituals, and habits

• If we always do the easy thing in life, life becomes hard, if we do the hard things, life becomes easy

• BEMAT = behavior equals motivation ability and trigger

• The primacy principle and the recency principle - and why you should chunk and take breaks to create more “beginnings and ends”

• Start as simply as possible - pick up a book and read one word

• "Upleveling your ability to process information” not just skimming - reading so that you understand

• Another brain hack - talk to someone else about what you just learned - we learn best by co-creating and sharing information

• If you make everything important than nothing is important

• It's not about reading slowly or quickly - its about reading for understanding - reading faster creates flow and focus

• Read for maximum comprehension and understanding for the goal you have for your reading

• You can learn things faster by overcoming the forgetting curve - you forget 80% of what you’ve learned within 2 days

• There is a difference between taking notes vs making notes - note taking is capturing ideas, note making is writing your impressions of what you’re capturing - you’re CREATING, questions you have, how it relates to what you already know, how you would teach it to someone else

• Ultimately all learning comes down to associations - that’s why metaphors are so powerful

• Mindmapping is an incredibly powerful strategy for you to remember concepts and ideas

• Most successful people in any industry journal on a regular basis - journalling helps us retain information and make new associations to things

• Brain hack - learn something with the intention of teaching someone else very specific - or think you were coaching someone or teaching them or giving a presentation on these topics. When you teach something you get to learn it twice.

• The FAST method - 4 strategies for learning anything more quickly

• Forget what you already know about a subject (set it aside)

  1. Active - be active about learning (doing problems, engaging your mind, etc). Learning is not a spectator sport.

  2. State - all learning is state dependent. Information + emotion becomes a long term memory.

  3. Teach - learn to benefit yourself and learn to teach others

• Forget about your limitations - if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them - add the word “yet” to negative self talk - be very careful to the words you put behind the words “I am”

• Be a thermostat not a thermometer

• To turn knowledge into real power - you have to schedule it into an activity and execute that

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Jim Kwik

• [Website] Kwik Brain

• [Article] The Zeigarnik Effect and Open Loops by Stephanie Booth

• [Wiki page] Mind Map

• [TEDTalk] How Great Leaders Inspire Action by Simon Sinek

Reviews of Jim’s Work

“Get his course. It will change your life in ways you cannot imagine. Jim’s training is incredible. I read faster because of Jim. I have a better memory because of him. LOVE his stuff. Get his course. It will change your life in ways you cannot imagine.”
-Brendon Burchard, New York Times Bestselling Author, Personal Development & Marketing Trainer

“Real thanks to Jim Kwik and the whole team for the minds that they are creating, how they are empowering people to change the world and commit to making this a better planet.”
-Peter Diamandis, CEO of XPRIZE & Chairman Of Singularity University

“Jim is one of the foremost authorities in the world on this subject. Jim makes it easy, fast, and efficient. So then you can say to yourself, I can learn anything that I need to learn.”
-Brian Tracy, Chairman & CEO of Brian Tracy International & Top Selling Author of Over 70 Books

“Unleash Your Superbrain! Never forget a name again and read faster and smarter with memory expert Jim Kwik.”
-Success Magazine

“There is no one that I trust more than Jim Kwik and his programs to optimize brain functioning.”
-Dr. Daniel Amen, New York Times Bestselling Author Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

“Jim’s superpower is learning. The ability to learn quickly is a distinct and powerful competitive advantage in business. It enables all success in a fast paced, fast changing world.”
-Forbes Magazine

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, with more than a million downloads in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We covered memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert. We go deep into the tactics of accelerated learning. We talk about the importance of mastering the fundamentals and get into tons of highly specific and actionable advice that you can use with our guest, Jim Kwik. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this. It’s simple, short, sweet, a few articles, stories, videos that we find really fascinating that we’ve enjoyed in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get a listener exclusive chance to shape the show. You get to vote on guests, submit your own personal questions that we will ask the guest in interviews and vote on changes to the show, like new intro music and much more. 

Sign up and join the email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 if you’re on the go or if that’s easier. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought most self-help was BS, to someone who uncovered that evidence-based growth strategies that actually work. We talked about guest journey from meeting self-help gurus, to spiritual leaders and even neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body and the simple, scientifically validated tools that evidence demonstrates are the best ways to be happier, with Dan Harris. If you want to know the science about being happy, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:32.0] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Jim Kwik. Jim is the founder of Kwik Learning and SuperheroYou. He’s a brain coach in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance and accelerated learning. His methods and work have been utilized with several high-profile companies including Nike, SpaceX and GE as well as individuals such as the Clintons, Oprah and Richard Branson. 

Jim, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:57.5] JK: Matt, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this, and thank everyone who’s joining us.  

[0:03:02.2] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and your background, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got so interested in accelerated learning. 

[0:03:13.8] JK: You could say when people see on my stage, they see me do these demos where I’ll memorize a hundred people’s names forward and backwards or these hundred words or hundred numbers and I always tell people, “I don’t do this to impress you. I really do this to express to you what’s really possible,” because the truth is each of us, everyone who’s listening could also do that and a lot more. The only reason why we can’t is just because we are taught, if anything, a lie. A lie that’s somehow that our intelligence, our potential, our memory, abilities is somehow fixed, like our shoe size. We have discovered more about the human brain more in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years, and what we fund is we’re grossly underestimating its potential. 

That’s what I’m really excited about, and I know this from personal experience, because as you’re asking, my origin story started — I wasn’t born with these abilities. If anything, I grew up with learning challenges and some people are surprised when they hear me say that, but it came from an early childhood injury. I had a head injury when I was a kid and I was very slow to understand things. Teachers would have to repeat themselves numerous times. I had no memory to speak of. I have very, very poor focus. It actually took me an extra three years to learn how to read. That was really debilitating for me and really affected me when I was a child. 

I struggled all through school. When I was about 18 years old, it got so bad. I was looking at everybody. I’m looking for a fresh start sometimes and I want to show the world and show my family and my friends and myself that I did, that I was smart enough, that I was good enough in these areas. I started taking on a lot of workload and I actually was ended up being hospitalized again because I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t working out. I wasn’t doing anything remotely, looking like self-care, and I ended up passing out in the hospital one night because that’s where I was living practically. I fell down a flight of stairs, I hit my head again. I was in the hospital and I just — A part of me woke me at the same time thinking there has to be a better way. 

I started studying, doing a deep dive instead of on subjects in schools. School teaches you what to learn; math, history, science, Spanish, all the important classes, but there was zero classes on how to learn. Just like what we’re talking about in the beginning, this idea of meta-learning, learning how to learn, adult learning theory. I wanted to solve this riddle that, basically, how does my brain work so I could work my brain better? I did a deep dive into adult learning theory and multiple intelligence. It is the early, like old school, the art of memory training and speed reading. 

About 60 days into it, a light switch flipped on and I just started. A whole new world opened up to me. I started to understand things. I started to have this laser-focus. I started to retain information almost without trying. I started to be able to adopt my reading abilities to the point where I never finished a book cover to cover, and I was reading like a good book or two or three a week, and my grades improve, and with my grades improving, my life improved. 

Really, Matt, the reason why I’m still doing it to this day, a couple of decades later, is because one of the first students I started tutoring this, because I was like, “I can’t believe this is not taught back in school.” One of my very first students, she read 30 books in 30 days. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine going on Amazon and picking up 30 business marketing entrepreneur or leadership, in health, in relationship, whatever, topic you’re interested in, picking up 30 of those books and then finishing it within a month’s time. It blew my mind. I wanted to find out not how she did it, but why she did it, and I found out that through asking that her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Was given 60 days to live, two months only to live, and the book she was reading were books to help save her mother’s life. I was blown away because I found out six months later that not only does her mother alive. She’s really started to get better. Doctors don’t know how or why. They were calling it a miracle. But her mother attributed 100% to the great advice she got from her daughter that learned them from all these books. That’s where I realized at that moment, I realized that if knowledge is power — We’ve all heard that, right? If knowledge is power, then learning is your super power. Learning is our super power. 

I think, now, in today’s millennium of the mind, we live in an age where our greatest wealth is found between our ears. Like no longer are we paid like an industrial age for our brute strength. It’s our brain strength. Like nobody listening here is paid for their muscle power. They’re compensated, rewarded for find-tuning their mind power, because we live in this knowledge economy, and knowledge is not only power, knowledge is profit. I don’t just mean financial profit, that’s obvious. The faster you could learn, the faster you could earn. Just all the advantages in life; in your health, in your relationships, in your career and so on. 

A lot of it, as you know with your show, the Science of Success, there’s a science in art to being smart, and that’ what I’ve devoted my life to. I never want people to struggle the way I struggled with. I think nowadays people are suffering from all these digital overload and digital dementia, where we’re losing our memories, because we’re relying on our smart devices, or digital distraction. Who doesn’t feel like their brain is not wired differently, because they can’t focus in any area, because their mind is going place to place to place, to phone notification, and texts, and WhatsApp, and social media, and emails and so much to keep up with. It feels like it’s taking a sip of water out of the fire hose. 

My goal is I want to be a personal trainer, a brain coach if you will to help people to tap in to more of that potential so they could be more productive, higher performance, have greater peace of mind in a world where we’re driven to distraction. 

[0:08:50.6] MB: There’s so much I want to unpack from that. Just starting out, one of the thing that sticks out to me, I want to understand the tension or kind of the connection between doing something, like reading 30 books in a month and how you can actually retain all that information. There’s so much, as you talked about, overload and digital dementia, and there’s just a deluge of knowledge that I feel like it goes in ear and out the other. How can we simultaneously churn through so much and actually retain it and turn it into sort of applied knowledge that becomes useful and relevant?

[0:09:28.2] JK: That’s really the goal; applied knowledge, because knowledge in itself if not power. We know it’s cliché, but we’ve heard it so much, but just all clichés, there’s truth to it, that knowledge is not power. It’s only potential power. It only becomes power when we apply it, when we take action upon it.

This is one that I think if there’s one super power to master in the 21st century, I think it’s the ability to learn faster. We do that with our podcast show and our online programs and we focus in areas of memory improvement, of speed reading, focus on concentration, in note taking and listening skills. These are the things I wish we would have learned back in school. There was never a class on memory. 

I think once you’re talking about when your people are reading, are they really retaining what they read? For example, a lot of people, like traditional speed reading programs taught years ago, and in some areas it’s evolved, some areas it hasn’t. Traditional speed reading is more associated with skimming or skipping words or getting the gist of what you’re reading, which is fine, because I think, for some people, maybe that’s all they need. They’re looking for a very specific information, and once they get it, that’s all that they need and they could take an exam and then they could just forget it and that’s all. 

For me, that was not the case. I grew up not being able to read very well, and so that was always something I’ve always wanted to conquer and a challenge that led to a greater change. The methods that I teach are really focused around not just speed reading. I think everybody has the potential, double or triple their reading speed and with the same level of retention and comprehension, and we could go over some of those brain hacks. 

For me, also, it made sense not just speed reading, but smart reading. I like to spend a significant amount of time teaching people how to comprehend information, even if they’re not reading it faster. How to actually understand more of it and retain more of it also as well. I like to get people who are listening here, if they’re up for the challenge. I just did our own podcast episode on how to read one book a week. 

You know how many books the average person reads? Obviously, you read a lot more than the average person, but it’s about one or two books a year, which I find really scary, because I think there’s so much great information out there that if somebody wrote took decades of experience and they put it into a book, maybe they are experts in marketing, or leadership, or optimal performance, health, relationships, whatever it is, and they put it into a book, and you could download decades into days. 

I think people first have to start with what’s important to them, meaning that motivation is really a key drive towards learning. I remember I was skimming a talk recently in Silicon Valley, and afterwards Bill Gates came up to me. He was in the audience. We started talking about the future of education, and he’s an avid reader. In fact, I asked him, talking about speed reading, I asked him if he got any one super power, what would it be. He looked at me and says, “Jim, the ability to read faster.” I was like, “Wow! I could totally help with you that.” 

Warren Buffett has said to Bill that he’s probably wasted 10 years of his life reading slowly, because think about how much reading we have to do. Probably about four hours a day, half on our workday is spent just processing information, reading emails and blogs and websites and books, newspapers, magazines, you name it. If you could just double your reading speed and save two hours a day, two hours a day over the course of a year is how many hours, right? We’re talking about 730 hours — Let’s just say if you save one hour a day. One hour a day over the course of a year is 365 hours. If you divide that 40-hour work weeks, that’s more than nine weeks of productivity, two months of productivity you get back saving one hour a day. 

I think starting point with reading, I think you want to tap into this motivation, because when I was talking to Bill Gates about this, we’re talking about the future of education. I was taking in a meta-learning approach, adult learning theory, and he was talking about it from a technology standpoint where those two things collide, and somebody who was listening was saying, “Is there anything missing?” We’re talking about it. Is there a thing we came up with for that legs of a stool, if you will, is motivation, like human motivation, like what drives people to do what they do, because a lot of people know what they should be doing, but why aren’t they executing and why aren’t they inconsistent, why aren’t they not completing it? 

I would say when it comes to reading, which is one of the focuses here, if you want to boost your comprehension, first of all, have a purpose why you read. If we’re talking about motivation, I always talk about the success formula. I call it H-cubed. H, the letter H. Three H’s; head, heart, hands. Head, heart, hands. Meaning that you could visualize things in your head. You could affirm things in your head. You could set goals in your head and have this vision for what you want things to be and imagine it, but if you’re not acting with your hands, nothing change. You’re not taking action. 

Usually what I would look at as the second H, which is the heart, which is the symbol of emotions. Where your focus goes, energy flows. What’s the fuel for the car? Everyone, most of your listeners probably read a great book called Start With Why, by Simon Sinek, I assume. Tapping into you why for learning is very important. 

Where I would start with when it comes to speed running, even before reading faster, I would tap into your purpose, because the fastest way to read something is just not to read it at all. I see so many people wasting time going through and studying something that might not be relevant and they’re not filtering out for it. Be clear on what your outcome is, going back to motivation. What’s it going to give for you? 

For the same reason, like one of the big focuses of our company and our podcast is focusing on helping people to remember names, because I think that’s some of the most successful people out there are really great networks, they’re really great connectors, they have great charisma and they have this unique ability to show that they care to other people. I think that starts with the very first words out of your mouth which is like introducing yourself. 

The problem is when people forget other people’s names, they communicate that that person is not important to them and it’s really hard to show someone you really care for their future, their family, their business, whatever it is, if you don’t care enough just to remember them. 

That’s just really starting with human motivation, and I think the self-awareness — I do believe self-awareness is a super power to understand intrinsically, extrinsically what motivates you to learn. When it comes to speed reading, I would start with smart reading, understand what your goal is for reading the books that you’re reading, because if you have greatest interest and higher levels of motivation, automatically, your retention, your focus, is going to be boosted and enhanced. 

Then when it comes to tactical things, I am not really big on getting soft information. I remember years ago, I’ve learned these skills, and I was speaking on it. I started to build a good reputation for speaking and making entertaining with these mental feats, kind of like a magician who does their tricks, if you will, but then I show, I pull the curtain behind and take people behind the curtain and show them exactly how to do it so they could be the incredible mentalists as well. 

We were getting home one night and the person, I didn’t know who it was, so I answered it and he says, “You got to help me, Jim. I have a conference tomorrow and my main speaker, they cancelled.” I was like, “Who’s this? How did you get my number?” “It came through a referral.” Basically, this person couldn’t get out for inclement weather or whatever, to do a keynote, and they needed somebody to speak on stage. 

I was like, “Well, what’s the topic? I’m not really prepared for this.” He tells me the topic. I was like, “Why are you calling me? I know absolutely nothing about that topic.” He was like, “Yeah, but this guy, he wrote a book.” I’m like, “So?” He’s like, “I heard you’re a speed reader.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Well, can you show up a little bit early and read the book?” I was like, “Well, this is really going to cost you.” 

I ended up going there. The talk was around the 12:00. I ended up getting there around 9:30, 10:00. I read the book and then I present on it, and humbly it was the highest rated talk of the whole conference. I don’t think it’s because of my ability to present. I’ve never taken one minute of public speaking, but I was able to read it and also retain it, and also I do this whole thing on how to give a speech without notes and go through it, and I taught it. I think everybody has that ability, and I know it. Just after teaching this for 25 years and having students online, students in over 150 countries, that we grossly are underestimating our own capabilities and we’re faster and we’re smarter than we think. 

I’m just putting this out there. Just to start with, I think that half of success is just mindset, and I do believe — That’s why I think it’s great with your show, having people like Carol Dweck and all these amazing icons and experts talking about the power of mindset and growth mindset and such. I really think that’s a starting point. But the other half is really what we teach, which are all the mechanics. Not the person that fixes your car, but like the tools, the strategies, the step-by-step recipes, if you will, to learn another language, to read a book a day, to be able to walk into a room and meet 30 strangers and leave saying, “Bye,” remembering every single one of their names, because I think these are critical skills. 

Especially, I know a lot of your listeners are thinking about starting their own business, or they are entrepreneurs, or anybody has a relationship with a human being. These are super powers that’s attainable for anybody.

[0:19:00.2] MB: There’s so many things I want to dig into from that. Let’s start with share a couple of the strategies that you have for speed reading. What are some of these brain hacks? 

[0:19:10.3] JK: Okay. What I would start with if you want to — People, their goal is to read more. Let’s say they want to read — I would start with a goal. Let’s say with college students and high schools, I talk about their GPA, but I don’t talk about like their grade point averages. I do it as more of like a success formula which G stands for goal, P stands for purpose and A stands for the action that’s going to reach that goal. Kind of like H-cubed. 

The goal is inside the head. The purpose is inside the heart. The action lies inside the hands. Having a book, let’s say, starting with the G in terms of goal. I would have a goal for reading. I think one of the most important — I challenge everyone to do this also, is leaders are readers, and I challenge everybody who’s not already doing this consistently to read 30 minutes a day. I do this whole morning routine where I have 12 things I do every single morning to jumpstart my brain and I try to hit most of those 12 things. 

I think, as you’ve heard many times, and I’m not the person to talk about this. If you win the first hour or two of your day, then you could win the day. I think people have really bad habits in the morning, like playing with their phone and stuff like that distracts them and wires them to be distracted, wires them to be reactive. 

Going back to how I started my day, I start more like — My goal, things I want to be able to accomplish. You always start with a goal. If we’re talking about speed reading, I would have a goal on your reading. Let’s say maybe it is to read one book a week. If you break that down, when it comes to hacking reading — I was looking on Amazon and said that about the middle amount of words per book is about 64,000 words. That’s a really large number, but if you break it down, say the average person reads about 200 words per minute, we’re talking about 320 minutes approximately to read a book. If you break that down into, let’s say, seven days, we’re talking about approximately 45 minutes of reading a day, which makes it much more doable. It’s not like this unattainable goal for people who just never start with reading. I would chart, really hit, see if you could do 30 minutes and start with 30 minutes a day.  

One of my favorite actors is Will Smith, and I had the privilege to be able to coach him, and he has this phrase where he says, “There’s two things I do every day. I like to run. I like to read.” I like to run; meaning something to do with something physical. I like to read; do something mental. 

When it comes to your brain — What I do is I help people to improve their mental intelligence, and I think it’s great to be able to recall facts and figures and [inaudible 0:21:37.8] all this stuff. As important, if not, more important than mental intelligence, is mental fitness. Really, when I talk about being a brain coach, just like how a physical trainer, a personal trainer at the gym will make your muscles faster and make it stronger, give it energy and give it focus, agility. That’s what I want for your mental muscles. I want your mental muscles to be focused. I want it to have energy, agility, flexibility, lots of power there. A lot of it is underused. 

Going back to reading, breaking it down to really set goals, I challenge people to read 30 minutes a day, maybe up to 45 minutes. Finish a book a week, and that would change your life. They say that the — I was looking online and I saw these reports are people reading — The average person reads one or two books a years. The average CEO reads about four or five books a month, about a book a week. I would commit to seeing if you can do 30 minutes a day and watch your life transform completely, because you feed your brain, it’s good things in, good things out. 

When it comes to the mechanics of reading, there’s whole programs on this. Fundamentally, people want to improve usually their reading speed, their focus or comprehension. One of the things that will help all three of these things is using what they call a visual pacer. This is such an easy brain hack, and I really have to emphasize and pull out for a minute before I go into this. As you’re listening to this, I doubt this is the first show you’ve ever listened to, right? If you’re listening to this show, you listen to other shows, you’ve read other books and going to conferences, because you’re on this path, this adventure of lifelong learning, because you know in order for your life to grow, you need to grow. Your income to grow, you need to grow. 

I would say that one of the dangers and the traps in the personal development field is this idea where people always want the next best thing, and I totally get it, because our minds thrive on novelty. But there is a difference between a dabbler and somebody on the path of mastery. I find that the people that are really on the path of mastery, that the people that I get to coach on a regular basis and spend time with that are icons in technology or entertainment or in politics or what have you, they really focus on the fundamentals and they get really, really good at the basics. It’s that idea with that quote with Bruce Lee saying, “I’m not scared of anything. The only thing I’m scared of is I’m not scared about — I’m not scared of the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once. What I’m scared of is the person who practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Metaphorically, the 10,000 hours and there’s some misunderstandings around that. The idea here is getting really good at the basics. What I’m going to give you is very basic and fundamental, and yet that’s going to give you — Those are the things that are going to give you the highest returns. 

For example, my talk about a visual pacer when you read. A visual pacer is like underlining the words as you read with a pen, a highlighter, a pencil, your finger, mouse on a computer, whatever it is, will boost your reading speed, your focus and your comprehension. Simple. Again, it’s common sense, and I’m going to explain why it works. The common sense is not — As we know, it’s not often a common practice. 

The reason why it works is when you’re underlining the words with your finger, as you’re underlying, not skipping not anything. Fancy finger motions I don’t think are necessary where you’re taking your finger and running it down the page and making it look like an S. You’re skipping over big pieces of information. My clients, some of the top financial advisers, doctors, attorneys in the world. You don’t want your doctor just get the gist of what he’s reading or she’s reading, right? That wouldn’t be the [inaudible 0:25:15.3]. You’d be very scared to go to that kind of doctor. 

Using a visual pacer will boost your reading speed 25% to 50%. Now, I don’t know if that sounds remarkable or not. I was blown away when I first saw this, and I’m not expecting people to believe what I’m saying. I’m saying you are the expert. Test it for yourself . Read something. Take a book. Pick up any book in your home or your office, read for 60 seconds, count the number of lines that you just read, and then reset the timer and then this time underline the words as you read the next 60 seconds and you’ll find that second number will be about 25% to 50% boost instantly with very, very little practice. Maybe people have to practice for a few minutes, they get a feel for whatever it is. 

Some people actually improve 100% their reading speed just using a visual pacer. That’s pretty remarkable, right? A 25%, 50% jump doesn’t sound like a lot. How many people would have loved to get in the 25%, 50% return on their investments this past year? It’s incredible, right? That reading takes time, and time is money. 

Let’s unpack this. The reason why using the visual pacer while you reads works. Number one is it’s interesting children do it. Every single child, when they’re learning to read will use their finger to help them maintain focus until we teach them not to do it. Second of all, you do it. People who are listening saying, “When I read, I don’t use my finger.” Yes, I understand that, because we’re taught that, but when I ask you to count the number of lines you just read, a hundred out of a hundred people will use their finger to count the number of lines, because they’re using a visual pacer, their finger, to help maintain their focus so they could count. We do it naturally until we’re told to not do it. 

The third reason why you use your finger while you read is because your eyes are attracted to motion. As you’re underlying the words, instead of your attention being pulled apart, which often it is. People report to me all the time, “Have you ever read a page in a book, got to the end and just forgot what you just read?” It just happens, right? You go back and reread it and you still forget what you just read. By using your finger while you read, it maintains your focus. Your attention is not being spread apart. It’s being pulled through the information. 

The fourth, and I’ll give you one more. This is one I find most interesting, is that certain senses in your nervous system works very closely together. For example, have you ever tasted, Matt, like a great tasting piece of fruit? Like something like right off the vine or like right from the farmer’s market? It’s not like it’s been sprayed for six months and sitting in wax and sitting in a supermarket and stuff. Have you ever tasted like a great tasting peach before?

[0:27:49.8] MB: Yeah, for sure. 

[0:27:51.2] JK: It’s amazing, right? There’s nothing like it. In actuality, you’re not actually tasting a peach. Your tongue is not really capable of tasting everything that’s in a peach. What you’re actually doing more, so as you’re smelling the peach and you’re like, “Are you sure?” “Yeah.” Because your mind doesn’t know the difference between what you’re tasting and what you’re smelling, because your sense of smell and your sense of taste are so closely linked in your nervous system. You don’t know the difference. You know it when you’re sick though. When your nose is congested and you can’t breathe out of your nose, what does food taste like?  

[0:28:25.9] MB: It’s bland.

[0:28:27.0] JK: It’s bland, right? It loses its flavor, if you will. It’s because that’s how much you rely on your sense of smell, and we confuse sometimes our sense of smell and taste, just like our sense of smell and taste are so closely linked, so as our sense of sight and our sense of touch. That actually people who use their finger while they read is what they will report. They say they feel more in touch, touch with their reading. There’s a kinesthetic connections. Kind of like with a little child. Let’s say there’s a toddler there and you’re kind of waving your keys and they look at my keys, “Look. Look with your eyes. Look at my keys,” and the toddler will reach out and grab the keys, because in order for the toddler to feel like they are looking at it, they have to touch it. In fact, when you lose your sense of sight, how do you read? You use your sense of touch with brail and such. 

Just one really quick brain hack — And I spend more time to explaining why to do it, because, again, going through the H-cube, you can have in your head, “I want to read 25%, 50%, 100% faster,” but if you’re not practicing the technique with your hand, get into the motivation of it. That’s why I explained why, and I go into leaders are readers, and Bill Gates is an avid reader, and just the more you could learn the more you could earn. 

Then tap into your focal point in terms of things like the reasons why, because I do believe — I always tell people, and I get retweeted on this every day, is just reasons reap results. Reasons reap results. You always need to — If you’re not taking action — Like I just did a whole episode on procrastination, because I think so many people are overloaded, overwhelmed. They can’t get themselves to start and do the things that they need to do. Part of it is they’re just not tapping into their motivation in terms of why they need to do it. 

Other reasons why — Interesting enough, when it comes to reading — I’ll give you another brain hack, is changing habits. Habits are so hard, but I do believe first do make your habits, and then your habits make you back. It really becomes — Excellence really comes down to a set of rituals and routines and habits. 

The reason why you want to habitualize things, routine things, the reason why my whole first hour of the day is set up is because I have decision fatigue. You’re hearing this world all over the place. It’s the idea and science, the research is saying that you could only make a certain amount of good decisions a day. It’s a finite amount. After you hit that limit, you can’t decide what to order at a restaurant at night, because you’re so fatigued. I found this doing research with surgeons and how the increase of mistakes that they’re making later in the day from what their start time was. It’s interesting. That’s the reason why Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Hsieh of Zappos, that they wear the same t-shirt, they wear the same sweatshirt, because they don’t want to waste one of their good decisions on, “What am I going to wear today?” 

Going back to what we’re talking about in terms of reading and hacking a brain, is starting new habits. Sometimes it takes a little bit more will power to start it, a new habit and to develop that habit. Once you’re done with it, I find that if we’re always doing the easy things in life, that life is really hard. If we’re doing the difficult, the hard things in life, life becomes really easy. Reading and discipline is one of those things. 

As we’ve heard many times, discipline is not something that takes away freedom. Discipline is what gives you freedom, because if you can’t get yourself to do the things you need to do, meditate each day, journal each day. I do this whole thing where I do brain tease and then make brain power smoothies and all these other stuff. You can’t get yourself to do that. Really, that’s a prison that’s taken away from your freedom. 

When I’m looking to do this when it comes to habit formation, and I’m going to close this loop in a second, is besides starting with your why and reasons reaping results, is also breaking things down. A lot of people don’t take on something brand new, because it’s this big monster. If you break things down into tiny habits — I get to interview this gentleman. He’s a researcher at Stanford University. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and we did a two-parter on how to create habits and how to undo bad habits, break bad habits. 

He was talking about this very specific model, it’s called BEMAT; behavior equals motivation, ability and trigger. Whatever behavior you want to, let’s say it’s to read each day, and you did — Your behavior is equal to the motivation. You need a motive, some kind of reward or incentive for what that reading is going to give you. You need the ability to be able to read, and then you need a trigger. That’s the area that a lot of things get ignored. Often, when it comes down to memory training, it comes down to anchors and triggers, reminders, for example. 

One of the triggers that I have like, like it’s silly, but every time I get into an elevator, especially when I’m alone, I’ll just do squats, and it’s so silly, but it’s just I feel like — You’ve heard that sitting is the new smoking. That living a very sedentary lifestyle, sitting at your computer all day for eight hours a day is really bad for you. You need to get up. I recommend this Pomodoro Technique, it’s a time management technique that says that they find there’s huge dips of focus after about 30 to 45 minutes. Setting my phone alarm every 30 minutes to 45 minutes to just remind me to get up and take a five minute break is very important. 

Going back to memory training and reading training, the reason why I don’t read for more than 30 or 45 minutes, the reason why I don’t study anything for 35, more than 35, for 35, 45 minutes or so on average, is because there’s something called primacy and recency. Primacy says — It’s a memory principle. It says you tend to remember things in the beginning. If I give you, Matt, a list of 30 words to memorize, you probably remember the first few words, because that’s prime. It’s first. 

Recency says you tend to remember things more recent, or at the end. You probably remember a few of those last words, because they’re most recent. Similar to if you went to a party and you meet 20 strangers there. You probably remember primacy, the people in the beginning at the party; and recency, the people at the end. Now, how to use this when it comes to reading and studying and stuff like that? A lot of people, they realize there’s a learning curve. What they don’t realize is there’s a forgetting curve. You learn something, it’d be gone. If you want to insulate that and mitigate the loss, sitting for five hours is not the process to do it. 

That’s why we take breaks, because if primacy says you remember stuff in the beginning of that five hours, and then stuff at the end of that five hours, but in the middle there’s a huge dip [inaudible 0:34:57.4] of regression where you lose that information. By taking a break every 45 minutes and breaking up that five hours into 45 minute chunks with five minute breaks, all of a sudden you created more beginning and more ends. Do you see that? All of a sudden you could have like eight beginning and eight ends which creates more primacy and more recency, which is more opportunities to retain information. 

It also coincides with our focus, that we can maintain really peak focus for more than 30 or so minutes. So since you’re getting diminishing returns, you should take a middle brain break, if you will, for five minutes and do the things that are good for your brain. Movement; which is very important. Deep breathing; which is very important. Most people get tired because they’re not getting enough oxygen. Then hydration, because your brain is mostly water and it needs to be hydrated. 

Going back to habit formation, where I’d like to start with people is just breaking it down. I don’t even tell people to read for 20, 30 minutes. I’ll just say, “Hey, just pick up a book and read one word.” That’s where what I’ve mentioned tiny habits. That’s out of Dr. BJ Fogg’s work at Stanford. That’s where Instagram came out of and everything out of his one of his students, is just starting somewhere small, and then just like flossing your teeth. We know flossing your teeth actually is good for your health. It actually helps you live longer. It’s crazy, right? That brain hack. But most people don’t floss their teeth, and what I would say for them is just, “Hey, practice flossing one tooth.” Who’s going to just floss one tooth? Nobody. So you’re going to do the second tooth and the third and fourth and so on. 

That’s one of the ways of overcoming procrastination, is starting with your why. Having a real reason. Motivation; a motive for action. Number two; breaking things into tiny little habits where it’s attainable. Instead of thinking about, “Oh, I got to go all the way to the gym and do this 60-90 minute work,” whatever. Tiny habits is putting on your sneakers. It’s something everybody could do, and then you start building momentum. Then there’s a memory principle actually called the Zeigarnik Effect. Zeigarnik effect is a psychologist, Dr. Zerganik in Europe that was noticing — She would notice when she’s at this café that the wait staff, the waiter and the waitress would remember everybody’s order. 

Have you ever had like going out to dinner and had somebody like memorize your order and you’re like a table, a sizeable table and they’re not writing any of it down? The reason why they could do it, it’s something called the Zeigarnik Effect. Unless they’ve been — Unless we do a lot of training at a lot of the hospitality hotels and restaurants and such. 

The Zeigarnik Effect basically says that the mind isn’t like open loops. It needs closure. Even when I’m talking right now, I’m opening up a lot of loops and that I’m going through and my cycling through and I’m closing them with reading and habits and everything else like that. The Zeigarnik Effect basically says that if a waiter opens up the loop in terms of what your order is, they will remember it until they deliver the order. Once the order is delivered and the customer has their food, they forget it. 

Similar to procrastination and getting yourself to take action, once you at least somewhere, the mind is more likely to want to finish it and conclude it, because it doesn’t like keeping that door open and it wants to be able to finish. 

When it comes to speed reading, I would start with using a visual pacer. It would boost productivity 25%-50%. Some of you will double your reading speed. Remember, saving one hour a day saves you 9 weeks of productivity every single year. That’s two months of productivity. I would say if you can’t get yourself to do that, break it down and just say, “Okay. Yeah, I want to build up some reading 20 or 30 minutes a day, because I like what Jim is saying and that makes sense, reading a book a week, 50 books a year and really retaining it. It’s going to be huge for my career and my personal life.” Just saying, “Hey, I’m going to break this down. I’m just going to read one sentence. Start with that.” Once you read the first sentence, I’ll guarantee you’ll read the second sentence and so on. Practice — It’s a misnomer. Everyone says practice makes, how do you say? Makes perfect. I would say that practice makes progress. Practice makes permanent, and that’s really the goal. 

[0:39:00.6] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:40:28.3] MB: I’d like to come back to the concept of sort of applied knowledge and the idea that — You mentioned, people on the path to mastery focus on the fundamentals. One of the things that I recently realized and I’ve really sort of shifted my focus on a little bit is I feel like there’s so much information out there. There’s so many new self-help books, information, all these stuff, and I’ve actually kind of dialed back and said, “I’m going to read less. I’m going to focus on really high quality stuff. Reading it very deeply and deliberately, and then actually applying and using the information that I read about.” 

[0:41:05.8] JK: Yeah. I completely support that. I’m an advocate for people. Whatever it take to actually use the information, because I think there is this imposter effect, meaning that a lot of people getting personal development and they’re trying to live up to some kind of standard that they’re seeing in the industry or social media. I think people waste a lot of energy there trying to maintain this image of who they pretend that they are, and then they’re putting energy into an area where they feel like this is who they fear they are, and then the energy into that they really are. A lot of people are depleted that way. 

I would say that you’re 100% right, that I learn something, if you’re not going to apply it for something. There are certain areas that it’s okay. Certain areas that you could learn out of the surface, and that you feel well read on it and it serves you. There are certain areas based on your filtering or qualification, how you’re qualifying information, of good information that you want to deep dive into something. I think a lot of a cycle through both areas, from one thinking to another, where sometimes we want to — Just like with people. Some people want to go out and meet a lot of quantity people, and other people want to go deeper with the handful of people that they’re interested in. There’s no unnecessarily right or wrong. I think that’s great, because that comes down to, again, starting with a goal in mind and having a purpose. 

I like mastery, because I feel like the future belongs to those experts who are really to demonstrate a level of outstanding ability and competence. I’m completely good with focusing on one subject, focusing on one book. When I speed reading, again, it’s misnomer. I’m not talking about skimming or scanning. You never read faster than you understand. I’m about up-leveling people’s ability to process information through a series of questions that they’re asking, through series of note taking, through a series of teaching other people and relating to other people so they could deeper in the level of knowledge. It’s not just some information that’s from some third-party, but when they’re teaching it to other people, they get to make it personal for themselves. 

Even in a nice brain hack to help people boost their comprehension is reading something. Then after you’re reading it, talking about it to somebody else. That’s why book clubs are so powerful, because learning is not always solo. It’s social. We don’t learn just by consuming information. We learn best by co-creating it with other people. Really, the other thing is there’s — It’s valid. Meaning that — Like I’m all about saying no in our life. I think people should say no more often and make things more clear. I think people, one of the reasons why people feel overloaded, overwhelmed, that they feel depleted, they feel like it’s too much mental fatigue, is because they’re overcommitting to things all the time.
They’re out there saying yes to everything. 

When you say yes to everything, it’s equivalent of highlighting everything. Which actually those people that just are reading and they are just like highlighting every other sentence, but if you make everything important, then nothing becomes important. It’s similar to like that book, it’s similar to your life. If you overcommit to everything and everything becomes important, then nothing becomes important. I don’t think you could necessarily manage your time, because time is very abstract. I do believe we can manage our behavior and our priorities. 

It’s even hard for me to say the word priorities, because as you know, from your reading, that the word priorities was never plural. It was never multiple priorities. It was always this one thing. More recently, over the past few decades, people have all of these priorities. If everything becomes important, nothing becomes important. 

I would scale back to if it’s a goal for people to reach a level of mastery in a specific subject, then I would not dabble. There’s nothing wrong with reading slowly. I just want to make sure people know that reading slowly doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding, because some people read so painfully slow, they don’t retain anything. It’s like riding a bicycle really slow. If I ride a bicycle really, really slow, I’m going to end up falling over. 

One of the reason — I’ll debunk this myth a little bit as best as I can in this like very short period of time. A lot of people think that if they read faster, their comprehension would go down. Maybe I work with a lot of people from all kinds of countries and backgrounds and levels of education, I find that it’s a misnomer and it’s actually not actually correct, because I find that some of the best readers, in terms of their comprehension, are actually some of the fastest readers, because they have the best focus. 

Meaning that the human brain has an incredible capacity to process information. Yet when we read, we feed it one word at a time. Metaphorically, we’re starving our mind. If you don’t give your brain the stimulus and needs, it will seek entertainment elsewhere in the form of distraction. 

There’s a myth out there that people that read faster don’t understand as much, but in actually they have some of the best understanding, they have the best focus. It’s equivalent of — Like notice when I was talking slowly. It’s like reading slowly. It’s like — You start thinking about other things. Like if I’m talking slow, your mind would wander. You would get tired. You would go off and do something else. You would fall asleep or whatever it is. Aren’t those the same exact symptoms have when they read? Their mind wanders. They get tired. They use reading as a sedative. It’s such a boring chore, because you’re dulling your brain. 

It’s like driving a car. If you’re driving in your neighborhood, you’re going 15-20 miles slow. You could do a lot of different things, because you’re going so slow. You could be drinking your bulletproof coffee, be texting, which you shouldn’t. You could be having a conversation, thinking about the dry cleaning, five different things, because you’re only going 20 miles an hour. If your racing car is going 200 miles an hour down a raceway, do you have more or less focus? 100% focused, right? You’re not trying to text. You’re not trying to fix your makeup. You’re not trying to think about the clients or dry cleaning or anything. You’re 100% focused on what’s in front of you, and that focus gives you the comprehension that you want. 

What I would say if you want to go deep in your information, then definitely go deep, especially if it serves you for a topic that’s important to you. Then do a bunch of — Use your finger while you read. Don’t read any faster than you understand, it also as well. But I think that the speed will give you the focus and the focus will give you the comprehension that you’re looking for.  

[0:47:21.1] MB: I think that’s a great distinction. Essentially, the idea that it’s not about whether you’re reading slowly or quickly. It’s really about reading for maximum understanding and maximum comprehension. 

[0:47:33.4] JK: Right. To your goal, because some people could skim or “speed read” the newspaper and they get full — They get fully satisfied. You know what I mean? Because not everything that we read do we need to 100% focus on or retain every single bit in chunk. It really depends on what your outcome is. That’s why having questions is so important for comprehension. Whether it’s listening to a podcast or reading a book or going to a seminar or reading someone’s blog. Questions are the answer. 

What questions do is they activate that part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS for short. Basically, it determines right now there’s two billion stimuli in your environment that you could pay attention to, but you can’t, because mainly your brain has a deletion device, because you would be, you’d go crazy if you had to pay attention to too much. Mostly, it’s trying to block stuff out. 

You have this reticular activating system that determines where your focus goes. Years ago, years ago, my sister was sending me postcards and emails, photos of these pug dogs. You know, these little like smooching face, little fun or whatever dogs. I was like, “Why are you sending these to me?” I realized that her birthday was coming up and that’s what she wanted. 

I noticed everywhere I was going, I go to the supermarket, I see a lady holding a pug dog. I’d be running and doing my jog around my neighborhood, I saw this guy walking six pug dogs. I was like, “Where were these pug dogs before?” The truth is they were always there. It’s just my mind, it fell into that two billion of things that I just didn’t pay attention to. Once she made it important to me, like me asking why is she sending these to me. What’s so important about pug dogs? I started seeing pug dogs everywhere. 

Just when it comes to those, if you imagine, pug dogs are the answer you’re looking for, they’re the knowledge or the wisdom, comprehension, if you will, that you want, then you’ll start seeing them everywhere. If you have questions about sales or marketing or whatever it is, and when you’re listening to a podcast, you’re reading that book, all of a sudden you’re like, “There’s an answer. There’s an answer.” Because it acts like a magnet and you’re pulling the information inside as supposed to somebody, a lecturer trying to push it inside of you, because the brain doesn’t work that way. It works better by wanting to answer these questions themselves and satisfy that open loop. 

I would focus mostly on what your outcome is for reading, and then that should determine your level of speed and comprehension. I don’t speed read everything. One of the challenges to overcome, the reasons why our programs are so successful and we’re getting 300% increase of reading speed in our online is because the biggest challenge when it comes to reading actually is not focus. It’s something called sub-vocalization. Sub-vocalization is that inner talk that we have. 

You notice, Matt, when you’re reading something to yourself, you heard that inner voice inside your head reading along with you? 

[0:50:29.9] MB: Yeah. 

[0:50:30.7] JK: That voice and stuff. Yeah. Hopefully it’s your own voice. It’s not like somebody else’s voice. You don’t hear like two or three voices in there. The reason why it’s a challenge is because if you have to say all the words to understand what you’re reading, you can only read as fast as you could talk. Not as fast as you could think. 

That’s why when I listen to podcast and many people listen to podcast or listen to books on — Like audible and stuff like that, books, audiobooks, is they put it on 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever, because you could understand all that information. It’s just you can’t possibly talk that fast. You don’t have to say words in your mind to understand what words mean, and it’s just a bad habit we picked up when we’re kids based on the way we’re taught in school. The fastest readers I find don’t pronounce a lot of the words, because you don’t have to pronounce a word like New York City, take all that time to say it, because you know what it means on sight. 95% of the words you read every single day are what they call sight words. You don’t have to pronounce and to understand it, because you’ve seen them tens of thousands of times. 

This is just going in to just reading methodology and stepping to this commonsense corner of your mind saying, “Does what I learn back then still make sense to me?” I think being a quick learner or having what I call a quick brain is not about just memorizing facts, because you get a lot of facts on Google. The ability to be able to focus, be able to absorb, to learn, to teach, to apply this information. 

That being said, a good memory now is more important than ever, because at any given time you can — Our live is a reflection of our decisions that we make day to day, like the decisions of where to live and what to do and who to be with and what to eat and everything. You could only make good decisions based on the information you know and remember. 

That’s why Socrates said, learning is remembering. That without remembering, you can’t make good decisions and you lose your power in the areas that you would normally be able to really be unstoppable.  

[0:52:28.7] MB: Another strategy, and I think that’s the really key point. In today’s world, there’s so much out there. How can we focus on really capturing and remembering, as much as possible sort of align with our goals in terms of what we’ve determined we want to learn about. One of the strategies that I’ve heard you talk in the past is using things like mind maps. Will you talk a little bit about that?  

[0:52:53.0] JK: What happens is when we’re learning something, people want to learn any subject or skill faster, whether it’s Mandarin or martial arts, or it’s marketing, music, whatever it is. Obviously, everyone like to do it faster. What helps you to be able to do it faster is to overcome what they call the forgetting curve. That within 48 hours, just two days, up to 80% of what you learn can be gone within two days. That’s a lot of loss that’s there. 

One of the ways to keep that from happening is by taking good notes. I like to talk about different ways of taking notes. Different than making notes, and that’s my distinction, is that when I take notes very simply. Mind mapping is one way of taking notes. It was created by a gentleman by the name of Tony Buzan, and some of your listeners may be very familiar with it, where you put the main idea in the middle of the page and branching out, just like the branches of the tree. You have those sub-ideas. 

Imagine the middle is health and then branching out of health is, “Oh, it’s exercise,” and then another branch out of the trunk is called nutrition and so on. Off of nutrition could be a branch that says food, because that’s one place you get your nutrition. Then another part of the nutrition branch could be supplements, so on. Then you can have a branch come off of supplements, different kinds of nutritional supplements and so on, or different kinds of food. You could break down the food groups. You could have this rare kind of sardine that leads to this, say, under the fish, to lead to protein, to lead to food, to lead to nutrition and that leads to overall health. 

It’s kind of a neat way on one page view instead of seeing notes on like 20 pages linear notes, and something on page 17 could be important than what’s on page one but it’s varied on page 17. Mind mapping is one way of seeing all the notes on one page view and seeing the relationships and the associations, because ultimately all learning is going to come down to associations, one thing linked to another. 

When  you’re learning something, you’re taking something unknown, something outside of you and you’re connecting it to something that you know already. That’s why metaphors are such a powerful way of learning when you’re comparing things to what you already understand. 

Another way — If to like the mind map with all the colors and the icons and images, these two right brain or imaginary creative for somebody. What I recommend, and I did a whole show on this, is just take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle page, and on the left side, take notes, and on the right side, make notes. 

There’s a clear distinction. What I’m talking about is — Because it’s only like a letter off. Note taking is where you’re capturing information. You’re capturing the strategies or the ideas. This is how to read faster. Okay, use your visual pace or a great rate. Do one thing at a time. That would be where you’re taking notes on the left side, you’re capturing notes. On the right side, you’re writing your impressions of what you’re capturing. On the right side, instead of taking notes, you’re making notes. Instead of capturing it, you’re actually creating. 

On the right side, you’re writing down questions that you have. How it relates to what you already know. How you’re going to teach it so somebody else, and I think that’s very important, because when you look at geniuses, and I don’t just mean IQ geniuses. People who are excelling in any area and at any industry, the majority of them journal. They take lots of notes. When you’re there — It’s interesting, because I just had a dinner recently with this very well-known multibillionaire. During this gala, if you will, he was just taking lots of notes of every single, what every speaker was saying and everything. I think that’s one of the ways not only do we retain information, but it also helps us to make new associations to something. 

Think about the journals of Einstein and Edison and Da Vinci and how priceless those things are.  There are studies that want to know, like, “Is it because they’re geniuses that they journal all the time or is it because they’re taking notes and journaling all the time that makes them a genius?” 

I’m a big believer in note taking, whether it’s mind mapping or this idea of capturing on the left side and creating on the other side. That’s the other reason, is it also is a great focus tool, because if your attention is going to somewhere else, like it often does when you’re listening to a podcast or sitting in a conference or a summit or whatever, then it might as well go on the right side of the page. Your creative expression of things might as well go to like, “Oh! How is this relate to what I already know? What about this and how am I going to share this with this person and everything?” 

By the way, you notice that I’m talking a lot about teaching other people, because another brain hack, if you will, is learn something with intention of teaching it somebody else. Again, it’s common sense, but it’s not common practice, that I challenge everybody who’s listening to this to re-listen to this episode and listen with the intention of teaching it to someone very specific, because if you had to give a talk on this in a couple of days, 48 hours from now on stage or coach somebody on how to speed read or whatever, you would listen at a higher level. You would be more active. You would ask more questions. You would take better notes, because you would have a stake in it. 

The reason why I like that is — What gets twitted all the time is this thing they say, I say that, “When you teach something, you get to learn it twice.” Is intention matter. If you learn with the intention of teaching and sharing it with somebody else, when you teach it, you get to learn it twice. 

If you want to accelerate your learning, learn any subject or any skill faster, learn it with the idea, the motive to teach it to someone else. Again, going back to this mastery path about fundamentals and the basics, this is very basic. It’s not very sexy, but it’s going to get you’re the result that you’re looking for.

[0:58:45.4] MB: Tell me a little bit about the FAST method and the strategies you have from learning faster. 

[0:58:50.3] JK: Perfect. I love talking about this, because — This is a framework that I use, just a guide system for learning anything more quickly, because I think that’s what we want to do. Our ability to acquire new skills. Our ability to acquire new subjects. Really simple four steps. The F in FAST stands for forget. If you want to learn something faster, I would say forget what you already know about a subject. Not permanently, but just set aside what you already know. I find that when I’m coaching somebody, as long as they have a motivation to learn something and then they have an open mind to learn something, a beginner’s mind, that’s really the phrase here, then they can learn faster. 

A lot of people won’t learn something faster, because they feel like they know everything and they’re not going to learn faster. I would say if you want to learn something new, temporary forget about what you think you know about it. 

The other thing I would say really fast when it comes to forgetting, I would forget about what’s going on that’s not urgent and important. It’s a myth that you can multitask. It is completely been debunk. Yes, you could walk and chew gum and have a conversation on the phone. You can’t do two cognitive intensive activities at once. It’s not possible. 

It’s a myth, and when people are multitasking, what they really are doing is what they call task switching, they’re switching from one task to another and every single time you switch to another task, because you’re getting these dopamine fixes and everything, because you’re getting rewarded for the novelty, you’re feeling like you’re getting stuff done, but it actually takes you another 5 to 10 to 20 minutes just to regain your focus and your flow. 

You lose time and, actually, that person also has more errors, so they make more mistakes. I would say focus on one thing. The F when it comes to forgetting, I would forget about anything else that’s not going — That’s going on that’s not urgent and important, because if 25% of your attention is being spent trying to do this and thinking about this and this, that only leaves you like 25% to really learn. 

The last F I would say for forgetting is forget about what you know about a subject. Forget about situational things, but also forget about your limitations, because most people are out there and they have a focus on what they can’t do. They have a fixed mindset where they are saying, “Oh, I’m just too old,” or “Oh, I’m just not smart enough,” or “I didn’t go to that school,” or “I don’t have that background,” or “This runs in my family,” or whatever it is. They’ll fight for their limitations. If you argue for your limits, you get to keep them. If you argue for your limits, you get to keep them. 

I would stop fighting for them. Instead, just set the possibility that something else is possible. Just a quick hack; if you find yourself saying, “I’m not successful.” Just add the word yet. Three letters at the end of that limitation, so at least your mind opens up the possibility that it’s going to happen, because imagination is very powerful. But be very careful whenever you put behind the words I am. Those are very — The two smallest words, but they’re the most powerful words on the planet, because whatever you put after I am, it’s going to determine your life, an identity level. Forget about subjects, what you know. Forget about situations. Forget about limitations.

The A is active. If you want to learn any subject or skill faster, you need to be active about it. While I was saying that one of the challenges is most people grow up with this very passive education where they were just sitting quietly by themselves, not talking to their neighbors. They had to regurgitate information or [inaudible 1:02:07.6] passive, and learning is not a spectator sport. Learning is not a spectator sport. You have to get off the bench, roll up your sleeves and get involved. Ask questions. Be active. Take notes, like we’re talking about. 

The S in FAST stands for state, and this is really a key one. I want to really emphasize this. If you walk out with anything from this conversation know this, all learning is state dependent. All learning is state dependent. 

What is your state? A state is a simple word for snapshot of the mood of your mind and your body. How you feel, your motional state. The reason why it’s important is one of the keys when it comes to quick recall, if you want a better memory that I teach, is information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory. Information combined with emotions becomes a long term memory, and you know this because there’s probably a song, a fragrance, or a food, or something that could you take you back when to when you’re a kid, right? We all have it. 

There’s a food, a scent, a perfume, some fragrance, some kind of music, whatever. It takes us back decades. That’s because information combined with emotion became a long term memory. You didn’t have to repeat it over and over again. You did it once and it’ll be there forever. That’s really accurate when it comes to learning, that you have to add emotion into your learning process. Otherwise we don’t remember the boring. We don’t remember the mundane, because if your emotional state is zero, zero times anything is anything. You want to up your state. 

We have control of our state and how we feel, because what I challenge everybody here is to be a thermostat, not a thermometer. What’s the difference? A thermometer is something — Functionally, it reacts to the environment. It reflects the environment, what the environment is giving it. That’s not a thermostat though. A thermostat is different. Thermostat sets the standard. It sets a goal. It sets a vision, and all of a sudden what happens to the environment, the environment raises to meet that standard, because that’s the power of the thermostat, and I’m here to say that just remember who you are, that you’re more of a thermostat than a thermometer, and that whatever you set that too, you’re more likely to be able to achieve. The thing that you really want to set, the standard for most, is how you feel about things. You could control how you feel based on just your mind and your body. You change your thoughts, right? Thoughts are things. There’s a biology to belief as we’ve learned. Also, by moving your physiology, it affects your psychology. That changing your posture, doing deep breathing, doing the things that I do in my morning jumpstart your brain kind of thing, it changes your physiology, and all of a sudden it changes the way you feel. When you change the way you feel, you’re going to learn faster. 

Finally, the T in fast is what we covered already. It’s Teach. Because I think there’re two reasons to learn anything. You learn it. Number one, how it could benefit you. The other reason you learn anything is because how it could benefit somebody else. I would always learn — One of the reasons why I feel like I learn fast, is everything I learn, I learn to be able to share with somebody else. That’s who I am. I think everyone else should do that and should give and pay it forward that way. Don’t give to get, give because it’s who you are. 

They say those who can’t do teach, I never thought that was negative. I thought, “Wow! Those who can’t do, teach. When you teach it, then you could do it.” I would encourage people. That’s FAST; forget, be active, manage your state and learn with the intention of teaching somebody else. 

[1:05:32.6] MB: Really quickly, for somebody who wants to be — We covered so many topics today. For someone who wants to really simply and easily start implementing some of these ideas today, what would kind of one piece of homework be that you would give them as a starting point to begin? 

[1:05:48.6] JK: Yeah. I’ll give people two. Number one, I would invite people to listen to our podcast. It’s only 10 minutes long. It’s not guest-driven. It’s just one brain hack for busy people who want to learn fast or achieve more, on how to learn a language or how to get rid of negative habits, how to read a book a week and so on. It’s not a big time investment. There’s zero cost. 

Number two, I would say schedule it. That’s the big thing I would encourage people to do. I think people don’t — They talk about things all the time. If you want to turn knowledge into real power, you have to schedule it down to a task or an activity and you have to schedule it and treat it as time that you would never cancel it with somebody. You would never cancel on a family member. You never cancel this doctor’s appointment. You never cancel this meeting with an investor or your number one client, because if we talk about stuff, it’s a dream. When we write it down and you put it into your calendar, then it’s real. 

I would say that the most important thing to take something invisible and make it visible is make it visible on your calendar. I would say like even with your show, I would say, “Hey, this many times a week I’m going to listen to this show at this time.” Then once it’s in there, that’s your learning time, and it’s time you never compromise. 

I would encourage everybody to listen to this episode again. Maybe try — Actually, listen to this episode again and do the note taking with the intention of teaching, that capture and create. The big thing is, schedule your learnings. Everybody has a to-do-list. For me, two more important lists that I have is a not to do list. I never touch my phone the first hour of the day. I think it’s somewhat the most destructive things to your productivity or performance. I have a very large not to do list. 

I also have a to learn list, and I think that’s very important, that if you want to be a leader, that you always are learning. Dedicate a lifelong learning, and pick subjects and skills that you want to — Every 30 days, take on a new challenge, because when we’re growing, when we’re green we’re growing, when we’re brown we’re rotting. I think all of us, everyone who’s listening to this wants to grow to their fullest potential. I would say it starts with scheduling time for yourself and it’s time well-invested. 

[1:07:56.2] MB: Jim, where could people find you and your show online? 

[1:08:00.3] JK: The best place for people to go is kwikbrain.com. You have to spell Kwik — Kwik really is my last name. I didn’t change it to do what I do. It’s K-W-I-K, kwikbrain.com. That’s how people can see our podcast. You can see it on Sticher and iTunes and so on. 

Then I would love to continue the conversation on social media. I’ve very, very active on Facebook, Instgram and Twitter, just @jimkwik, J-I-M K-W-I-K. I would love people to actually tag both of us on this episode, so if you’re sharing this episode, that’s a way of you teaching somebody else, like we talked about. I think that’s important. I would love to know everybody’s big takeaway. If there’s one aha after this conversation that we had together, I would love for you to post that big aha, because that’s a way of you demonstrating, you’re taking the invisible and making it visible and you’re teaching it, and so you’re owning it and making it your own, and tag us un it, and I would love to read that and respond it and re-share it also as well. 

Yeah, Kwik Brain is the podcast, kwikbrain.com, K-W-I-K, and @jimkwik, K-W-I-K.

[1:09:02.7] MB: I think that’s great. I’ll second that. I respond to every listener tweet, and so definitely do that. We’ll both chime in and give you some feedback. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show. You shared a tremendous amount of wisdom today. I really appreciate all of the awesome insights that you shared with our listeners. 

[1:09:19.9] JK: Matt, this was tremendous. I really appreciate you and everyone who’s listening. Remember, you’re faster and smarter than you think. I wish your days be filled with lots of life and lots of love, lots of laughter and always lots of learning. Thank you. 

[1:09:31.5] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. 

I’d love to hear from you and I personally read and respond to every single listener email. I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. 

First, you’re going to get our exclusive weekly Mindset Monday email which listeners have been loving. It’s simple, short, sweet, articles and stories that we’ve enjoyed from the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions, vote on things like changing our intro and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How To Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. You can join by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 4222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, that helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes, which you can get at successpodcast.com. Just go there and hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Skeptics Guide To Meditation With Dan Harris

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought most self help was BS, to someone who uncovered the evidence based growth strategies that actually work. We talk about our guest’s journey from meeting self help gurus, to spiritual teachers, and neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body, and the simple, scientifically validated tool that evidence demonstrates is the best way to be happier with Dan Harris. 

Dan Harris is a correspondent for ABC News and the co-anchor for the weekend edition of Good Morning America. Dan regularly contributes to Nightline, 20/20, and World News and has covered stories from all over the world including war reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, the Congo and more. Dan is the author of the book 10% Happier and his work has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Dr. OZ, Good Morning America, and much more.

• How Dan went from being a skeptical hard-nosed reporter who thought meditation and self was was largely “bullshit”

• What happened when Dan had a panic attack in front of 5 million people on Live TV

• What it’s like to have your mind get hijacked by the most boring person alive

• Dan’s journey of visiting self help gurus, religious leaders, neuroscientists and more led him to one major conclusion about how to improve your brain and your body

• How many self help gurus are correct, but often not useful in a practical sense

• Simple and scientifically validated tool to deal with the voice in your head

• The secrets of "contemplative neuroscientists"

• How to train up the ability to focus, deal with emotions, be nice to other people, be nice to yourself, have patience, and be grateful

• The radical notion, supported by research, that you can literally train and transform your brain to prime it for happiness

• Happiness is skill, according to the science, and it can be trained

• There are thousands of kinds of meditation and it’s not useful to get overly dogmatic about the superiority of one method over the other

• Dan gravitates towards mindfulness meditation because it has valuable and strong research supporting it

• The basic and simple strategy you can use to start meditating RIGHT NOW

• You don’t need to clear your mind - clearing your mind is impossible

• Think about meditation like going to the gym - if you’re not sweating and panting youre not doing it right, meditation is like bicep curls for the brain

• The whole game of meditation is have the collision with the voice in your head and return to breath

• How to defeat anxiety, depression, and panic attacks using meditation

• What to do if you don’t have enough time to meditate

• The false belief that meditation is self indulgent and a waste of time

• The myth that you will lose your edge if you start meditating

• The different between responding wisely and reacting blindly

• How do we strike a balance between acceptance/mindfulness and achievement?

• Non-attachment to results - you are not fully in control of the universe - everything is interconnected and multifactorial - the wise stance for an ambitious person is to recognize that you shouldn’t be attached to results

• How do we battle back from nihilism if we go to deep down the path of buddhism?

• We do have some agency to impact the universe, but we aren’t the master of the universe

• The importance of seeing things as they are instead of as you want them to be

• It’s not about perfection its about marginal improvement, a 10% improvement compounds

• Meditation is simple but not easy

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Sam Harris

• [Website & App Download] 10% Happier

• [Book] Hoist on My Own Petard: Or: How Writing 10% Happier Threw My Own Advice Right Back in My Face by Dan Harris

• [Book] 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris

• [Book] Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg

• [Website] MNDFL Meditation

• [Article] Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits: A meta-analysis by Paul Grossman, Ludger Niemann, Stefan Schmidt, and Harald Walach

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

Today’s very special episode on the Science of Success, this is episode 100. I couldn’t imagine more than two years ago when we set out to start doing this show that we would do over a hundred episodes and we would interview so many amazing, incredible experts, but I’m super excited today. In this episode we’re going to discuss how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought self-help was BS to someone who uncovered the evidence-based growth strategies that actually work. 

We talk about our guest’s journey from meeting self-help gurus, to spiritual leaders, and neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body and the simple scientifically validated tools that evidence demonstrates are the best way to be happier, with our guest; Dan Harris. 

I’m going to give you four reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Yeah, there’s an extra fourth reason today. Why is that? Well, the fourth reason, I guess, really we’re going to start with the first reason. I have something special that we’re going to do in honor of our 100th episode of the Science of Success, but you have to be on the email list to be part of it. So if you’re not on the email list, you’re not going to be eligible. In fact, you’re not even going to hear anything else about the surprise, but it’s going to be awesome. We’re doing something really special for the 100th episode only for the people on the email list. So you should definitely sign up. 

Next, if you sign up on the email list, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, it’s called; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide that you have to sign up to get by joining the email list today. You’re also going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday, which listeners have been absolutely loving. It’s a short, simple list of articles, stories and things that we found exciting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions for our guests, vote on changes intro music and much more. So make sure you go to successpodcast.com and sign up for the email list right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, if you’re moving around, if you’re listening in your car, just text the word smarter, that’s “smarter" to the number 44222. Text “smarter” to 44222 to get all of these awesome benefits. 

In our previous episode, we discussed the groundbreaking research behind the ancient molecule that fuels peak performance, look at the foundations of neuro-economics, talked about how our brains react during social interactions. We examined how our brained are designed to connect and built to work cooperatively, and we dug into the power of oxytocin and how you can increase it in your life, with Dr. Paul Zak. If you want to know the science behind what makes your brain happy, listen to that episode.

[0:03:13.2] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dan Harris. Dan is a correspondent for ABC News and the co-anchor for the weekend edition of Good Morning America. He regularly contributes to Nightline  2020 and World News and has covered stories from all over the world, including war reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, the Congo and much more. 

Dan is the author of the book 10% Happier and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dr. Oz, Good Morning America and much more. 

Dan, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:45.0] DH: Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. 

[0:03:46.7] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to start out, you have a fascinating background and story around what kind of lead you down this path of studying self-help and meditation more deeply. Could you share that story? 

[0:04:00.8] DH: Sure. First, let me apologize for any background noise you may hear. I’m actually at my hose and there’s possibility for noise in the background. If that happens, I apologize in advance. I am a reporter, a pretty skeptical guy. I didn’t have a lot of preexisting interest in things like self-help and meditation. I think it’d be safe to say that I was, for most of my life, I thought that stuff was bullshit would be probably the technical word. 

What started to change that for me was that back in 2004, I had a panic attack on live television. I was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America, so that’s kind of a term of art for the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads the headlines. Just gives you a basic rundown of here are the headlines of the day. I had been — At that state in my career, it wasn’t my full-time job. I was kind of filling in that morning on that beat, but I had done it many times before. So there was no specific reason that I was aware of for what was about to happen, which was that I basically just freaked out. It was like 7:04 in the morning and that the main hosts of the show tossed it over to me and said, “Okay. Here is Dan. He’s going to give us the headlines in the morning,” and just a few seconds into — All I had to do was read six voice overs, just basically quick stories off of the teleprompter and then I’d be done. 

Again, I was in my early 30s. I had been doing this work for, at that point, 10 years. Again, this was a pretty basic assignment for me and a few seconds into it I just was overcome with fear. My heart started raising, my lungs seized up, I couldn’t breathe, my mind was raising, my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up. It was just classic fight or flight response, and I had to do something radical to get myself out of the situation, which was I just basically quit. I somehow squeaked out, “Back to you,” to the main hosts of the show, and they looked a little surprised and just took over from there. 

As embarrassing as that was, actually what was more embarrassing was what caused it. I was and still am, really, a very ambitious news reporter and that point in my life I had spent a lot of time overseas covering the aftermath of 9/11, so the war in Afghanistan. I’ve spent a lot of time in Pakistan as well. I covered The Second Intifada in Israel. I spent a lot of time in the West Bank in Gaza. I made something like six trips to Iraq covering the war there, and that had produced for me an undiagnosed depression. I was having trouble getting out of bed. I felt like I had a little grade fever all the time, and the coping mechanism, which was extraordinarily stupid, was I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. Just to be clear, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, where there’s pounding Quaaludes every five minutes. My drug use was not like that. It was pretty intermittent and it was never when I was working, and I was never high in the air or anything like that. 

After I had the panic attack I went to a shrink who is an expert in panic and he’s asking me a bunch of questions trying to figure out what went wrong. One of the questions he asked was, “Do you do drugs?” I officially said, “Yeah, I do a little bit.” He gave me a look, one of those classic shrinky looks that communicated the following sentiment, “Okay, asshole. Mystery solved.” He pointed out that even though I hadn’t been doing drugs that long or that frequently, it was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenalin in my brain and primed me to have a panic attack. 

That was a huge aha moment for me, and I realized very quickly that I’ve been very stupid and that set me off on a long, winding, weird journey that ultimately led me to meditation. I’ll stop talking there, but that’s the basic fact story.

[0:08:12.9] MB: One of the most interesting things that I really connected with about your story was how the panic attack itself was really a manifestation of years of buildup and things all kind of culminating in that single moment. It wasn’t just something at that particular time that triggered it, but it was all of these kind of underlying factors that slowly accumulated. 

[0:08:35.0] DH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Sorry, you’re hearing a little noise. It’s what I would call a sort of a cascade of mindlessness. It was the opposite of mindfulness, which is what you learn in meditation. Where I just wasn’t in touch with my own — I wasn’t in touch with a thunderously obvious fact that most of us are not in touch with, which is that we have a voice in our heads by which I’m not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices or anything like that. I’m talking about your inner narrator, the voice that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and asks you constantly, like wanting stuff or not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, judging yourself, thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever is happening right now. 

I have a friend, a guy named Sam Harris, who’s maybe familiar to some of your listeners. It’s a good friend of mind and he’s also really into meditation. He has this wisecrack that he makes occasionally, which is that when he thinks about the voice in his head, he feels like he’s been hijacked by the most boring person alive who just says the same shit over and over, most of it negative, all of it self-referential. 

What I realized, what I came to realize in my journeys after the panic attack was that when you’re unaware of this nonstop conversation that you are having with yourself, it yanks you around. It’s why eat when we’re not hungry or we check our email in the middle of a conversation with our child or we lose our temper when it’s really not strategically wise. For me, the voice in the head is why I had gone off to warzone without really thinking about the psychological consequences. I was really sort of wrapped up in idealism and curiosity and ambition, and then I came home, got depressed and was insufficiently self-aware to even know it, and then I blindly self-medicated and it all blew up in my face. 

[0:10:27.7] MB: I think that’s so powerful, and you see — One of the things that you talk about in the book and in the stories that you’ve shared is that often times all of these kind of self-help literature strikes many chords in the sense that it can kind of identify some of these problems and in many instances does a great job of pointing out that there’s negative voice in our heads, but sometimes can kind of go too far or doesn’t really offer practical strategies and solutions for resolving that. 

[0:10:55.4] DH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Just to fill in some of the blanks there. Many years after the panic attack, I ended up reading on the recommendation of one of my colleagues actually, a book by Eckhart Tolle, who may be familiar to your listeners, huge self-help guru. I had never heard of the dude. My producer recommend that I read him, because at the time, one of my areas of interest as a reporter was faith and spirituality, which was an interesting, I say areas of interest. I was forced to be interested in it, because I was raised basically by atheist parents. I did have a Bar Mitzvah, but only for the money. 

Mind boss, Peter Jennings, who’s now no longer with us, but he had the kind of strong-armed me into taking over the faith and spirituality feat. As a consequence to that, one of my producers recommend that I read this Eckhart Tolle book, and Tolle was the first person who pointed out to me via his book that I have a voice in my head, again, not schizophrenia, but this inner narrator that we’ve discussed, and it was just a massive, massive headline for me. I just was unaware. I knew that I had thoughts, etc., etc., but nobody had really articulated this idea of our ego, this inner yammering that we have all the time and how negative and destructive it can be when you’re unaware of it. 

The problem with Eckhart Tolle in my view, and I’m going to paraphrase a friend of mine who says, “Tolle is correct, but not useful.” In my view, Eckhart Tolle beautifully articulates this phenomenon of the voice in the head, but there are several problems. One is like he’s really weird about it at times and gauges his pseudoscientific dabbling and also like a lot of grandiose promises about spiritual awakenings and blah-blah-blah. That’s one problem for me. The other problem for me is that I had a hard time finding any actionable or practical advice about dealing with the voice in the head in his material. Ultimately, that’s what got me to — I’m very grateful to Eckhart Tolle. I make fun of him a lot. But if I hadn’t read his stuff, I never would have ultimately found meditation, which is a really simple secular scientifically validated tool for dealing with this fundamental fact about the human situation, which is that we have this stream of consciousness often driving us to do phenomenally stupid things. 

[0:13:36.6] MB: In your journey, you met with self-help gurus, spiritual leaders, scientists, people across the board. What was kind of the resounding conclusion from all of these different spheres of influence? 

[0:13:49.0] DH: Yeah. The self-help, my peregrinations in the self-help world, which I write about in the book, I mostly put in there for entertainment of value, because I think we really get much useful information out of it, but it was pretty weird, so it makes good copy, so I write about it. 

Once I started talking to scientists, specifically, neuroscientists who are looking at what meditation does to your brain and to your body, that’s really what — That for me was the signal moment. Just seeing that there’s this little community of what’s called contemplative neuroscientists, and now not so little, but smaller at the time when I was looking into it many years ago. When I started to look into it, they were doing this path, this groundbreaking research. For years, the dogma, the received wisdom in the world of neuroscience was that the brain doesn’t change after like your mid-20s. 

In fact, what the research on meditation has shown us is that you can train your brain very specific ways. In fact, we’re all training our brains all the time, mostly in negative ways, mindless ways, we’re training it to eat crappy food or to watch crappy television or to be totally distracted by our devices, but actually the act of meditation, and we can talk about what that actually is. The act of meditation is training up the qualities that I think most of us would agree we want, like the ability to focus, the ability not to be yanked around by your emotions, the ability to be nice to other people, the ability to be nice to yourself, the ability to have patience, the ability to be grateful for stuff. All of these qualities that we want are trainable, and that is a radical nation, because most of us think that happiness is dependent upon the quality of our childhood, the quality of our marriage, the quality of our work life, all of which are super important. I’m not down playing that at any way. I’m focused on all of those things. 

In fact, what the science is telling us is that happiness is a skill, that you take your responsibility for it and train and your own just the way you can work on your body in the gym. If you think about it, most of us spend so much time working on our bodies, working on our stock portfolio, our interior design, our cars, but no time working on and maintaining the one filter through which we experience everything, and that is our mind. To me, the resounding headline out of my time with this theory of scientist was that. 

[0:16:19.5] MB: When you talk about meditation and people throw around different strategies and types of meditation, everything from mantra-based meditation, mindfulness meditation, etc., what do you think kind of the — How would you define it and what do you think the most effective forms of meditation are?

[0:16:35.5] DH: I’ve read some of your writing about meditation as well, and I think it’s important to honor the fact that there are thousands of kinds of meditation and I don’t think it’s useful for me or anybody to get orally dogmatic about the superiority of one over another. The word meditation, as one of my scientist friends like to say, the word meditation is a bit like the word sports. It describes a whole range of activities. Water polo and badminton don’t have a lot in common. There are tons of kinds of meditation. 

I have gravitated towards something called mindfulness meditation, because that is the kind of meditation that has been on the receiving end of most of the scientific research. Not all. Lots of other kinds of meditation have been studied too, but most of the research that I’m aware of and the strongest research appears to really be centric around mindfulness meditation. 

I also like it because it’s a validly secular. Mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhist meditation, and you can make an argument, as I often do, that Buddhism itself isn’t even really a religion. It can be practiced as one, but in my view, it’s an interesting religion, because the more fundamentalist you get, the less metaphysical you become in my view within Buddhism. Some people disagree with me on that, so I want to be clear that that’s my view. 

Anyway, mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhism, but it’s stripped of all of the metaphysical claims and religious lingos and it’s delivered as a secular exercise for the brain and the mind, and some might say the heart, although I try to avoid that kind of language, because it can be off-putting to people like me. 

Basic mindfulness meditation is really simple. The beginning instructions are to sit comfortably with your spine straight so that you’re not falling asleep, although if you fall asleep, worst things could happen. It just probably means you need more sleep. Sit comfortably with your spine straight. A lot of people close their eyes, although you don’t have to. You can kind of soften your gaze and stare at a neutral point on the floor or whatever. That’s the first step. There are only three. 

The second step is just to kind of focus on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Usually you pick a spot where it’s most prominent, like your nose or your chest or your belly, and this is an important step, because you’re not actually thinking about your breath. You’re doing this interesting thing of just feeling it. You’re just feeling the raw data of the physical sensation of the breath coming in and going out. 

Then the third step is the key to mindfulness meditation, and this is the money move here, which is as soon as you try to do this seemingly simple thing of just feeling your breath coming in and going out, your mind is going to mutiny, your mind is going to go crazy. You’re going to start thinking about all sorts of stupid shit, like what’s for lunch? Do I need a haircut? Why Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for best picture in 1991? Blah-blah-blah. The whole game is just to notice when you become distracted and to start again and again and again and again. This is like a golf game with a million mulligans. 

In fact, a lot of people feel like they can — I hear this all the time. In fact, I’m writing a book that’s coming out at New Year’s that’s about all of the reasons why people don’t meditate. I would say the number two reason why people don’t meditate is because there’s this feeling of, “I can’t clear my mind.” The good news is you don’t need to clear your mind. In fact, clearing your mind is impossible unless you’re enlightened or dead. 

The way to think about meditation is similar to going to the gym. If you go to the gym and you’re not panting or sweating, you’re cheating. If you sit to meditate and all thoughts have disappeared, like you might want to go to the hospital, or you should go to the mountain top, because you are enlightened. 

Really, the whole game of meditation is just to over and over have this collision with the voice in your head, and the reason that’s valuable is that the more you become familiar with the insanity of your inner narrator, your ego, the less owned you are by the insanity. The goal of meditation is not to clear your mind. The goal is to focus your mind for just nanoseconds at a time on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, coming in and going out. Then when you get lost, start again, and start again. 

The three benefits that really emerge from this are; one, just a greater sense of calm; two, a greater focus, because you’re engaged in this daily, this exercise of trying to feel your breath coming in and going out and then when you get lost, just start again. That’s like a bicep growth of your brain on your ability to focus. Third is this word mindfulness. Mindfulness is just the ability — This is the most important benefits. It’s the ability to see what’s going on in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it. That benefit is derived from just over and over and over seeing how fucking crazy you are but not reacting to it. Just trying to see it nonjudgmentally, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. I just gotten distracted by a big blast of anger or I’m planning something or I’m thinking about something random or whatever. I don’t have to deal with it right now. I see what it is. I’m going back to my breath.” 

Then the value of that is in your — The rest of your life, when you’re ambushed by a big blast of anger or you’re tempted to eat the 18th cookie or you’re tempted to say the thing that’s going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage. You can catch it before you actually do it. It’s like having an internal meteorologist that’s pointing out the hurricane before it makes landfall. That, to me, is the game changer. 

[0:22:19.0] MB: I think that’s a great description, and I’ve heard one of the simplest kind of explanations to that is that meditation is the return to breath. It’s not this kind of state of having no thoughts, but it’s really the act of returning to that state whenever your mind wanders. 

[0:22:34.4] DH: Yes. It took me  years to internalize this, because all the basic meditation instructions — For years, I was a phenomenal — And I’ve been meditating for eight years. I’ve been publicly evangelizing for meditation for the last three and a half since my book came out and since I started this app also called 10% Happier, and a podcast also called 10% Happier. I’m not a pretty public evangelist for this thing. 

For much of that time, I have been a massive hypocrite, because when I first heard the beginning instructions of meditation as a type A driver, I basically ignored the third step, which is when you get distracted, start again, because I told myself, the cocky asshole that I am, I told myself, “I don’t need that step, because I’m going to win at this thing. I’m going to get so good that I’m not going to get distracted,” which is that it’s just impossible and so phenomenally stupid. It ignores that what you just said, which is that the act of meditating is noticing you’ll become distracted and starting again. That is the magic moment. If you can be cool to yourself in that moment instead of doing what I’ve done, which is engaging in endless and useless rounds of self-flagellation around my inability to focus, then the whole thing starts to flow with much more ease. 

[0:23:54.5] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:25:22.2] MB: Tell me the story of how you kind of fell off the wagon and maybe fell out of the rhythm of meditating. 

[0:25:29.3] DH: That has never happened actually for me interestingly. It is a real issue for many, many people. I don’t want to pretend that I’m especially disciplined. Just by way of an example to prove this to you, not long ago I have a huge problem around food. I’m a slim guy, but I have a huge sugar addiction, because I am an addictive personality. True story, not long ago I ate so many Oreos one night while watching TV with my wife that I woke up in the middle of the night and puked. 

I tell you that, because I don’t want you to think that I’m somehow some militaristic, inhuman, disciplined dude. I’m not. I have never fallen off the meditation wagon largely because I’m now like so publicly associated with meditation that I’m not willing to live with that level of hypocrisy, A. B, more importantly, because I have a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety and it’s so clear to me that when I do less meditation, like if I’m like on a big breaking news story and I’m only getting a few minutes a day, that I can see how much more noxious my inner weather becomes. 

I do many things in my life to stay off what Winston Churchill has called the black dog of depression and like daily exercise. It’s not because I’m super disciplined, it’s because it sucks so badly when I get depressed that I’m willing to be quite regimented about a few things in order to make sure it doesn’t happen. 

[0:27:08.4] MB: That’s something that I’ve dealt with as well, and I totally agree. It’s really funny, because the simplest things are often the most effective, right? Meditation, getting enough sleep, exercising on a regular basis, if you just do those, you’re 80% of the way there into battling back the anxiety and depression. 

[0:27:26.7] DH: Yes. I would add to that. I know you weren’t trying to make a comprehensive list, but I would just amplify your excellent point by adding in proper diet and having good relationships and meaningful work, whether it’d be volunteer work or your actual career, like a sense of meaning in your life and also a sense of social connection either to family members or friends. These are the things you need to do in order to maintain mental fitness in my view. 

There’s a funny story of my shrink, who’s a really great guy and a sort of no nonsense dude, also quite ambitious and very, very willing to point out when I’m being an asshole. Early on, when he was helping me avoid panic attacks, quit doing drugs, etc., etc., he used an animal analogy to explain to me that I really need to take care of myself, because of how prone I am to anxiety, depression and panic, the wonderful trifecta there. 

Years later, I went back to him and I said, “Remember that animal analogy you told me that I needed to treat myself like a stallion?” He’s like, “No. No. No. No. I said thoroughbred.” Of course, I, being the, as I mentioned before, cocky bastard that I am, heard stallion. In other words, if you are prone to these conditions, you do need to treat yourself like a finicky thoroughbred, a hothouse flower, you need to take care of yourself, because this is what will lower the odds or recurrence. There’s no silver bullet. Let’s just be clear about this. I certainly don’t think meditation is that silver bullet. There’s a reason why all of my endeavors are branded under 10% Happier, the book, the app, podcast, because I don’t want to do what I think — I don’t want to be guilty of what I think is rampant in the $11 billion howling sea of bullshit that is our self-help industry where they pedal these sort of reckless panaceas. I just think meditation is another arrow for your quiver. 

[0:29:30.7] MB: Tell me a little bit about the new project that you’re working on and kind of diving into why people don’t meditate. 

[0:29:37.4] DH: Yeah. It grows out of the — About two years ago, I started to work on a meditation app with my meditation teacher; Joseph Goldstein, who’s this kind of legendary teacher. We launched a sort of minimum viable product about two years ago and then we actually put up a much more fulsome 10% Happier app about a year ago, but we’re still very much in the early stages. Although growing fast, faster than I would have expected, because there seems to be a real appetite for this kind of instruction. 

I’ve learned so much in the course of becoming, in essence, a small businessman, an entrepreneur. What I’ve really learned is that I made some mistakes in my first book, because I kind of cavalierly assumed that if I demystified meditation and made it seemed fun and useful and told a funny story about it, that everybody would go and do it, but the human behavior changes so complex. 

I think we now — The culture has really changed on meditation. When I first started getting in it back in like 2008, 2009, there was a huge stigma around it. I think there still is in many quarters, but that has really — That stigma has declined in many ways. Where I think we are now as a culture, is that we have millions of people who know they ought to be meditating, but aren’t, can’t get over the hump to do it. 

In the course of doing, building this app, we did a lot of market and consumer research and started to identify the main, we call them secret fears, but basically another way you describe them is just main obstacles or myths, misconceptions and self-deceptions that could stand in the way of people meditating. That led to a book idea, like let’s taxonomize these myths and misconceptions, like make a full list of them and then really help people get over the hump. We did this ridiculous things where we rented an orange rock to our bus, and me and one of my favorite meditation teacher, a guy named, Jeff Warren, he’s a Canadian, hilarious meditation teacher. Me and him and a whole crew of people, we got in this bus and we drove across county over the course of 11 days and we met people who sort of embodied these various obstacles and we help them get over the hump and actually start a habit. 

Actually, the book isn’t out until January, but a lot of the material from the road trip is available on the 10% Happier app, so you can see the videos and get access to some of what we learned and also learn how to meditate there for free. 

Just a taste of some of the obstacles we encountered. The most obvious ones are — The biggest one, first of all, is time. People feel like I don’t have time to do this. I have good news on that score and then I also have better news. The good news is I think what you should be shooting for is 5 to 10 minutes a day-ish, daily-ish, trying to get 5 to 10 minutes in most days. That’s, I think, a really good goal to have. 

Here’s the better news; if you don’t feel like you’re ready to do that or if you, on one day, you’re just too busy to sneak that in, I believe firmly that one minute counts. We are on the app building a lot of — We have them up there now and we’re actually going to be doing even more, one minute meditation. As a way to help people get over what is the biggest obstacle, which is finding time for meditation. Too often, people think they need to do a really dedicated ton of time to it, and then it becomes another thing on there to do list, which is stressing them out, which is defeating the whole purpose of meditation, which should help you reduce stress. 

The second fear which we discussed, which is the idea that you’re supposed to clear your mind, which I think we’ve thoroughly debunked that in the course of this conversation. Others include, and this is particularly prevalent among women I found, the idea that meditation is self-indulgent. That sitting with your eyes closed and doing nothing. It’s just like a complete waste of time and you ought to be out doing much more useful things. 

My wife labored under that illusion for a long time. The answer to that of course is that if you are not taking care of yourself, you’re not equipped to help other people. It’s like that cliché from the airline safety instructions; put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others. 

Let me think of one other obstacle. Yes, I think will, I think, resonate with your audience. Another main misconception that stands in the way of a lot of people meditating is the idea that you’ll lose your edge if you do it. We spent some time in our road trip with police officers in Tempe, Arizona, and some of them were really worried that in their dangerous, fast-moving, stressful job, that if they started to meditate, that they would be ineffective. In fact, that it could be downward dangerous. 

Again, I think this is a misconception. I think there’s a reason why we’re seeing some of the most — People who are engaged in the most high-octane works; athletes, executives, scientists, lawyers are now using meditation, because it sharpens your edge. It puts you in the zone. It allows you to be less yanked around by random emotions so you can stay on task and be maximally effective. That’s why we’re now seeing a lot of police departments and Marines and soldiers embracing meditation. That’s kind of a sampling of some of the obstacles we found. If you want a full dissection, you’ll get it soon.  

[0:35:19.5] MB: There’s a couple of those that I’d love to break down. The idea that you’re losing your edge, I’ve definitely heard that, and it’s so funny, because when you really start practicing it, you can see how much more clear the edge has become. You’re so much more centered and focused. My reaction to stressful situations now, and it reminds me of, I think, a quote from — I think it’s Marine Corps snipers, which is slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. In the midst of crisis, my reaction is often to slow down, because if you’re slow and methodical, you can see all the pieces moving around and you can figure out, “What do I really need to do right now?” If you’re reacting really rapidly, you’re getting whipped around by kind of the winds of fate and running around like a chicken with your head cutoff. Often times you’re not only not being effective in trying to actually achieve what you want, but you’re being counterproductive. 

[0:36:10.7] DH: Yes, I think that was beautifully said and I think it’s fully accurate. I write about this a lot in my book, this lose your edge myth was a massive factor for me, and it is possible to misinterpret the message of mindfulness and to be passive in the face of life’s challenges. I’ve actually fallen into that rut, and I actually go into embarrassing detail about how I’ve done so in the book. 

Really, that is the opposite of what meditation should teach you to do. It doesn’t mean that you should be lifelessly and non-judgmentally observing everything and passively resigned in the face of challenges and emergencies, etc., etc. The goal is that you should learn how to responds wisely to things instead of reacting blindly. 

Most of time, there’s no buffer between the stimuli in our life and our blind reaction to it, but with meditation you’re able to get enough self-awareness so that maybe 10% of the time, when something infuriates you or scares you, you are able to respond, take a breath and respond with some wisdom rather than just getting yanked around by it. That is massively valuable in stressful situations, in strategic situations, in interpersonal relations, from your marriage, to your colleagues, to your bosses. This is a huge game changer. 

Again, it’s why we’re seeing some of the people we admire the most, the Chicago Cubs, the U.S. Marines, 50 Cent. That dude got shot nine times. I’m glad he’s using meditation to get some peace of mind. Some of the most aspirational figures in our culture are embracing this precisely because it enhances rather than erodes your edge. 

I think it speaks to a deep misconception in our culture, which is that if you get to happy, you’ll get complaisant. I think that is to misunderstand what happiness is, that people think that happiness is this like sort of passively resting on your laurels, but that to me isn’t what happiness is. 

[0:38:27.7] MB: I think you’ve kind of hinted at something that I think about a lot, which is how do we strike a balance between sort of acceptance and mindfulness, versus achievement. How do you think about that balance? 

[0:38:41.2] DH: Yeah. There’s something I’ve learned from my teachers, which has been really useful to me, which is the idea of non-attachment to results, which is going to sound counterintuitive at the beginning. If you’re achievement-oriented, it’s very natural to feel attached to the outcome of whatever project you’re working on. I have a startup company that is teaching people how to meditate through an app. I’m attached to whether we succeed. I have been writing a book that comes out in January. I’m attached to whether that succeeds, or that’s my inclination is to get overly attached. 

However, that is to willfully overlook some rather obvious things, which is that you’re not fully in control of the universe and everything is interacted multifactorial and the wise stands for an ambitious person, is to recognize that it makes sense to work really hard and stress and plot and plan on whatever you’re working on, but then to recognize that at some point you lose control. If you’re not overly attached to the outcome of whatever you’re working on, then you have more resilience to bounce back. 

I have so many projects that I’m working on my life; my journalism career at ABC News, where I’m constantly launching investigative projects, to the app that I’ve mentioned, the books that I’m writing, I have a podcast, and I’m always pitching new ideas. Sometimes things don’t work or they don’t go as well as I’ve planned. If I’m so knocked out and paralyzed by any setback, because I’ve become so overly attached to the success of a thing, it hinders my ability to be resilient and, really, to analyze with dry ice what went wrong so that I don’t do it again. 

Yeah, that to me has been just incredibly valuable lesson. Don’t get me wrong, I still — I’ve had a couple of setbacks lately that really threw me for a loop and I mourn the loss of things when they don’t go my way, and I can probably be pretty unpleasant if my wife just walked into the house and I gave her the phone, she would probably tell you how unpleasant I can be in the days or weeks after something doesn’t go my way. I think my bounce back time has gotten much better. 

[0:41:07.4] MB: If we falloff kind of on the opposite end of this spectrum in terms of going down the rabbit hole of thinking really fundamentally that everything is so interconnected, so multifactorial, that it’s really beyond our control, how do we — If we’re in kind of that deep end of the pool, how do we pull back and still strive to build or achieve things in the world? 

[0:41:29.3] DH: Yeah, it’s a great question among many great questions. That’s to misunderstand, and that’s like one of the classic pitfalls of this path is to fall into a kind of nihilism that like, “Oh, yeah. Everything is so deeply interconnected, so fleetingly impermanent, that there’s no way I can have agency.” That’s not true. It’s somewhere in the middle there that you certainly have some agency and some ability to affect the universe, the world around you. You’re just not the master of the universe. Sort of figuring out that titration is key, and figuring out what leverage you actually can impact and which you cannot is really key. I don’t have some secret sauce, some magic, some silver bullet that will allow you to navigate this. It’s I’m constantly trying to figure out in my own life. The best way to proceed is from a position of clearly seeing what reality is and that, like it or not, is reality. 

[0:42:30.7] MB: I think that’s a great point, and something that meditation I think really helps crystalize is the ability to both see and accept things as they are as supposed to as you want them to be. 

[0:42:42.5] DH: It’s exactly right. Again, it’s not like I don’t struggle with this. I do. Maybe there are meditation masters out there who have some beautiful equipoise that allows them to move to the world like a ninja without getting upset when things don’t go their way. That’s not me. Again, it goes back to my whole 10% happier thesis. This is not about perfection. This is just about marginal improvement. I would add, since I’m now stuck with this stupid 10% joke, that I kind of pulled that on my butt. The 10% compounds annually. The more you practice, the better you get at this stuff. 

[0:43:20.0] MB: That’s another great point as well and something that I think about a lot kind of on this journey. In many ways, the journey of the podcast as a whole is about this compounded improvement and the idea that if we can make incremental improvements in our ability to manage our emotions, to think more clearly about reality, to understand, as we talk a lot about in this show, the mental models that kind of govern the world. Those improvements compound overtime to produce a really drastically different kind of understanding of the world, of yourself, and really your ability to create and achieve things in that world. 

[0:43:54.0] DH: I think that’s exactly right. I think it’s a really positive useful message to be spreading, so good on you. 

[0:44:00.4] MB: For somebody wants to get started with meditation, what would either be maybe kind of the simple piece of homework you would give them as a starting point, or just something that you would say to them as like, “Here’s the dead simple way you could start literally today and just try it out.” 

[0:44:19.3] DH: Yeah. One overarching thing is that it should be cheap or free. I’d be a little weary of somebody asking you for a ton of money to learn how to meditate. There are lots of options. The three that come to mind are; one, the way I learned how to meditate, which his by reading a few good books. As I articulated earlier, the basic instructions are pretty simple. It’s very easy to lose your way though, because usually people start to have a lot of questions. I just read a few basic meditation books and just went from there. 

One that I like in particular is called Real Happiness by my friend, Sharon Salzberg, who’s just a master teacher. Pick that book up and it will explain the basics to you and you’re up and running. Come January, the book that I’m working on about the obstacles to meditation will be the book that I will recommend the most, because that book will also include a ton of, “Here’s how to meditate.” Anyway, one option is just pick up a good book. 

The other option is an app. Obviously, on partial, our app, 10% Happier, but there are a lot of good apps out there and all of them, to my knowledge, teach you the basics for free. For example, if you download our app, there’s a whole course teaches you how to do it. You don’t have to pay us anything and you can use that material as long as you want. Frankly, you never have to pay us anything. If you want to subscribe, great, we love that, but it’s not mandatory. If you don’t like our app, there are plenty of options out there. That’s another tip I would recommend, so book, apps. 

Then third is if you live in a city where you can go to an in-person class, I highly recommend that. I think it’s really useful to be in a room with other people who want to do it. I think that has kind of an HOV lane effect, and to be in a room with a teacher who you might want to taste test a little bit, go to different places. I live in New York City. There are tons of options. There are a bunch of — There are meditation studios all over the city. Some of them are Buddhist, some of them are Hindu, some of them are secular. Like this one chain that I particularly like called Mndfl, M-N-D-F-L, which is run by a friend of mine. 

L.A. has a bunch of both secular and Buddhist meditation centers. We’re seeing secular meditation centers popping up in Miami, Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C. and elsewhere. Also, if you live in a smaller place, you may not have a meditation studio per se available, but there are often teachers who will teach some MBSR; mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is, again, the secular meditation secular, which is an eight-week course and it’s offered all over the country. Just do a little Googling. You might be able to find somebody in your area. If you live in an area where there are no meditation teachers and you really want a teacher, there are teachers who are willing to teach via Skype. 

[0:47:10.9] MB: What has been the hardest thing for you about becoming a consistent meditator?

[0:47:15.7] DH: Like I said before, for me, consistency hasn’t been that hard and I feel a little sheepish saying that, because I think it really is hard for a lot of people. Working on this book, the thing I learned about human behavior change is perhaps the most important attitude with which to approach it is one of experimentation and exploration. You should know, we are not wired as — We did not evolve for long-term planning about our health and well-being. We evolved to escape from saber-toothed tigers and get the meal today. We evolved for pretty immediate gratification and also to get our genes into future generations. 

Changing your behavior to improve your health and wellness is a really hard thing, and I think just being aware of that and giving yourself a break and going into any formation of a new habit with a spirit of like, “I’m going to experiment. I know I’m going to fail, and that’s cool.” Rather than trying to rely on the extremely ephemeral and unreliable internal reservoir of willpower, which is a huge — I think often sort of destructive myth. In the behavior change world, people think, “Oh, well. I don’t have willpower.” No. You need to experiment and see what works for you. What works with your schedule? What provides you with the benefits you need to be pulled along by the benefits, by the positive outcomes of the practice rather than trying to whip yourself over the back and force yourself to do the thing, because that’s not a recipe for a sustainable habit. 

Boiling it down; just experiment. Try different  times a day, try different apps, try different books and just know that you will fail and that you just need to have the resilience to get up and start again once you fall off the wagon. It’s totally fine.

[0:49:17.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more about you, want to dig in and read the books, check out the app, where can people find you and these resources online? 

[0:49:25.7] DH: Thanks for that. The book is available on Amazon. The app is available — If you have an Apple device, you can download, it’s in the App Store. If you don’t have an Apple, we’re working on an android version, which should be available in the pretty near future, I hope. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can get a web-based version at 10percenthappier.com. The podcast; 10% Happier Podcast, is available wherever you get your podcasts. 

I think the pitch for the podcast is that basic meditation is pretty basic. The cliché is that it’s simple but not easy. It can start to feel a little stupid after a while just sitting there and watching your breath. One thing that I found to be incredibly useful is to have sources of ongoing inspiration, and that’s why I started the podcast, because you’ll hear from great meditation teachers, you’ll hear from celebrities. We’ve had the lead singer of Weezer on. We’ve had athletes on. We’ve had Marine Corps, folks from the U.S. Military. Josh Groban, the singer. Blah-blah-blah. We have lots of people on and we talk about meditation. How it plays out in an individual mind and life. Talked to cops. We talked to all sorts of people. I find that, for me, as the host, and hopefully for the listener, that this is just a way — It’s just like a support for your [inaudible 0:50:39.6].

[0:50:40.3] MB: Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your amazing story and all of these wisdom about meditation. 

[0:50:47.9] DH: Thanks for having me. Great questions. Really appreciate it. 

[0:50:51.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and personally read and respond to every single listener email.

I want to give you a couple of reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, we’re doing something special in honor of our 100th episode, but you have to be on the email list to find out what it is and to be eligible to participate. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. It’s short, simple, awesome articles, TED Talks and stories, things that we found exciting in the last week. You’re also going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests, vote on major changes in the show. If you want to be part of what we’re creating here, make sure to get on the email list. 

Lastly, you’re going to get our awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. Listeners have been absolutely loving that guide. It’s super helpful and it’s exactly the system I use to keep track of all the information I get from interviewing amazing guests, reading a ton of books and much more. Be sure to sign up and join the email list today. You can do that simply by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get everything we talked about in the show, all the information, links, transcripts and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can find them at our website, successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Ancient Molecule You Can Use To Unlock Peak Performance with Dr. Paul Zak

In this episode we discuss the groundbreaking research behind the ancient molecule that fuels peak performance, the foundations of neuroeconomics, how our brains react during social interactions, we examine how our brains are designed to connect and built to work cooperatively, we dig into the power of oxytocin and how you can increase it in your life, and much more with Dr. Paul Zak.

Dr. Paul Zak is founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology, and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He was also among the team of scientists who were the first to use brain imaging to identify the role of oxytocin as a key driver of trust, love, and morality that distinguish our humanity. Paul is the author of the new book Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies and has appeared on ABC World News, CNN, Fox Business, and more.

• Paul founded the field of Neuroeconomics - what is that?

• How are humans able to interact with total strangers when that is impossible in the animal kingdom?

• How do our brains balance the risks of meeting a stranger vs the benefits of increased social influence?

• Our brains live in this soup of chemicals, none of which we are aware of consciously

• How Paul’s groundbreaking research transformed what scientists thought about the production of oxytocin and how humans build trust

• Testosterone inhibits oxytocin synthesis

• People are complicated, its important to have alot of acceptance

• Oxytocin is an on/off switch

• Paul challenges the listeners to a fight!

• Our brains naturally help us adapt to the environment we are in

• How do we get people in groups to perform at their highest level

• How you can train your brain to release more oxytocin

• Learn how to read the emotional state of the people around you

• “All research is me-search”

• How “listening with your eyes” can help boost your oxytocin and help you become more in sync with people

• The “evil trick” you can use to get tons of information when you meet someone (it’s NOT what you expect!)

• Our brains are designed to connect, we want to be connected. We are naturally open to touch. Our brains are built to work cooperatively.

• Strategies you can use in your daily life to increase your oxytocin

• How companies can measure and manage their culture for high trust and high performance

• The 8 key building blocks leaders can use to build trust and improve high performance

• Paul focuses on measuring brain activity and use that to solve real problems that humans have.

• Its all about empowering humans to be their best selves

• The neuroscience firmly demonstrates the power and vital importance of sleep

• How you can implement concrete changes to get the biggest bang for your buck in building a culture of high performance

• We trust people more who are their real, vulnerable, natural selves

• Why you should replace “how was your weekend” with “hey you look really <insert emotion on their face>” to build deeper relationships

• Almost no human can survive on their own - we only survive in groups - we must understand how to engage the groups that we are constantly around

• Science predicts, and data strongly supports, that people want to be and enjoy being part of high performance groups

• Relationships are super important

• Why isn’t work an adventure? How can we make a work an adventure

• Connecting, touching, giving a gift - give the gift of connection, empowerment, love, to someone around you

• Effective social behaviors are rooted in SERVICE and serving others

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies by Paul J. Zak

• [Book] The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works by Paul J. Zak

• [Website] Ofactor

• [Personal Site] Paul J. Zak

• [Video] Paul Zak: Trust, morality - and oxytocin

• [Video] TEDxAmsterdam 2012: Paul J Zak - The Biology of Good and Evil

• [HBR Article] The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies by Sarah Green Carmichael

• [Wiki Page] Peter Drucker

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss the groundbreaking research behind the ancient molecule that fuels peak performance, the foundations of the neuro-economics, how our brains react during social interactions. We examine how our brains are designed to connect and build to work cooperatively. We dig into the power of oxytocin and how you can increase it in your life, and much more with Dr. Paul Zak. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another sweet surprise bonus guide when you sign up today by joining the email list. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s simple, it’s short, it’s a few things every single week that we find interesting and exciting. 

Lastly, you’re going to get a listener exclusive chance to shape the show; vote on guests, vote on and submit questions to our guests. In fact, we’ve got an interview coming up this week where we had listeners submit questions, and we’re going to be asking those questions and calling specific listeners out that gave us those questions. You get to vote on new intro music, changing all kinds of pieces of the show. It’s an awesome chance to shape the podcast. So be sure to sign up for the email list. All three of those reasons are great reasons to join the emails today. Just go to successpodcast.com and signup right on the homepage, or just text the word “smarter" to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to use mind control techniques to create any habit you want. Why we’re driven much more by pain than pleasure. We looked at the Hook Model for describing human behavior, talked about how to hack your reward to change your behavior, and the power of tiny amounts of friction and much more with our guest, Nir Eyal. If you want to hack your behavior to make or break any habit, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:30.8] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show; Dr. Paul Zak. Paul is the founding director of the Center for Neuroecoomics Studies and a professor of economics, psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University. He was also among the team of scientists who are the first to use brain imaging to identify the role of oxytocin as they key driver of trust, love and morality that distinguishes our humanity. Paul is the author of the new book Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies and has appeared on ABC World News, CNN, Fox Business and more. 

Paul, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:04.4] PZ: Matt Bodnar, great to be on with you. 

[0:03:06.5] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your background, I’d love to go back and start with kind of your story and some of the early experiments that you did that really uncovered the power and the role of oxytocin. 

[0:03:22.5] PZ: Sure. I’m a very confused person. I have spent both the economics and neuroscience in both my training and my research help start this field called neuro-economics that we could talk about a bit. 

Anyway, one of the kind of deep questions that I’ve been studying for almost 20 years now is the role of interpersonal trust in explaining why countries perform better, why companies perform better, why individuals have more friends, are happier. As part of this quest, I was looking for a signal on the brain that would tell us essentially why we can live around strangers all the time. If we think of our closest genetic relatives; chimpanzees, they don’t like other members of their species they don’t know. 

I just came back to Atlanta a couple of days and I spent six hours on a metal tube with 150 other humans being dowsed around. You put chimpanzees on a metal tube, don’t even bounce them, put them in a metal tube and you see fur and blood to be all over the floor. How do we do that? How do we get a sense that you met wonderful human being, fun to hang out with you and your producer are often clearly a sketchy dude, don’t want to be around him. We have to have something in our heads that say, “Matt is safe. Austin, not so much.” Otherwise we can’t live in New York City or any big place we don’t know people all the time. 

Basically, the punch line is the secret to my success has been to read research and animals and figure out a way to apply that to human. We began running experiments in which we could have people share money with each other, and that money would grow if they shared it, but then they would lose control over it. Animals have been shown that when an animal encounters another member of a specie that it recognizes, usually by smell, think of this in a burrow. I ran into Matt in a burrow and I sniff and I can say, “Oh, that’s Matt. I know him. He’s awesome.” And so my brain makes this chemical oxytocin and it motivates me to affiliate with you so we can — I’d love to stay warm, we can protect each other, we can hangout, we can dig in the burrow, whatever we’re doing. Then if I smell an Austin coming in, then I’m like, “Oh, no! Fear response, aggression. I’ve got to battle this guy.”

It turns out that the same signal works in humans. In fact, it works in overdrive in humans that when someone intentionally trusts us or more generally shows us a kindness, our brain make this chemical, oxytocin, and it motivates us to invest effort into helping that person. 

If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, the cost and benefit of being around strangers are not always clear. The cost of being around a stranger is that person might hurt me, might steal from me, could be dangerous, but the benefit is that I might find a project to do with him or her or I might be romantically attracted to that person or I might have that person join my circle of friends. 

Our brains are constantly balancing the benefits that come with building more social relationships with a cost of having the wrong person or people in those relationships. Oxytocin seems to be a key part of that signaling mechanism in the brain.  

[0:06:43.4] MB: I love the focus on looking at the animal kingdom and trying to understand how do these parallels play out in human behavior. One of the things that we talk about all the time on the show is how evolution has shaped the human brain, and it’s done a lot of good but it’s also baked in these cognitive biases and traps that we fall into. Tell me a little bit more about how that drove your research. 

[0:07:11.0] PZ: Yeah, I guess the major focus of my research in the last 20 years has been — I’ll just tell you that in a second, but I just had this socialization for talent development big HR meeting in Atlanta and I gave a keynote there and I started out by saying, “None of us will be ever out of a job, because the humans are complicated.” 

My talk was about how to understand some of that complication. By complicated I mean that if we run an experiment and we have people do a particular task and you put 20 people doing that task, you’ll get 15 different brain responses, not just behaviors, but brain response. 

As you sort of suggested, Matt, the selection pressure for higher cognitive abilities evolutionary has been very weak and so we see high variation in how people respond to different environments, and those manifest as cognitive biases, the use of heuristics. Our brains live in this super chemicals none of which we’re aware of consciously. 

A lot of the work we’ve done changes that chemical soup and then we can map out how that changes responses to a particular choice, and I do think choice is an interesting place to focus on because eventually all the information you take in — Not all of it, but a lot of it, boils down to doing something with it, which ends up being a choice. Much of my work has focused on where that variation in decisions comes from, and there are sort of trivial variations, male, female, young, old. There are also super interesting weird variations like I test you, Matt, today, and then I test you a week later to do the same thing and your brain and your behavior are totally different. I want to know why that’s the case. 

[0:09:05.3] MB: I think that’s another really important point, which is that this chemical soup as you called it or super chemicals is something that’s taking place in our brains that we are not consciously aware of. 

[0:09:16.4] PZ: Yet because our brains produce language, there’s this expectation that we have kind of insight into the brains inter-workings. In fact, what [inaudible 0:09:27.7] we always ask people, “Why do you do this? Do you think this was an interesting choice?” The whole reason we started measuring brain activity, honestly, was because people’s modal response to most experiment stimuli was, “Oh, I don’t know why I did this.” 

It’s pretty hard to build a theory of human behavior on I don’t know. Other than that it’s like having you eat a hamburger and saying — Asking your liver how it’s processing that beef. Your liver can’t tell you. Honestly, your brain can’t really tell you. I can force you to say something to me, because I know you can create some language. It doesn’t mean it has any insight into what is going on. 

Most of what your brain does, perhaps 99%, is in fact unconscious, and there’s a good reason for that that we could talk about. We’re not just aware of what we’re doing, and that’s okay. It just means that people are complicated. 

[0:10:21.0] MB: Let’s bring this back. Tell me about — You mentioned some of the early experiments that you did with trust and with money, what were the results of that and what did that teach you about Oxytocin? 

[0:10:33.1] PZ: Right. In humans prior to the experiments we started running around 2002, the brain was only known to make oxytocin when humans gave birth, breastfed or had sex. All three of those activities are way too messy for me to run in my lab. I don’t want to get involved. 

Based on the animal literature, we thought that if someone intentionally trusts you, your brain would produce oxytocin, maybe, and maybe that oxytocin would impact your behavior. In fact, that’s we found. We found that the more someone intentionally trusts you with money, but with other stuff we show subsequently, the more your brain produce oxytocin, which is a very rapid signal in the brain. It has about a three-minute half life, so it’s like a quick on and off switch. It says, “Oh, this guy is cool. He wants to play nice. I’ll make this chemical.” And oxytocin predicted how much money people would reciprocate to someone who trusted them. 

It’s not only that we respond to positive overtures from strangers. It’s that this chemical motivates us to engage with them in a cooperative way. I think of oxytocin as the biological basis for the golden rule. If you play nice with me, most of the time I’m going to play nice with you. Of course, most of the time is where the rubber hits the road. We spent about 10 years classifying the factors that inhibit or promote oxytocin release, and we really, really know this, because we also developed a way to shoot synthetic oxytocin into living human brains safely, and in that case we can erratically increase the amount of trust, generosity, cooperation that people have.  

[0:12:09.0] MB: Tell me about some of these factors that inhibit or promote oxytocin release. 

[0:12:13.4] PZ: Let’s talk about your producer, Austin. Why is he a sketchy guy? Because he’s a young alpha male. I’m looking at his picture right now. Look at that guy. He’s a specimen. He’s got a very high testosterone, and testosterone has been shown to inhibit oxytocin synthesis. Indeed, when we run experiments, when we give men synthetic oxytocin, we create a bunch of Austins, and sure enough they are more self-focused. They are more entitled. They demand more from others. They offer less to others. It’s all about them. 

I can tell you a nice evolutionary story on why between 15 to 25, young male should be aggressive and think only about themselves, but nonetheless that’s the factor. You have pretty reliable markers for testosterone levels, hairiness, deep voice, long chin, but we don’t know second to second how much testosterone is in our system, because like every other neuro-chemical system in the body, it’s adapting second by second to help us survive or reproduce. 

Other factors we find in women, estrogen levels which vary twice over the course of a month over a women’s menstrual cycle. Estrogen increases the uptake of oxytocin. For listeners who are female or who have girlfriends or wives, when you go to the movies with them and every once in a while for seemingly no reason they cry at the Bambi movie, they could be that they’re just more sensitive to oxytocin, which increases our sense of empathy and caring, and that may be driven by changes in estrogen levels. Progesterone, which increases when women are ovulating or pregnant, inhibits the action of oxytocin. High stress inhibits oxytocin release. 

Again, normally, I maybe want to affiliate and meet with Matt and hangout, but if I’m under high stress, then I’m in survival mode and I’m less interested in hanging out with new people and more interested in getting to the next 10 minutes. Anyway, whole variety of factors that we’ve been able to characterize, affect the way we are. Again, I may run into you down the street, Matt, and not know that you’re super stressed out and you treat me like a jerk and I say, “Oh! Matt’s a real jerk,” and what I didn’t know was that your dog just died or you just got in a car accident or something stressful really happened to you and you’re just having a bad day. 

I think for listeners, the punch line I’ve learned for doing this for 20 years is that not only are people are complicated, but it’s important to have a lot of acceptance for the degree of complication that the people around also aren’t even aware they’re giving off. We’re complicated and we’re unaware that we’re complicated. I think the only way to go through life is just to be accepting and just to say, “Hey, it’s not that Matt is a bad guy. He might have just had a bad day or a bad week, and that’s okay. I don’t want to rule him out from ever interacting with him. There’re maybe a lot of good things that I could do with Matt.” So I become much more accepting and tolerant of people around me. How about that? 

[0:15:23.5] MB: If I’m somebody that cries all the time at a movie, does that mean that I have a higher sensitivity to oxytocin or that I have higher sort of natural oxytocin levels? 

[0:15:33.1] PZ: Yeah. Oxytocin, it’s a really on-off switch, so it’s not a level of response. It’s a change from baseline. I’ll tell you something embarrassing about myself. I’m going to answer that question with a story. We’ve done a lot of work on persuasion and storytelling, and I know you’ve worked a lot in marketing, Matt, so we could talk about that. 

We started doing this work because I was on an airplane coming home from Washington, D.C., and my kids were little — I have two little girls, and I was tired and I couldn’t work, because it was turbulent. So I was watching The Million Dollar Baby, this Clint Eastwood movie, which I had never seen, and it’s a father-daughter story, has a very sad ending. The next thing I know, the guy next to me on the plane is poking me saying, “Sir, do you need some help. Is something wrong with you?” Not only was I crying, like every orifice in my face was shooting out goo. It was really embarrassing. 

When I got back to my lab, I mentioned that to some of the people I worked with, and I said, “You know, I was cognitively attacked. Maybe I was a little tired or lonely, but I knew I where I was. I knew this is a fictional story and yet I was so absorbed in that story that I couldn’t help but cry at the movies.” It turns out, since I had children, I become much more of a movie crier, and there’s a reason for that. As you age, your testosterone goes down, so the relative effect of oxytocin goes up. When you commit a relationship, your testosterone falls. When you have children, your testosterone falls. I don’t have data for this, but in my personal experience, if you have girl children, you pick out little dresses everyday of your life, your testosterone goes to zero. You become a big girly man. 

Again, there’s probably a good adaptive story evolutionary and why that’s the case. For the guys listening, if you’re in a relationship or have children or have girl children, don’t worry, all of us men have this high octane version of testosterone, which has the initials DHT. It has a long name behind it. DHT, you can turn on in a second. I’m making a joke, because I’m 6”4’, 205 , I’m not a girly man, but I am very sensitive now because I have kids. I wasn’t before I had kids. If you want to mix it up with me, I’m happy to do that. I can turn on the DHT like nobody’s business. Anyway, I’m kind of making jokes here. 

It does mean that our brains are helping us adapt to the environment we’re in, and the part of that is the social environment. Again, if you’re around children, if you’re around women and you need to be more sensitive, a lot more oxytocin and less sort of testosterone-driven, your brain will adapt to that. These systems are very adaptive even in adults, and so the more able you are to connect to people, the more you release oxytocin, the more you are in tune with the emotional state of people around you, which is also a very effective tool to have. 

I don’t know about you guys who are young, Matt and Austin, but when I was — Under 30, I couldn’t tell you the emotion of anybody around me. I didn’t really care. I was just like driving a thousand miles an hour in everything that I did. Now, I’m much more socially aware and I think that I’m a better social creature to people around me. Anyway, it’s a kill you can develop. If a big stupid jock like me can do it, then you guys can certainly can do it. 
 
[0:18:46.7] MB: I think you’re maybe the first guest to challenge the listeners to a fight, which I think is pretty funny. 

[0:18:52.7] PZ: I’m ready, man. Come on! I like, Matt, that you talk in your blog about performance. I think one of the most interesting things — I’m cutting you off. I’m sorry. I love high performance. I think that’s — The current work I’m doing is really focusing on how do we get people in groups to perform at their highest levels? I think it’s a really interesting and hard problem. I don’t know if you want to go there, but maybe that’s the pitch for why I’m still a — Like all of us who are men. We’re still kind of like 18-year-old doofusses, because we just want to do super cool stuff all the time, right? Let’s be honest. 

Women too, and a lot of women are really high performers. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sexist there, but I don’t know. I can’t think of anything more interesting than knocking a baseball out of a park or jumping out of an airplane. I don’t know. I just love that stuff.  

[0:19:42.8] MB: I definitely want to dig into that. Before we do, I want to dig out a little bit more about oxytocin. Tell me what are some things — You mentioned kind of dosing people with oxytocin in your lab. What are some ways we can naturally increase our oxytocin levels. Is that something you would recommend, or would you even recommend potentially trying to take oxytocin?

[0:20:03.5] PZ: On the later, it’s a no. Oxytocin is a prescription drug. You cannot get it without a prescription from a physician. There are homeopathic versions sold on the internet, which are of course are just bogus. Don’t waste your money buying Liquid Trust or some other company that claims that there’s one part per bazillion of oxytocin. There’s nothing in there that have an effect. 

In fact, when we do experiments, we’d put about two teaspoons of oxytocin up your nose to get into your brain. It turns out the nose is a good portal to the brain for physiologic reasons. Two teaspoons of fluid up your nose is not really pleasant. Yeah. Really for research only. There have been a number of clinical trials that have looked at Oxytocin infusion for things like autism, schizophrenia and basically the effects are really, really mild, because the larger brain system that oxytocin activates is just regulated or damaged in these patients. 

Taking oxytocin, not a good idea, but training yourself, training your brain to release more of it, probably a good idea, because it will make you a better social creature, it will make you more empathic to people around you, which means you can read the key source of information, which is their emotional state. 

Again, when I was 18 or 30 or something, I wasn’t really good at reading people’s emotional states and I ran over people a lot. As you can tell, I talk fast, I have high energy, I move fast, and a lot of people, that’s not an effective to interact with them. Now that I’m a little older, and this saying in psychology that all research is me search, so maybe I had issues and that’s why I studied this chemical that makes us better social creatures. 

Now, I’m much more in tune with people around me — How they’re responding to me, how they are responding to the environment. I’ve trained myself to release more oxytocin, and I know that because I do a lot of experiments on myself, because I have a lab. 

Some things you can do are — Gosh! There’s so many that we’ve shown experimentally. One of my favorites is called listening with your eyes. I’m actually looking at your picture, Matt, even though we’re only on audio. When I’m talking, I’m actually making eye contact with you. Next time you’re with some friends or with your romantic partner, if you put down your phone, there are no screens in front of you and you gave that person in front of you your full attention. If you listen with your eyes, you’re giving this person the gift of being fully present in that conversation, and we’ve shown that when you do this, release oxytocin, that person becomes more in tune with you. 

Dogs actually do this to us. Dogs make eye gaze and cause our brains to make oxytocin. Other things you can do include things like touch. If people have ever seen my TED Talk, at the end of that I gave a person, the audience a hug. I got outed as a hugger, and now I just hug everybody. I go into a business meeting and if people want to shake hands, I say, “Hey, I hug everybody. I’m a connection guy.” 

Boy! People’s faces light up and all of the sudden I’ve got a ton of information from you. It’s almost an evil trick for listeners. If you hug somebody, you get smell information, you get touch information, you’ve invaded their space for 10 seconds or whatever, 5 seconds. It’s a great way to accelerate the connection that you’re trying to build somebody. What I do is I pre-announce. I just say I hug everybody. 

Maybe 1% of humans I’ve interacted with in the last seven years were refused a hug, because they’re socially anxious or they’re super old or whatever, but everybody else is happy to get a hug. Yeah, touch, really important. 

Sharing a meal, actually eating with another person will release oxytocin. There are tons of things. I will go through more, but I certainly have a top 20 list I can go through. 

[0:23:51.7] MB: No, I think those are some great resources. I love the evil trick of hugging people. I’ve even heard something sort of similar on a scaled on version, which is that you should never fist bump, you should always do a hand shake, because a handshake releases more oxytocin for both people and kind of forms a deeper connection. 

[0:24:08.3] PZ: I don’t think that’s even proved, but presumably. If you’re shaking my hand, I’m going to do a two hand and I’m going to pull you in anyways. Here’s the thing. It seems weird in a way like, “Oh, that’s just a funky, weird dude in California.” In fact, our brains are designed to connect. We want to be connected. We’re really open to touch. 

Like when you play sports when you’re younger, I think the only place you can hit a guy in the butt and not get punched in the face is on a sports field, right? There’s a sense of teamwork that goes into — Or team building that goes into touch. I want to just accelerate that process because, again, I’m interested in high performance and anything I can do, any hack I can use to get the people’s brains around me to connect better to me, it means we’re going to form a more effective team.  

[0:25:00.4] MB: Let’s dig into that now. Tell me what has your research uncovered around how we can build more high performance teams. 

[0:25:07.7] PZ: Yeah, the short back story on that, Matt, was that, as you know, we got kind of fair amount of media attention around this work on trust and oxytocin because it was brand new. No one had shown this before. We’ve got protocols to measure oxytocin in humans and, as I said, infuse into the brains. 

Eventually, companies started coming to my lab saying, “Hey, we think trust is important in our organization. Could you tell us how to build trust?” My first response, because I’m a nerd, was, “Yeah, we have this protocol. I can draw blood from your employees and I’ll measure their oxytocin,” and these executive’s faces turned white, they’re like, “There’s no way you can take blood from our employees.” Then I started thinking, “Gosh! If I’m such an expert on trust, how come I can’t advice companies on what they can do to build trust?” 

We started running experiments in my lab on teams. We eventually got permission to actually go in and take blood from companies like Zapos and Herman Miller and measure brain activity and measure productivity, innovation. We really got objective data on the conditions within organizations that allowed them to build trust, and we showed that high trust organization perform better using multiple measures. Then we went back and developed a tool and actually spun out a company called Ofactor so that companies can measure and manage their culture for high trust and high performance. Now we have a survey that identifies or both measures organizational trust and identifies these eight key building blocks that leaders can influence that create higher trust. 

The sort of punch line of that work is once I can measure trust within your organization, then you can manage it for high performance. If you can’t measure, you can’t manage. Because humans create culture whenever you put them in groups, if leaders on organizations don’t manage their cultures, those cultures are going to manage them. 

The humans are going to work out norms of behavior, and either you can let them go and just figure whatever it is it is, or you can manage that culture for high performance in a consistent way using the way our brains respond to each other. 

I think thinking about people that work as brains at work, embodied brains, in which our brains are built to work cooperatively, I want to use neuroscience again to optimize how I’m deploying resources and getting the most out of these individuals. It turns out that people want to perform in high levels, almost everybody, and if you put them in situation in which they can’t perform which they have the freedom to execute as they see fit when they get a lot of coaching so they can hit performance goals and then are recognized when they achieve those goals, people dig it and they perform better, they stay at their jobs longer, they’re happier, they’re healthier. That’s the work I’ve done in the last 8 years or so, and it’s fun for me because I get to work at scale now. 

The clinical work we’ve done is really exciting. It’s great to help patients, and it’s very rewarding, but if we go into a company and we change the work life for the better for 10,000 people or 20,000 people, that’s super exciting to me.  

[0:28:20.0] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:29:48.0] MB: I love that point that our brains are designed to connect with each other and they’re built naturally to work cooperatively. 

[0:29:55.6] PZ: Yeah, and if we don’t inhibit that, it will happen. The question is it doesn’t happen in a way that is sustaining. It think if you remember like econ 101, we were sold this bill of goods from — I don’t know, like the 19th century or something that work provides this utility. The reason you have to pay for them at work, is because work sucks so much. But I know, Matt, that you dig what you do. I can tell, because I read your bio and we chatted beforehand. 

We’re recoding to Memorial Day. I’m all about doing cool stuff. I don’t care if it’s Memorial Day. I want to talk to you. I think it’s awesome. Why am I “working” on a holiday? Because it’s not work for me. It’s the coolest thing on the planet to measure brain activity, for me, to measure brain activity and use that to solve real problems that humans have. 

Yeah, if you understand that we’re set up to work in teams or we’ve done this for eons, don’t screw it up. Try to create an environment where people can really deploy that passion, that energy in an effective way. 

By the way, in my new book Trust Factor, as you mentioned, there’s a ton of ton of Peter Drucker in there. I was on a faculty with Peter Drucker at Claremont Graduate University for 10 years before he passed away, and Peter really influenced me, and Peter was all over this stuff, like in the 50s and 60s. It’s really about empowering the humans within an organization to be their best selves in groups, to get them stretch goals, to challenge them, go give them a chance to grow. 

There’s a ton of Drucker in the book as well and it’s just super practical. Every chapter ends with — In homage to Peter Drucker who famously said, “Don’t tell me what a great meeting you had. Tell me what you’re going to do differently on Monday.” 

I have a Monday morning list after every chapter. There’s a list of five things to do on Monday, and I say these are all experiments. No one knows for sure if these principles, even though they’ve been worked out in lots of different companies. They worked on my laboratory. If they work in any particular organization, because every organization had its own little weird quirks. They’re just experiments, and if you pitch it to people you work with and say, “You know what? I read this book.” We think it’s going to be awesome if we move to a four 10 hours a day instead of five eight-hour days. We’re going to try it for six months and see what you guys think and you give us feedback. If that helps marshal your energy so that you can do your other crap you need to do on a Friday or whenever and not take up a work, I want you to be all in. 

For example, I talk about this in the book, the importance of sleep is just really been shown clearly from a neurologic perspective. In a bunch of companies, you use something called firm 40. That is office opens at 8. At 5:05 the parking lot should be empty. I want you to be full bore for eight hours and then get the hell out and take a rest, see your family, go recreate, whatever you want to do, versus places I’ve worked, for example, where the boss is late for 8 p.m. Yeah, you screw around during the day, because you know you’re working a 12-hour day and you got to — Whatever, get your laundry or go on Facebook or whatever people do at work. 

I want people to be in 100% or as close to 100% as like Dan, and culture is a way to do that, to set up these normal norms where people are challenged and can respond with their best selves. 

[0:33:17.6] MB: There was a recent HBR article that talked about — I think it was something about how people who worked more than 40 hours a week actually started at some point to become less productive than people who just worked 40 hours, which I thought was really interesting. 

I also love your perspective as viewing everything as an experiment and just trying it out. I think that’s a great framework for implementing any change in your life and especially it changes in business, but I think that’s a really insightful way to view all of these potential strategies. 

[0:33:48.7] PZ: I think so, and I think if you’re honest with people that you work with — By the way, I don’t like the word worker or employee, I never that use that — Colleague or teammate. If you talk to your colleagues and say, “Hey, you know, we did this survey and we found that the culture isn’t as good as we like it to be, and we’re going to try a couple of new things for six months or 12 months as an experiment, but I think it’s going to be awesome for you guys. If it’s not, look, we’ll try something else. We just want to make your time here as engaging and as valuable to you as possible. If it’s valuable to you, it’s going to improve the performance of the company.” 

I have to suppress the name of this company, but we did a kickoff of a — Once you have the data, you can intervene. We’ve created culture interventions for companies to use and I did a kickoff at a company recently, and I was talking to the employees and I said, “Look, you may not think this is going to make your work-life better, but please give it a try. You’re going to get some little animated videos, we’re going to ask you some questions, we’re going to do this for 60 days, which is what about it takes to change a habit. 

It’s basically a habit change. It changes the way you interact with people at work. Guess what? If you actually try to change your behavior, it will improve your home life as well, because all these behaviors are good for all the humans around you. If you want to be happier at home, if you want your relationship, romantic relationship to be better, if you want your kids to be performing better and your workmates to be a more effective teammates to you, here are some behaviors you can do to make that happen. 

It’s got to be like a win-win space, right? If it’s like so many times at work, right? You know there’s some issue, they have to change something and employees get it right away. You want to pay me the same and get me to work harder. Doesn’t sound like a good win for anybody, but if we’re in this world in which labor does not provide this utility and which I have an integration with my work and life. I’m working from home, I’m working remotely, I’m doing stuff I think is super cool, I get choice over the kind of assignments I take. Then you can — If I’m a good leader, I can help to focus your energy and passion on stuff that you really enjoy doing. If you do that with a group of people that you rely on, that you could trust — Boom! Then you’re in high gear and it’s super exciting. 

[0:36:09.0] MB: Let’s dig in a little bit. I want to hear some of these building blocks. Tell me about the various different building blocks that you specifically recommend to kind of integrate trust into and help develop high performance. 

[0:36:21.9] PZ: Right. I’d be happy to. Somehow, Matt, as you know, magically they spell out the acronym OXYTOCIN. I don’t know how that happened, but I’ll list them and then I‘ll just discuss one or two briefly. The OXYTOCIN acronym stands for ovation, expectation, yield, transfer, openness, caring, invest and natural. 

Really quickly, ovation is recognizing the higher performance. Yield is crowd sourcing processes by delegating responsibility. I left out the E, sorry. The X is for expectation, which is designing challenges for people at work. The T is for transfer, which is enabling self-management. O is for openness, which is reducing stress by being clear about what the company is doing and why. C is for caring, which is intentionally building relationships with people at work. The I is for invest, which is helping colleagues grow personally and professionally, and the last letter, N, is for natural, which is being your authentic self at work and including being vulnerable.

Some of these things, people have happen to cross, because we’ve tried everything at work for the last 500 years, but what I like is that the neuroscience, my lab has done and other labs have done, show you how to implement these culture changes to get the biggest impact on branded behavior. Let’s take the first one, ovation. Recognizing high performance. Hey, that’s not new. Yeah. But what’s the science say about this? 

Recognition comes from peers when it’s close to when the goal is met, when it’s unexpected, when it’s tangible, when it’s public. All those things are reinforced the importance of achieving high performance within this community that we call work. When my community members go, “Matt! You killed it. You worked on this project for three months. Your team was just killing it. You thrilled the client. You hit these milestones, under budget, on time. Everybody is thrilled. We as a community want to recognize you, so we’re going to give your whole team a trip to Disney World. You guys are going to take three days off. We’re going to send you down to Orlando. Knock yourselves out. You just killed it an we’re thrilled to have you be part of our team.” 

Because the number of high performance in the world is in fact limited, I want the best people not only at my work, but performing at their best. Doing things like recognizing tangibly people who are just knocking it out of the park is the way to say, “It’s not about money. You got to pay people fairly for sure. It’s about doing stuff that’s super cool in a community that values that.” That’s just one example, and the book has many, many more examples for all these components on how to create really high engagement by essentially tapping in to intrinsic motivation.  


[0:39:14.1] MB: I’d love to dig into the power of vulnerability as well and hear some strategies you’d recommend for how to bring that into the workplace, or maybe how listeners could potentially bring that to a workplace even if they’re not necessarily a manager. 

[0:39:28.8] PZ: Yeah. All these applies to people at any level of the organization, from the lowest level, and in the book I spent a lot of time talking about how even entry level people at work can do amazing things with their work team and for the organization. 

The last component I call natural, which is just being yourself at work. If you have to put on some kind of mask that your work persona, that’s just extra wasted energy that doesn’t go into performing at the highest levels. It turns out, many experiments have shown, that people who come off as too perfect, too beautiful, we kind of hate those people. Yeah, I’m talking about Austin, again. 

If you show that you don’t know everything, if you ask for help from people around you, if you let your imperfections show, it turns out that induces oxytocin release, and people want to help you. 

If I said, “Look, Matt. We got this big project. Our client wants to do machine learning on this dataset we’re collecting for them. I read about machine learning. I don’t know how to do it, but I know you do. Can you help me out? I really need two weeks of your work life to do this machine learning thing and teach me about it. I want to learn from you. Even though I’m the boss, I don’t know how to do everything, for sure, that’s why we have an organization. That’s why people specialize.” 

Just being who you are, letting your work show, it’s okay. We actually trust people more who let their imperfection show. It’s okay to be imperfect and then ask for help. 

[0:41:02.0] MB: What’s another one of these that you think could be really relevant for our listeners and maybe something that — As a concrete, one of these strategies that they could really benefit from understanding?  

[0:41:12.5] PZ: I forgot one more. The caring component is straight down the trust building oxytocin runway. Sometimes, at least when I was in business school, they sort of had this implicit or explicit statement that fraternize with the people you work with, they will respect you. You don’t want to be friends with people at work. Again, our brains are built to form connections. 

If you’re at work and you’re forming connections, again, you’re inhibiting your national responses and you’re not going to be able to have strong relationships and count on people, trust people to do what you need them to do, particularly in crunch times. 

One way you can intentionally build relationships is to articulate the emotions you see in others. Normally, when you walk in at work you’ll say, “Hey, Matt. How are you?” “Good. How are you?” “Good.” I might go as far as to say, “How is your weekend?” “Oh, it was great. Fine. Whatever.” 

If you replace that hey what’s going on with the emotion you see in that person’s face, then you have a much different conversation. Matt walks from the office and I say, “Hey, Matt. You look tired, happy, sad, joyful, worried,” then we have all different conversations. “Why do you look so worried today?” “You know what? My wife has been really sick. We went to the doctor last week and it looks like it’s something really bad.” “Okay, let’s talk about that. How do we now modulate your work-life relationship? Do you need to be at work today? Should you take some time off? Is your team working effectively?” 

Once you actually can recognize the emotions in others and if you just articulate them, it’s like a booster to build relationships with them, and other things. Like in my lab I have a lot of graduate students, so I buy beer out of my own pocket every month. I think the beer budget is the best money I spend, because we have a nice patio behind our lab. You’re done with work and you want to have some bees and hangout with the people you work with, awesome. Build that relationship. 

[0:43:12.6] MB: I think it’s so vital and it underpins all of the research that you’ve worked on over the last — However long, 20 years or however long. I think that, just fundamentally, it’s about building relationships, and oxytocin underpins much of that, but at the end of the day if you care about people, if you invest in them and you really genuinely want to develop relationships with them, it yields tremendous benefits for yourself sort of at a biological neuro-chemical level, but also in the results in your life and in the results you see in your workplace as well. 

[0:43:50.3] PZ: Yeah, and I think Peter Drucker said that every knowledge worker, which to me is everybody now, needs to be their own CEO. If you’re your own CEO and I’m in an organization that treats me like crap, “Dude! I got skills. I can go elsewhere.” I’d rather have you have a lot of say over your career, to give you opportunities to grow, to have you be in a place that recognizes the amazing things that people do every day at work. Yeah, I want those people with me. 

I should say. I always keep my scientist head on, Matt. I’m always skeptical of anything I do, so that’s why I spent eight years doing this work before writing the book. We looked at all the business outcome measures we could capture, like energy at work and chronic stress and productivity and retention, all those things — Trust, substantially improves. 

Even objective measures like sick days or life satisfaction, the people who work in high trust organizations take fewer sick days and they’re more satisfied with their lives outside of work, because when you come home, instead of being beaten down by some — Sorry, bad word, asshole boss, you’ve been working with people who respect you, who value you, and if you’re something cool for the world at the same time, you’re energized when you come home. Yeah, you’re a nicer person to be around. That’s the world that we can create at work, which improves employees lives, improves organizational performance and really strengthens societies by focusing on relationships. 

[0:45:28.8] MB: We’ve touched on it, but we haven’t even really hammed home at this point, which the fundamental thing that underpins all of these high performance is trust itself. We’ve talked a little bit about and talked about a lot about oxytocin and how that helps build trust, but it’s really all about trust fundamentally. Once you’re able to cultivate that using these various strategies that you’ve recommended, that’s how you yield these incredible dividends.

[0:45:56.5] PZ: Yes and now. I want to push out a little further. I think it’s really about relationships. There’s almost all humans that can survive on their own. There must be some permit living in some mountain somewhere, but it’s extraordinarily rare. We only survive in groups. If we survive in groups, then we’ve got to understand how to engage the groups of people that we’re always around. We’re in many different groups over the course of our day or week or life. 

Again, I’m just a really super boring person and I just want to make the groups I’m in and my own performance better, because for some reason I’m obsessed with performance. The nice thing is the science predicts and our data strongly support that when you’re in a high performance group, you enjoy what you’re doing a hell of a lot more. A lot of focus on happiness at work and giving employees, I don’t, Taco Tuesdays or something, and that’s not what the science shows. It shows if you’re doing something important for the planet, we’re talking about purpose, if you know your organization’s purpose and you’re doing it with people that you trust and you can rely on that treat you well and you treat well, now you’re in high gear and now you are making a dent in the universe. It’s really that joy, that satisfaction of doing something important with people that you trust. It’s really about relationships. 

I think for guys in particular, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about building relationships who are younger, partially because of testosterone, partially because we’re more aggressive than older guys are and then women are in general. I think this is a bit of a call to say that relationships matter a ton. I want the 3 a.m. friend. This is a guy that you can call up at 3 a.m. and say, “Don’t ask questions. Just bring a couple of shovels and supply. Something bad went down.” I want a couple of guys like that in my life who just they don’t ask, they just show up at 3 in the morning and help you fix some nasty problem. 

In the best case, I’m like a 3 a.m. employee. I’d like to have an employee not that I can call at my house at 3 a.m., but occasionally emails me at 3 a.m. going, “Hey, Paul. You know this problem we worked on for a month? It just came to me. I couldn’t sleep tonight. I fixed this damn thing that’s been bugging us that’s been holding down our performance.” 

You can’t pay people to do that. You have to love what you’re doing. You have to care about the people you do it with. Anyway, that’s my claim at least. Relationships matter. 

[0:48:33.9] MB: I love the phrase that you used. I forgot if it’s on the cover of the book or not, but why isn’t work an adventure. 

[0:48:40.7] PZ: Yeah. You know, we always adventures. Certainly, if you look at the way the world is evolving in terms of business, which is people will pay for experiences. I pay a lot of money for experiences. Why is that experience only for the customer? Why are the employees not having that experience? 

I think work should be an adventure. Not every second of the day maybe. There’s still some stuff. Still got to clean up the floors or whatever you got to do, but — I don’t know. What about you? Isn’t your work an adventure most of the time? 

[0:49:09.9] MB: Most definitely. Yeah, as you said, even adventures have boring parts potentially. Yeah, I try to make every single day an adventure. Absolutely. 

[0:49:19.0] PZ: And you can’t do that by yourself, because you got to work with a team. I think empowering the people around you to have cool ass adventures is — I don’t know, man. That’s a true leader, I think. When I’m helping the people around me be successful and allowing them to create adventures for themselves, what could be better than that?  

[0:49:42.4] MB: What would be kind of one piece of homework or actionable advice that you would give to somebody listening to this podcast that they could use to either implement some of the strategies that we’ve talked about to make their lives more of an adventure or to build trust relationships and develop kind of more oxytocin, I guess, in their lives? 

[0:50:05.0] PZ: It’s a broad question. I could do that. I work quite at home. Let’s do it at home. It holds over. Again, I don’t think there’s any — For most of us, there’s no hard line between work and home anyway. Oxytocin is a really, really interesting and ancient molecule and it’s very difficult or perhaps impossible to have make your brain make it yourself, but you can give that gift of oxytocin release to others by connecting to them, touching them, giving them a gift. Almost always when their brains make oxytocin, they want to reciprocate and give you the same thing. 

If we think about the best social behaviors, it’s really about giving the gift of connection, of empowerment, or love or whatever that person around you really needs. Think of this as effective social behaviors are surface behaviors. I want to serve the people around me. 

I try to end every conversation with the word service and I’ll do that with you, Matt. Matt, I want to be of service to you. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and I hope that we find a way to do something in the future, so I want to put myself out there and say when you’ve got an idea, when you’ve got a crazy neuroscience question, when something you’re doing, I want to continue to be of service to you. I think if I end every conversation with service that I want to engage with the people around me, and it turns out that if you serve other people, that comes back to you many fold. If it doesn’t, that’s okay, because I still feel good helping other people. 

Think about being of service to the people around you as supposed to what’s in it for me? Think about what I can do to make you happier, perform better. I don’t know. I think that’s a pretty good way to go through life.  

[0:51:53.2] MB: What a great idea and what a great framework, and I’m pretty sure I felt a little boost of oxytocin when you said that. 

[0:51:59.9] PZ: Bingo! We’re in good shape now. 

[0:52:01.5] MB: Exactly. It reminds me of the old — It’s probably before him, but Zig Ziglar, “You can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” 

[0:52:11.5] PZ: Man, it’s so true, isn’t it?

[0:52:13.0] MB: I’ll do a small act of service for you. For listeners who want to dig in more, where can they find you and find the book online?

[0:52:20.9] PZ: All your online sellers; Amazon, Kindle, Audible Habits, Trust Factor, the science of creating high performance companies, the company we’ve spun off to do that work is ofactor.com, O-F-A-C-T-O-R.com. Lots of free tools and assessments there that you can use, and you can find out more about me at pauljzac.com.

Reach out listeners. Let me know what I can do to help you. 

[0:52:47.7] MB: Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these incredible wisdom. Your work and research and fascinating and there are so many relevant conclusions for everybody, so thank you again. 

[0:52:59.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. In fact I responded into a number of listener emails this morning from across the globe. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us every single week, our Mindset Monday email, which listeners have been loving.

Next, you're getting a listener exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to our guests, vote on new intro music and all kinds of ways to interact with the show. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide which is equally as awesome by joining the email list. You can go to successpodcast.com, sign up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, if you’re on the move right now, just text the word “smarter" to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts, everything we talked about on the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How You Can Use Behavioral Design To Create Any Habit You Want with Nir Eyal

In this episode we discuss How To Use “Mind Control” Techniques to Create Any Habit You Want, why we are driven much more by pain than pleasure, the “hook” model for describing human behavior, how to hack your rewards to change your behavior, the power of tiny amounts of friction, and much more with Nir Eyal. 

Nir Eyal is an expert in “behavioral design” having worked in both advertising and video gaming helping companies build and create more engaging products. Nir is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products and has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, and more. Nir is an active angel investor and currently writes to help companies create good habit and behaviors in their users on his blog NirandFar.com.

We discuss:

• Persuasion, mind control, and behavioral design

• What is a habit and how do you define it?

• How we can leverage technology to build healthier habits

• How 50% of your actions take place with little or no unconscious thought

• Internal vs External triggers

• There is only one reason you use a product or service - to modulate your mood - that’s it

• Our behaviors are driven NOT by seeking of pleasure, but rather the quelling of a unconformable emotion

• Figure out what your frequently occurring internal triggers are

• We are driven more by PAIN than by PLEASURE

• There’s no end to what we can accomplish if we can understand that pain is our primary motivator

• Even seeking pleasure = satisfying the PAIN of WANTING

• The power of the unknown to draw us in

• The 4 stages of the “Hook” Model on how Habits are formed and sustained

• Rewards are actually wanting to quell the “stress of desire”

• Discomfort drives us to action

• How the same mental hardwiring behind addiction also underpins love and desire

• The easier you can make a behavior the more likely people are to do it

• The biggest thing that drives people to adopt technology is making life EASIER

• Reward itself doesn’t have much impact on your brain, its the anticipation of the reward that drives us

• 3 Kinds of Variable Rewards

• Rewards of the Tribe

  1. Rewards of the Hunt

  2. Rewards of the Self

• The power of adaptability

• Belief is as much of a factor in addiction as physical dependency itself

• How making a behavior just a little bit easier can have dramatic results

• How to put the hook model in reverse and destroy bad habits

• How putting space between steps in your habit loop can create massive changes

• Even small amounts of friction can change the marginal decision and make a habit much harder

• How can you make bad habits more difficult, take longer, or be harder to do?

• How you can use “temptation bundling” to break the hold of variable rewards in your habit loop

• Never do something when you don’t have the end in sight - do things that have a finite END so that you don’t get hooked

• Key question you must ask yourself: Is this technology serving ME, or am I serving IT?

• One simple piece of advice to implement the ideas discussed in this interview right away

• How to leverage technology to combat technology that is distracting you

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Article] Skinner - Operant Conditioning by Saul McLeod

• [Wiki Article] B. F. Skinner

• [Personal Site] Nir & Far

• [Calendar] Nir’s Meeting Scheduler

• [App] 7 Cups: Anxiety & Stress Chat

• [App] Pocket

• [App] Byte Foods

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss how to use mind control techniques to create any habit you want. Why we’re driven much more by pain than pleasure. We look at the hook model for describing human behavior, talk about how to hack your rewards to change your behavior, look at the power of tiny amounts of friction, and much more with Nir Eyal.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, like our popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get that for free along with another awesome surprise bonus guide that you go to sign up to find out by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every week called Mindset Monday. Listeners absolutely love this email. It’s short, sweet, simple. It's basically topics, ideas, things that we've come across that have us excited that we're talking about, that we've come across that we find interesting. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show; vote on guests, give your input for guest questions. In fact, in our Mindset Monday in the last two weeks, we've sent out emails asking for specific questions for an upcoming guest. You got to be on the email chain to find out who that guest is and to submit your questions, but this is a great opportunity to get involved, shape the content, figure out what we’re going to be asking the guests, vote on things like the new into we rolled out last month. All kinds of chances to shape the show and become part of what we’re doing. You get all of these if you join and sign up for the email list, which you can go to successpodcast.com and sign up right of the homepage, or if you're on the go right now, if you don't have a chance to go to the website, just text the word “smarter”, that's “smarter" to the number 4222 on your cell phone. That’s “smarter” to 44222 and you can get signed up that way. 

In our previous episode we discussed what happened when our guest; the astronaut, Chris Hadfield, went blind during a spacewalk and how he made it out alive. We talked about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations. We discussed in depth how astronauts deal with fear, looked at the vital importance of having training to deal with powerful risks, and much more with Chris Hadfield. If you want to learn how to crush through any fears standing in your way, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:52.2] MB: Today we have another awesome guest on the show, Nir Eyal. Nir is an expert in behavioral design, having worked in both advertising and vi9deo gaming helping companies build and create more engaging products. He is the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today and more. He’s an active angel investor and currently writes and helps companies create good habits and behaviors in their users on his blog nirandfar.com. 

Nir, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:25.9] NE: Thanks so much, Matt. Great to be here. 

[0:03:27.2] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of your background, tell us your story and how you got started down the path of behavioral design. I'm curious, especially, I’m a huge gamer myself, so I'd love to hear especially kind of about the video gaming side of your world. 

[0:03:45.7] NE: Sure. The last company that you mentioned they was at the intersection of gaming and advertising, and that company gave me a lot of insights into persuasion, mind control, behavioral design, whatever you want to call it, that those lessons I found were very powerful and very effective. I saw my clients using them time and time again and I became fascinated with these techniques, but what I found was that there wasn't a book out there. There wasn't like a resource into how to use these techniques, and in fact many of the gaming companies that I worked with and the clients, the advertising clients I worked with, they just use these techniques because they worked. They didn't know what they were called. Certainly, they didn’t know the psychology behind these principles. They just kept using them again and again and again because they produced better results. 

I really became fascinated say with how these technologies persuade us, and I came to a hypothesis that technologies of the future will be the ones that are able to persuade us to form these long-term habits. Originally I wanted to learn these techniques for my next company. My company was acquired and I wanted to figure out what to do next. 

When I started doing research into, “Okay. I'm going to figure out how to compile all these into a resource that I would use into my next company,” I started blogging about what I was learning. I spent a lot of time in the Stanford Library. I started to spent a lot of time talking to people who are building these technologies, folks at Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp and I just learned so much from them and the more I blogged about it the more interest there was in people reading my blog and learning more. One thing kind of led to another. The blog became a class at Stanford that I taught for many years, and then that class turned into the book that you see today, which is called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. 

[0:05:30.7] MB: Let's start with something really simple. How do you define habits? What are habits? 

[0:05:38.2] NE: Right. Habits are defined as the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. It’s about half of what you do every single day is done purely out of habits, and these habits are by and large very good for us. It’s just another form of learning that human beings have evolved. Many animals have evolved habits, where our brain is able to put these tasks into automatic mode if you will, so that we don’t have to think about it while we’re doing these behaviors. 

These repetitive tasks that you do day-in and day-out without really thinking about why you're doing them, those are our habits, and my contention is that we can actually use the psychology of habits to help us live better lives. In fact, technology can facilitate those healthy habits. Now, of course, technology can also facilitate a bunch of unhealthy habits as well. Many of us feel that we are overly dependent on our devices that many times these habits can be bad habits as well, but I think it's imperative to understand the psychology of habits so that we can hopefully, as business people, design products and services that create healthy habits in our lives, helping people stay connected and helping people save money and helping people exercise more and eat better. We can do all these things through these miracles of today's technology, but then also understanding how these technologies hook us. We can also make sure that we put technology in its place to make sure that we control the technology and that the technology doesn't control us. 

[0:07:05.8] MB: I think one of the most important things that you said is this notion that the habits are unconscious, right? I forgot the exact percentage, but like 50% of everything we do takes place unconsciously. We’re not consciously thinking about it. Some sort of random queue or trigger from our environment sends us into this habit loop, which I find fascinating. 

[0:07:28.3] NE: Right. By and large, these things are great for us. We benefit from having all these habits. You can see from an evolutionary basis, if every time there was danger, you had to think as a caveman a hundred thousand years ago, “What should I do when this sabertooth tiger is charging after me?” If you deliberated, you’d be dead. That branch of the human evolutionary tree died off. Whereas the people who had these instincts, who had these quick response behaviors, who had these learned responses that they didn't have to deliberate, these were the people who had survived and became us. 

[0:08:04.3] MB: Let’s dig into how do habits get formed, and what are some of the components that go into creating habits.

[0:08:13.1] NE: Sure. The basic habit loop that a lot of people know about is a trigger, something that queues us to action habits are environmentally dependent. These are things that occur with little or no conscious thought based on our environment, so there's always some kind of trigger, some kind of queue. Then there is the action, and then there's the pay off, some kind of reward. 

Now, what I’ve changed in that model, looking into the research that I did, is not so much how do habits form in our day-to-day lives. I think that’s pretty well understood stuff. I think what I wanted to push the field forward in a direction of how do we build products and services, or how do products and services build habits within us. What I added to that model is a few things. One is this idea of internal and external triggers, that when it comes to the products and services we use, there is only one reason that you use any product or service, one reason, and that reason is to modulate our mood. I don't care what the product is. You use that product to feel something different. 

The internal trigger, meaning external triggers you know all about. External triggers are things in our environment that tell us what to do next; your phone dings, or you get an email, or friend tells you to do something. These are all external triggers, they tell you what to do next. 

What we also have are what’s called these internal triggers that when we are in a certain situation or routine around certain people or places or when we feel certain things, before we even understand what's going on, we already have the itch. We already have this unconscious trigger to get us to do something. 

For example, when you're feeling lonely, you check Facebook or Tinder. When you're feeling uncertain about something, before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer, you're already Googling it. When you're feeling bored, before you even ask yourself what you're feeling, your brain is already telling your fingers to type in New York Times, or Reddit, or YouTube, or something else to ease that boredom. 

This is a very important thing to understand, that our behaviors are driven not by the seeking of pleasure per se, but the quelling of an uncomfortable emotion. What I call this internal trigger. That’s one very important thing to understand both when we’re designing products and services. When I advise Silicon Valley companies on how to build more habit-forming technology, part of my advice is you’ve got to figure out what that frequently occurring internal trigger is. 

Then from a personal development standpoint, we have to understand that we are driven by pain, right? That it’s not the pleasure principle that Freud espoused that everything we do is for the pursuit of pleasure and the denial and quelling of pain. It's just pain all the way down. Everything we do is just to avoid pain in as much as even when we think we are driven by pleasure, we’re not actually driven by pleasure. We’re driven by the urge to satisfy the pain of wanting the pleasure, and this is a really important point, because, really, the superpower that we all have within us is to understand that we are driven by pain and find ways to deal with that pain. There is no end to what we can accomplish when we can deal with our dissatisfaction, with our pain. 

Anyway, that’s one important addition. Another important addition has to do with the next what I call the action phase of the hook. In my book I talk about the hook model. the action phase; we see this manifested in all sorts of products we use, that what’s happened today, the reason so many of our technologies are so habit-forming is that they have become so much easier to use. Meaning they’ve made the action way easier to do. 

The fact that I can open an app with one tap, that I can scroll a feed, that I can watch a video anywhere at any time with very little effort makes that behavior more likely to occur. The more friction is removed the easier the behavior is to do. Then the third part of the hook model is what I call the reward phase, which is not just the reward, it's a variable reward. This comes straight from Skinner. We know that variable rewards, when it comes to Skinner's famous experiments with his pigeons, when he gave them a food pellet as a reward. When it was on a predictable schedule of reinforcement, they clicked X-number of times when it was on a variable schedule of reinforcement, meaning sometimes when the food pellet came out, sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. When there was variability, when there was an intermittent schedule of reinforcement, Skinner observed the pigeon clicked on the little food pellet dispenser many, many more times. 


Variable rewards are everywhere. We’ve thought traditionally in psychology as variable rewards being something that is only about food pellets, but it turns out it's everywhere. It's what makes slot machines  so enticing. It what makes the news, right? Why are we all glued to the news these days, because we all want to know what the next stupid thing that's going to come out of the president's mouth, is that we want to know what's going to happen next. The first three letters of news is new. We watch a movie, we want to know what's going to happened at the end of the movie. It’s all about the unknown. 

When you think about online, scrolling the newsfeed and scrolling and scrolling and searching and searching, is it uses the exact same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. They’re both variable schedules reinforcement.

Finally, the last part of the hook, which has never been articulated before, but I've kind of added to the conversation when it comes to habit-forming design is the investment phase. If you think about all these technologies, what’s really special about technology today and why it's particularly habit-forming, is that we are co-creating the technology with the manufacturers. Now, that's never been possible before. If you're Henry Ford in the production line, you decide how to make the model T. You design it on paper that you tool it, then you create the machines to build the machines. This takes years, or at least it used to take years. Now, that’s gone. 

Now, that’s gone. Today we are co-creating products with the manufacturers. When you think about Facebook, every time you like something, you add a photo, you friend someone, you comment on something. You are giving them data to modify your feed in the future. You are making the product better and better with use, so that if you were to log into my Facebook account, it would be super boring for you. It would make no sense, because it's been tailored to my needs based on my data. Now, that’s super special. 

When we think about habit-forming technology today, the four key steps are trigger, an action, a reward, and finally an investment, and it’s through successive cycles through these hooks, this is how consumer preferences are shaped and how our product habits are formed. 

[0:15:15.2] MB: There’s a lot I want to unpack out of that. Before we start, I want to explore more deeply this idea that we only seek to avoid pain. Tell me more about that. 

[0:15:24.2] NE: Yeah. When you look at the biology of what's actually going on in our brains, a lot of people think that we do things because we want to feel good, but that's not actually biologically true. When you think about the reward system, when you think about what's happening inside the nucleus accumbens, it’s not the pursuit of pleasure per se. It's the need to quell the wanting, what we call the stress of desire. That’s the way the reward system operates, is it creates this itch, this psychological state of hetero stasis where there is an imbalance, where there's some discomfort that drives us to action. This is when we are most focused. This is when we are most engaged, and this is when we pursue something, is to quell that feeling of wanting. 

Wanting doesn't feel good. If you think about some of the things that we think are driven by pleasure. Let’s think about love and sex. It’s not actually the orgasm itself. It's not the love affair itself. It’s the pursuit, right? That’s what makes us lovesick, and if you think about, in fact the language of love, it’s very similar to the language of addiction, that when you think about someone that — I could spout off song ballad after song ballad of how love hurts, and many people will describe this longing that they have for another person in very similar terminology. In fact, there are scientists out there who believe that the same mechanism that drives addiction today comes from the hardwiring that drives love, that drives sexual desire, is basically the same hardware that is hijacked by someone looking for a sensation, looking to quell some kind of negative sensation, but through other means. That a very important understanding. When it comes to driving our own behavior and how we shape what we do in life, is understanding that it's really all about the dealing with pain. 

By the way, this is fancy psychology terminology dropped on something that has been a knowledge that people have had for thousands of years. Every major religion, Buddhism comes to mind first and foremost, has ways to deal with the pain of this world through different means. 

[0:17:48.5] MB: Let's get into — I think this is a really interesting discussion of how triggers function. I want to kind of move into the next phase of the hooked model. Tell me more about the action phase. 

[0:18:02.4] NE: Sure. The action phase is really about making the behavior as easy as possible. This is really been the innovation that we’ve seen from personal technology over the past several years, is making it as easy as possible to do the intended behavior. The easier you can make the behavior, the more likely people are to do it. What seems trivial to people outside the industry has a huge impact on how people will do something. 

Just the positioning of a button, or which button comes before a different button, or the color of the body, or the contrast of the button. All of these things make a profound impact on how likely you are to do a particular behavior, and I know because we test these things all the time. There are armies of people behind the apps you use every day who are there to do nothing but make that behavior easier to do. Now, that’s nothing new. Technology has always been defined as the process by which a behavior becomes easier to do, and I don’t care if it’s the cotton gin to the iPhone. Every technology we use is adopted because of the work it saves us. 

Now what we’re seeing with this manifestation through personal technologies is that companies are investing all sorts of ways, some of them seem trivial, but fact turn out to be quite persuasive to make the job easier to do. When you think about how we went from desktop. to laptop, to mobile phones, now to wearable, and now to voice interfaces, like the Amazon Alexa or the Microsoft Cortana, what we’re seeing is the technology is helping us make the day-to-day tasks of our life even easier. 

Again, it seems trivial when you first interact with some of these technologies, but what happens is that people adopt them because of these small bits of effort that they save us. I can ask my Amazon Echo what the weather is, and that will save me a couple taps over going to my iPhone, that will successfully change my habit over time. 

[0:20:09.2] MB: That's a great example, because my wife and I have actually two Amazon Echoes in their house because. 

[0:20:14.8] NE: Oh, they got you. 

[0:20:15.9] MB: Recording everything that we say and do. It’s so funny, because that's probably the biggest use that I have for it, is just asking it, “What's the weather today?” It's great, because if you’re in your closet getting ready, you can kind of shout at the Alexa and it will tell me as supposed to having to dig out my phone and fidget around and figure out and look at the weather app. 

[0:20:35.6] NE: Right, and you think to yourself, “What’s the big deal?” If you compare that to the way we use to get weather a generation or so ago, the iPhone is way easier, right? It used to be, if you want to know whether, you had to wait for the weatherman on television to tell you what the weather was going to be like. There was no magic tablet that we could just touch and instantly know all these information or our fingertips. 

If you take the perspective of a few decades, certainly, a generation, these things are magical. We couldn’t have imagine these things are real today when we were children. Yet even they aren’t easy enough. Even now there are opportunities to make that behavior even easier to do with these new technologies that are just becoming widely adopted. 

[0:21:21.8] MB: This may be kind of leading into the next phase of the hook model, but tell me about the idea that — And this is something you've written about and spoken about, this notion that when we complete the action is not actually when we get the reward, but it’s more in the anticipation itself. 

[0:21:41.0] NE: Right. This whole idea of pain versus pleasure, what these products often stimulate is not the reward itself. What keeps us coming back is the anticipation of the reward. When we think about how the reward system is structured in the brain, it’s back to that stress of wanting, that pain of desire. That's what keeps us coming back. 

The reason you are waiting for Alexa to tell you the weather, is that there’s unknown there. There’s uncertainty. There’s variability. In that period of time, you’re not going to do anything else in that second. It’s the same reason why when you pull the handle of a slot machine, you're going to want the results, because there’s uncertainty about what you might get. 

In a softer form, this is what keeps us engaged to all sorts of things, is this variability, this uncertainty, this mystery around what you might find next. 

[0:22:37.2] MB: Tell me more about the different kinds of rewards that can impact us and how — Let’s dig into, and I’d love actually to talk even maybe as a starting point a little bit more about Skinner's work with pigeons and the power of variable rewards, and then kind of dig in to the different types of rewards you’ve seen be really effective at driving human behavior. 

[0:22:59.5] NE: Sure. The type of verbal rewards that I identify in my book, they come in three forms. There are rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self, and you’ll see these in all sorts of products and services that you use every day both online and off-line. 

My book is mostly around technology products, but the same exact rules by the way apply to all sorts of things. If you think about spectator sports, if you think about what makes books and movies interesting, why we watch the nightly news, why we subscribe to a particular religion. They all have hooks embedded in them. They all have these elements of variability. 

Rewards of the tribe are things that feel good, that come from other people and have this element of variability. When you think about — We talked about what makes Facebook so habit-forming. You’ve got this endless stream of information in your newsfeed and it’s all about your friends, what are your friends doing. Are they going on vacation? Did they post pictures of their kids or their puppy or an interesting news article? There's uncertainty around what you might find when you keep scrolling that newsfeed. Of course, all about your friends, all about information about people you really know. 

In a workplace, when you think about Slack, or email for that matter, it's all about information from other people. That's rewards of the tribe. This is also the base of what makes romance romantic, right? That romances is romantic in the beginning of a relationship when it's uncertain. Now, I’ve been married for over 15 years now, I know that other things become what keeps a couple together. To be honest with you, very few couples who been married for any lengthy period of time still feel the butterflies that they felt the first time they held hands or the first time the kissed. That uncertainty, that variability, that mystery is extremely exciting and extremely engaging. It's almost a high that you don't get later in life when you know everything about your partner. 

Of course, it doesn't mean that you can't stay in love certainly, but it’s a different type of engagement. It’s a more intellectual type of engagement. You have to remind yourself, “This is why I'm here,” as opposed to this love sickness that is a mindless kind of attraction. That's rewards of the tribe. Competition is another form of rewards of the tribe, cooperation. These are all forms of things that feel good, that have an element of variability and come from other people. 

Then you have rewards of the hunt. Rewards of the hunt stem from our primal search for food and other material possessions. In modern society we get these things in the form of money. When you think about a retention bonus, a year-end bonus, why does a year-end bonus key people retain? Why do they keep coming to work for a year-end bonus, also known as a retention bonus? Because there's uncertainty there, “How big is my bonus going to be? How well did I do?” That’s all about this uncertainty, and that's why it works to keep employees engaged. 

If you think about the stock market, people play the stock market as day traders, although anybody who specializes in the science of how to make money in the stock market will tell you that day trading is a fantastic way to lose money. That playing the markets, you might as well be playing on a slot machine. Of course, that metaphor is very apt, because it's the same exact psychology the keeps people playing. The ups and downs of the stock market, it's a variable reward. There’s uncertainty there, so that's why day traders do what they do not because it makes money, but because it's as habit-forming and sucks us in as engaging as a slot machine.

If you think about sports, for example, why are we obsessed with a little bouncing ball going back and forth on the field? It might as well be a pachinko machine. It's the same exact thing. It’s uncertainty, it’s variability, it's these things keep us engaged. If you were to go into a sports bar during the World Cup or during March Madness, there’s a reason they call it March Madness, because it is madness. It doesn't make any logical sense why we do this, but it's fun, it's engaging. It has this element of mystery around who is going to win. In the moment, it’s incredibly important to us. Of course, if I told even the most diehard March Madness fan who won five years ago, who won three years ago, it’s going to take them a minute to remember. In the moment, it was everything to them. 

All of these comes from terrible rewards of the hunt. That's variable reward of the hunt. Of course, we see the same exact phenomenon online and we talked about the slot machine, effect of scrolling on a newsfeed, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. So many products these days have this newsfeed element, because scrolling on this newsfeed, hunting for information, is this reward of the hunt. Searching and searching and never down searching for that next interesting bit of content. 

Finally, we have rewards of the self. Rewards of the self are things that feel good that have this element of variability, but don't come from other people and aren’t about these information or material rewards. These are things that feel good in and of themselves. The search for mastery, consistency, competency, control all examples of variable rewards of the self. 

When you think about gameplay, for example, online games, you may not win anything in terms of material possessions when you play Angry Birds or Candy Crush or one of these online games. You don’t really win anything. Most of these you don't even play with other people, but there's something fun and exciting about getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement. Those are all rewards of the self. 

We also see this online when it comes to email, for example. Checking those unread messages, finishing the to-dos in your to-do-list, or tapping on an icon on your home screen that has a little message that says something is waiting for you, all examples of variable rewards of the self. The search for competency, consistency and control. 

[0:26:57.9] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price, so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There're so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:30:25.7] MB: This is something we talk about a lot on the show, but I think it bears repeating, and I love the verbiage you’ve used on here, the rewards of the tribe, the rewards of the hunt. These psychological tendencies are baked into the human brain by evolution. One of the most powerful things about the hooks model and something the more broadly we talk about on the show all the time is that the more you align yourself with the inmate sort of way that evolution has shaped our brains. The more you align yourself with those forces, powerful things can happen, but the more you try and fight them, the more you try to challenge and refuse to accept natural biases and the way that our brains are structured, you're fighting a serious uphill battle. 

[0:31:09.7] NE: Right. I think understanding this is incredibly important. Now, I think the worst thing we can do — One of the worst cognitive biases that we have is when we learn helplessness. A lot of critics of technology — If you listen to what I've just said or you read my book, one interpretation is that these companies are out to get us. They are using our psychological tendencies to get us to buy more junk and to get us to use their apps. That is all true. They are doing that. They have always done that. Persuasion has always been about changing behavior. If you dress a certain way to impress a mate, that is persuasion, and that has happened for 200,000 years of human evolution. 

Now, what's beautiful about the human species, what makes us so special, one of things that makes us so special is that we are adaptable. If I took a Siberian tiger and I put them with their cousin, the Indian Tiger, in the middle of the Indian forest, that Siberian tiger would die because it can't adapt to its environment. Human beings who can adapt to every single continent on the planet and they can even adapt to life outside the planet, in outer space. We are the only species that can do that. 

The lesson here is that we need to use that adaptability. The reason I wrote this book is twofold. One; I want people to build technologies that help change our habit, because I really do believe that we can use this new generation of technology to help people live better lives. The second reason I wrote the book is because I want us to understand how these technologies change our behaviors so we can do something about it. 

I don't want people to think that these technologies are somehow taking away your agency, that you're powerless to resist them, because that is in fact the worst thing that you can believe. There’s been some great studies that have shown that — There was a study back in 2015 that found that alcoholics who believe they were powerless to resist the temptation of alcohol were much more likely to relapse after treatment. In fact, there are beliefs about powerlessness, were as much of a factor as the physical dependency itself. That should stop everybody in their tracks. Think about that. Their beliefs about the addiction and their powerlessness relative to temptation was as much of a factor as the physical dependency itself. 

The lesson here is that as an adaptable species, I have never found any technology to date that makes us powerless. There is nothing I can show you on a screen. There’s even nothing I can inject into your body that turns you into a zombie. What that means is that we need to be aware of how these technology work, how these products and services can potentially hook us and sometimes addict us, so that we can do something about it. So that we can put these products in their place. 

Now, most of the time, these products and services serve us, we love them. They help improve our lives. Of course, sometimes we can go overboard with all sorts of different bad habits, and so this is an instruction manual just as much to help people build healthy habits as it is to help us break unhealthy habit that don't serve us. 

[0:34:35.6] MB: Let's unpack each of those, maybe starting with building healthier habits. What are some specific recommendations or habits that you talk about that maybe somebody listening could use the hooked model to create healthier habits for themselves. 

[0:34:51.3] NE: Sure. The book is really about products. I will give you a few examples of a few different products. Now, I have to state for full disclosure, I've invested in some these examples that I’m going ot share with you, so I just want to get that out of the way, because I want to invest in companies that are using my techniques for good. One product that I'm particularly proud of is a product called Bite. Bite is this — It tackles this problem of food deserts. food deserts happen when there are people located in areas where they cannot get access to healthy food. 

This particular company tackles the problem of folks who work in office buildings, and many times the only options for accessible food are vending machines. Think about nurses that are working late, or people in office buildings maybe in more rural settings where they can just walk downstairs to a cafeteria that’s serving fresh food. Literally, millions of people are stuck in these effective food deserts where the only food they can get if they didn’t bring something from home are Cheetos in the vending machine and soda. 

The current thinking around the obesity epidemic is that people don't eat healthy, because they don't understand. I see this over and over and over again, that many people the first knee-jerk reaction as to why people don't change their behavior is because, well, they just must not know. It turns out that’s almost never true. That people know more than you think. That people generally know what is healthy and what is unhealthy. That a bag of Cheetos and a Coca-Cola are not as healthy as a fresh salad.Tthere's very few people who don't know that, so why don't people eat better? 

It turns out it's really about availability. It's about access to these food items. In fact, making that behavior just a little bit easier can have dramatic results. We talked about the action phase of a hook. We have seen that there are — We can dramatically change people's behavior just from moving the access to food a little bit closer, and sometimes I'm talking about just a few floors closer can have dramatic effects. 

In fact, there was a study done at Google that have found that just moving unhealthy food in the snack room a couple of shelves up so that people had to reach for the cookie dramatically reduce the amount of cookies eaten and increase the number of healthy snacks chosen instead that were placed at reach level. 

This company that I started to tell you about, Bite Foods, they basically took these refrigerators, the size of vending machines. They slapped an iPad on top of each one of these vending machines so that all you have to do is swipe your credit card, the machine unlocks, and you take out of this vending machine farm fresh foods; salads and fresh made food that was made that day that's delivered from local restaurants, and this has dramatically increased the number of people who are eating healthier and losing weight and getting their bodies in better shape just because they made it easier to access these foods. That's one example of a company that I've invested in that’s using the hook model. They’re also, of course, using variable rewards, because the food changes regularly. Also using investments, because the products — They will bring you more of products that you are consuming, so they you’re your preferences. If you like yogurt and you rated it as something you like, they’re going to bring you more of that Greek yogurt next time or the salad or whatever it is that your preferences are. They are using the hook model in that way. 

Another company that's building healthy habit that I've invested in is called 7 Cups. 7even Cups was started by a psychotherapist by the name of Glenn Moriarty, and Glenn called me a couple of years ago. On my website, many people read my book and they'll ask for time with me. They want to figure how to build a habit-forming product or they have a question about the book. I actually give out time for free. Anyone can call me just by going to my website. 

Glenn booked time with me a couple of years ago and he said, “Look. I’m a therapists, and I know that there are far more people who could benefit from therapy that don't get it, because that’s too hard. There's social stigma. There is expense. There’s time involved. All these things that make getting therapy something that people don't do because it's too darn hard.” 

Glenn built this beautiful app called 7 Cups, that is essentially something that whenever someone's feeling down, let’s say it’s a parent of a child with a disability or a soldier suffering from PTSD or just someone who’s feeling down and need someone to talk to. With the click of one button, that’s the action phase, a click of a button. The internal trigger by the way is loneliness, that negative emotion. The action is clicking with one of the button. The variable reward is that you are instantly connected to another human being, and the investment is that the more you participate with this product, the more you use it, you are actually offered the opportunity to invest in the platform by learning how to become a trained listener yourself. 

It turns out that people who do this find the service to be as effective as traditional psychotherapy, which is really amazing, because it’s a free service that I think right now is in a 140 countries and they’re doing 180,000 sessions a week. These are two great examples of companies that are using the hook model to build healthy habits in people's lives. 

[0:40:14.3] MB: We’ll make sure to include those in the show notes so that listeners can check them out. On the flipside of the coin, what are some strategies we can use to break negative habit loops that we get stuck in? For example, looking at Reddit or constantly checking Twitter, something like that. 

[0:40:30.9] NE: Yeah. Basically what we do is we put the hook model in reverse. The idea is that we want to break the hook. Habit-forming products of all sorts — By the way, we talked a lot about technology. Again, there's just as many habit-forming technologies off-line as there are online. What we want to do is put space between the steps of the hook. 

For example, the simplest thing you can do is to remove the triggers. Let's say you got a bad habit of checking Facebook too much. The simplest thing you can do is to remove the Facebook app from your cell phone. How about this? Take 15 minutes and adjust your notification settings. About two thirds of people with smartphones never adjust their notification settings. That’s madness. Take a few minutes and just make sure that the app makers are not interrupting you, are not triggering you on their schedule. Make sure that only the apps that are important to you can notify you, can send you those triggers. Remove unwanted triggers. 

The best thing you can do if you're on a diet and you find yourself eating unhealthy food, is to remove those foods from your house, for God sakes. If you're trying to cut down on sugar, don't have cookie and ice cream all over the house, because it's too powerful of a trigger. You have to remove them. 

In my house, for example, we’ve dramatically cut down on our sugar consumption. There’s doctor in America that's going to tell you sugar is good for you and you should eat more of it. The science there is pretty darn ironclad, that we don't need more sugar. We still eat dessert from time to time, but we don't eat it in the house. What a simple rule. If we really want something sweet, we have to go outside, go to a restaurant and go but it. 

Just that added friction has dramatically reduced how much of that thing that we don't want to consume we actually consume in our lives. Just removing the trigger, the next step is of course making the action more difficult. We talked a little bit about how now that added effort of having to go get a dessert outside the home, that's increased friction. 

When it comes to technology, for example, how could we make the action more difficult? Here's what I do in my house. I was finding that every night I was spending more and more time online as supposed to being with my wife, someone I love very much. Our relationship was suffering. Our sex life was suffering because we were spending more time fondling our iPhones than actually being together. We did something very simple. I went to the hardware store and I bought myself a $10 outlet timer, and that outlet timer every night at 10 p.m. turns off my Internet router. 

Now, I could go over and take out the Internet router and unplug it from the timer and re-plug it in. I could do that, but of course now that requires more effort. I just inserted a bit of friction to make the action a little bit more difficult to do. Why? Because now it gives me this moment of mindfulness to say to myself, “Wait a minute is this really important right now? Do I really need to be online, or do I need to get to sleep, or do I need to spend some quality time with my wife?” That bit of mindfulness, that’s what we’re looking for, just a moment of reflection to stop a mindless habit. 

When it comes to the variable reward phase, I use a technique called temptation bundling. What you want to do here is to make sure that these variable rewards are not something that keep pulling you in. What I do is use a technique, and it’s been well studied now, called temptation bundling, which is when you take something you want and you couple it with something that you don't really want to do. 

Here’s what I do. Here's a bad habit I tried to break, where particularly with new administration, with the elections, I was reading the news all the time and that was not healthy for me. I just kept wasting time. I’d read one article and then I’d see a link for another article and another article and I’d be pulled in and 45 minutes later I was scrolling the web and I didn’t get anything done. 

Instead I have a rule that whenever I see an article that looks interesting I save that article to an app called Pocket, and there're other apps like it. I think previously there is another app that does this. Basically, you can save that article into an app. Then there're variable rewards there. What's in the article is the variable reward, the content itself. I want to know what the story is about. Instead of reading it right then and there where it's going to be a big waste time, I have this rule that I don't read on my desktop. Instead, I only can read that content when I'm on the treadmill, or I use this other app called VoiceStream that will literally read what's in my pocket queue to me. I can go on a walk. I can ilft weights. I can do something that I want to do, but it’s a little bit more difficult to do, I need some extra motivation, so I’ve put it in my headphones. I can listen to these articles, and I’ve removed the reward from that immediate circumstance and then coupled it with something that I want to get done, namely; workout in the gym. 

Finally, when it comes to the investment phase, the fourth step of the hook, you want to make sure not to invest. Here's the rule; never do something that you don't have the end in sight. I like video games. I like movies, but I don't play social games and I don't watch series. I had this terrible experience. Do you remember the Series 24? Did you ever watch 24? 

[0:45:38.1] MB: Oh, yeah. I remember 24. 

[0:45:40.0] NE: All right. With Kiefer Sutherland. He got me bad. Kiefer Sutherland got be real bad. I went with some friends to a ski retreat and somebody brought 24, and we sat there the entire weekend and we watched every episode of this stupid show and we didn’t do any skiing, it was horrible, because of this stupid show. 

From that day forward I decided I will never watch one of those serialized shows. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm a dork that I don't know what happens in Games of Thrones. I don’t know what happened with the House of Cards. That's okay to me. You know why? Because I like movies, I like things that have an end. I like things that have two hours, and then I know that’s how much time I’m putting into it, but I don't start things that go on and on and on and on. Why? Because they are designed. There are thousands of people at that studio trying to figure out how to keep you coming back. Every episode ends with a cliffhanger, and that emotional investment of your of wanting to know what happens next is what keeps you watching the next episode and the next episode and the next episode. Do not invest in things that you don't have the end in sight. 

[0:46:47.1] MB: Very good recommendations, and especially Pocket. Pocket is something that I personally love using and recommend to people all the time as a great way to stop a random article from disrupting the middle of your workload. Just save it to Pocket and then have that time set aside to actually look into it. That's when you go and you sort of batch that time to read articles or you use dead time, like time when you're waiting in line or somewhere. 

What would be kind of one simple piece of homework that you would give a listener as a starting point to implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today? 

[0:47:23.8] NE: Sure. If you're trying to build a healthy habit, maybe if you're trying to build a habit-forming product, that you want to make sure that you have a hook built into that product. If you're working at a company and you need to form a customer habit, you want to make sure that you have trigger action reward and investment built into the product design. It’s not that every product has to have a habit. It’s that every product that needs a habit has to have a hook. That’s if you're trying to build a habit. 

Now, if you're trying to break a habit, the first thing to ask yourself — I think this is something that we’re going out to become more and more familiar with, is this simple question of; is this technology serving me, or am I serving it? 

We all need distractions. Distractions are something that human beings have had forever. Socrates and Aristotle debated the nature of a crazy, this tendency to do things against our better interest. In fact, distractions can be very useful in life. They help us cope with uncomfortable situations. However, when we rely on distraction to escape an uncomfortable reality and we never learn how to deal with that pain, well then the person who can alleviate that pain can take advantage of us. Whether it’s drugs, whether it's television, whether it's watching too many sports, frankly, whether it’s listening to this podcast. If we’re using a distraction to escape something that we don't want to deal with, and that goes on for an extended period of time, that can harm us. 

The real question here is when does a distraction serve us and when are we serving it? By asking us that critical question, that’s the homework, is to ask ourselves that critical question. Then we can start to categorize, “You know what? This technology actually does serve me. I enjoy it. I like this distraction. I'm not serving it.” A way you can test that is to disconnect for a little while. What would happen if you didn’t use Facebook for a week or two? What would happen if you stop watching sports for a week or two? How would you deal with that? If the answer is, “It’s no big deal,” then that’s probably not addiction. It's not something that causes you any kind of long-term harm. If you find that, “Wow! This is really difficult for me to cope with, or I'm unable to cope with,” then you might need to bring out the heavy artillery and understand with the deeper needs are, what the deeper reason. What kind of pain are you really escaping from?

For the most part, what you'll probably find if you're not actually addicted, there is a portion of the population that is actually addicted, but it's a very small proportion. If you're like most of us, you're not struggling with addiction. You're struggling with distractions. The key question here is to understand when is the distraction serving you, when are you serving it, and then to put technology in these distractions in its place by adapting your behaviors around these technologies and distractions and adopting new technologies.

We talked about how you can use these other technologies. Like I told you the story about that router that shuts off the Internet — The outlet timer that shuts off my Internet router. There are literally thousands of apps and technologies that you can use to shut off technology during certain times of the day so that you can focus, so that you can get the kind of work done that you want to get done. 
We talked about Pocket, all these new technologies that help put technology in its place. Lots of solutions out there if you ask yourself this critical question of; is this serving me or am I serving it? 

[0:50:42.2] MB: For listeners who want to dig in more, where can people find you and your book and your blog online? 

[0:50:48.0] NE: Sure. My website is called nirandfar.com. Nir is spelled like my first name, N-I-R, so nirandfar.com, and my book is called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and it’s available wherever books are sold. 

[0:51:00.7] MB: Nir, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these wisdom. I know listeners are going to get a lot out of this and to have some really concrete strategies to both implement using technology to build better habits, but also how to combat negative habits and distractions. 

[0:51:13.7] NE: Awesome, it is a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. 

[0:51:16.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We’ve created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based personal growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an exclusive weekly email from us called Mindset Monday. This is packed full of interesting links and articles in short, sweet, easily digestible. Things that are interesting to us, things we’ve been talking about, reading, discussing internally here that we wanted to share with the listeners. 

Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, guests’ questions. We actually have a guest coming up that’s a guest we’re super excited about and we’ve been asking the email list for the last couple of weeks to give us feedback and questions for this particular guest. 

Lastly, you're going to get an awesome for a guide. It’s a free guide we created based on listener demand. It's our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with a sweet bonus guide, that's a surprise. All you have to do is sign up and join the email list. You can do that right at our website, successpodcast.com, sign up on the home page, or if you're on the go right now, just text the word “smarter”, that's “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out the show notes. If you go to the website, successpodcast.com, you can find the show notes, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How This Astronaut Survived Going Blind In Space & Tools for Crushing Fear with Chris Hadfield

In this episode we discuss what happened when our guest astronaut Chris Hadfield went blind during a space walk - and how he made it out alive. We talk about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations like that, discuss in depth how astronauts deal with fear, look at the vital importance of powerful training to deal with huge risks, and much more with  Chris Hadfield.

Chris Hadfield, who the BBC called “the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong" has been a part of several space missions with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He served as Chief of Robotics and Chief of International Space Station Operations. Chris was the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and inducted to the Canadian Aviation Hall Of Fame. In addition to his work as an engineer and astronaut Chris is an author, musician, and speaker.

We discuss:

• The 3 key things that enabled chris to make it all the way through the astronaut selection process

• How Chris survived going BLIND during a space walk in outer space!!

• How astronauts rescue incapacitated crew in outer space

• How to cultivate the mental toughness to survive the most dangerous situations imaginable

• The learned and trained ability to deal with extremely complex circumstances

• Why Chris was an astronaut for 21 years and only spent 6 months in space, thats how important training is

• In outer space, you can’t count on luck, you count on your own learned ability to deal with the probable things that could go wrong

• How NASA develops training programs to do everything possible to be successful

• The vital importance of visualizing failure and understanding what could go wrong

• The importance of practicing the 10,000 things that could go wrong

• Astronauts don’t visualize success, they practice for failure, all the time

• Visualize failure, incrementally improve, don't count on luck

• NASA’s Recipe for Success

• The relationship between DANGER and FEAR

• Things aren't’ scary, but people get scared

• Things don’t change whether or not you are afraid of them - the ONLY question is whether or not you are prepared

• Preparation is the antidote to fear, if you’re ready, you won’t be afraid

• Your body’s physiology reacts to being unprepared to a dangers situation with a reaction we simply call “fear”

• FEAR = LACK OF PREPARATION

• Perpetual fear = STRESS (and overwhelm)

• Ask yourself “what thing am I not prepared for that is causing me stress?"

• Listen to fear, but don’t keep fear from allowing you to dictate your life

• How do you change your own threshold of fear?

• How to overcome your fear of spiders!

• Recognize real threats through the noise of the non threats

• if you dont know what to be afraid fo, then your afraid of everything

• the difference between belief and knowledge

• If you're afraid of a jaguar, should you be afraid of a kitten?

• One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate your problems

• Why the perception that the world is more dangerous now than ever is fundamentally flawed

• "The Sky is Not The Limit"

• Life is TOUGH and the earth is TOUGH - it’s been here for 4.5 billion years

• The perspective of an astronaut viewing the entire world from above

• The shared nature of human existence

• Why Chris recommends that you should “aim to be a zero”

• Take the time to get informed, understand what is happening, and then take action

• The building is very seldom on fire, yet we always treat it like it is

• In space, ”there is no problem so bad, that you can’t make it worse”

• Don’t just accept your fear, understand WHY, dig in, and treat it clinically - whats the REAL danger, whats the REAL problem I’m trying to solve, how can I change who I am to solve that problem / challenge better, what skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself to be terrified?

• How can I change myself to move beyond fear

• Fear is a destructive long term solution to anything

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Chris Hadfield

• [Twitter] @Cmdr_Hadfield

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we what happened when our guest, astronaut Chris Hadfield, went blind during a spacewalk and how he made it out alive. We talk about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations just like that. We discuss in depth how astronauts deal with fear. We look at the vital importance of powerful training to deal with huge risks and much more with Chris Hatfield. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our popular guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another awesome bonus guide. That’s a surprise. You’re going to sign up to find out, by joining our email list. 

Second, you’re going to get curated weekly emails from us every week including our mindset Monday email, which listeners have been loving. It’s a short email that shares articles, stories and links of things that we found interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music, like when we rolled out our new intro a couple of weeks ago, and weigh in on many important things that are going on with the show. 

Again, join the email list today by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, you can just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222.

In our previous episode we discussed how a neurologist’s perspective on your brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system. We talked about your gut biome’s role in depression, mood regulation and how the micro-biome controls your behavior and emotions. We ask why it is so hard for people to break negative eating habits, looked at the biochemistry of addiction, discuss the incredible importance of understanding your micro-biome and gut health and much more with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. If you want to get the neuroscience behind your gut in your micro-biome, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

I want to make a quick note before we dive in. Chris had to dial in via phone, so the audio quality on this episode is a little bit rougher than some of our typical interviews. Remember, we are interviewing experts across the world, people in many different industries and in many cases, you know, astronauts like Chris are not professional podcasters. They don't have a professional recording set up. We do the best we can to try and deliver the highest quality audio possible, but I just wanted to give you heads up that the audio quality on this interview is not the best that we've done, but the conversation is amazing. I know you’re going to get a ton out of it, so let's dive right in. 

[0:03:15.7] MB: Today we have another incredible guest on the show, astronaut Chris Hatfield. Chris, who the BBC called the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong, has been part of several space missions with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He served as the Chief of Robotics and the Chief of International Space Station Operations. Chris was the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service medal and inducted to the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame. In addition, his work as an engineer and astronaut, Chris is an author, musician and speaker. 

Chris, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:50.4] CH: Thanks, Matt. It’s really nice to be joining you. That’s almost embarrassing to listen to all of that introduction, but thanks for mentioning everything. 

[0:03:57.0] MB: You had quite a storied career and some really, really fascinating experiences. I’d love to start out, for listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of your background, tell us how did you become an astronaut and what were you doing before that? 

[0:04:12.3] CH: The simple question, or I guess how to answer to your question is, I decided to be an astronaut when I was a kid and I started trying to turn myself into one starting at like 10 years old. I really had no idea, but I thought astronauts fly in space, so I’m going to learn to fly. Astronauts have to know how to operate complex machinery, so I’m going to become an engineer. I noticed that a lot of astronauts traditionally at the beginning were test pilots, so I thought I’m going to try and become a military test pilot and see if all that works or not, and if it doesn’t, that’s all still a bunch of interesting things to be a pilot and a test pilot and an engineer. That's the path I followed. 

I served 25 years in the Air Force and became a test pilot, actually even serving with the NAVY, U.S. NAVY as a test pilot. At the end of all of that, I even got a university degree in Tennessee, in fact. After all of that, I got selected as an astronaut and then served 21 years as an astronaut. 

[0:05:09.9] MB: That’s fascinating. Both of those things, how do you — I know it’s such a competitive and challenging field even just becoming a test pilot, let alone becoming an astronaut. What do you think enabled you to make your way through that incredibly difficult selection process? 

[0:05:28.4] CH: Three different things, Matt. I think let me get through all that. Number one was an unquenchable burning desire. You really, really have to want to do this just because there're so many dead ends and obstacles and unlikely opportunities. The second is a huge amount of work. I love work. I grew up on a farm work. I think work is interesting and productive and it gives me satisfaction. I think in addition to an unquenchable desire is also a big appetite for hard work. Then the third is luck. If I’ve been born 10 years prior, I couldn't have been an astronaut. It’s just timing, and health, and circumstance and such. There’s always going to be some luck involved. 

I think if you have a burning desire, you have a huge amount of ability to work at something and then accept that there's luck involved, that's not a bad recipe for no matter what you’re dreaming of doing. 

[0:06:21.3] MB: One of the most famous things that you're kind of known for is this infamous spacewalk that you talked about in your TED Talk. Could you share that story with the audience? 

[0:06:33.1] CH: Sure. I’ve done two spacewalks to help build things orbiting the earth. I helped build part of the International Space Station. Spacewalks are hard. They take many, many years of training, development, invention, practice, but even while they're happening, they’re physically very demanding and very technically complicated. Nothing like you see in the movies ever. But stuff goes wrong during spacewalks all the time naturally. We try and keep it safe, because your danger is very hard and, touch wood, we've never lost an astronaut during a spacewalk to this point, but we recognize the risk and the danger of them. 

During my first spacewalk there was contamination inside the suit that got into one of my eyes, sort of stopped it from working. Suddenly I couldn't see out of my left eye. I just kept working, because I figured well maybe it will clear and I couldn't do anything about it anyway. I couldn’t rub my eye or anything. It’s stuck inside a helmet. My eye was irritated enough by the contamination. It was tearing up, and without gravity, the tears don’t go anywhere. They just stay in your eyes like this big ball of contaminated saltwater and tear. 

Eventually, that ball of contamination got big enough that unfortunately it bridged to the side of my nose and flowed this little bubble of contaminated stuff flowed into my other eye and contaminated my other eye. So then both my eyes were contaminated and I was blinded during my first spacewalk. That was a difficult thing to deal with, being outside, holding on to the outside of the ship suddenly unable to see. 

I think if we hadn't practiced, if we’ve taken it lightly, if we hadn’t done all the work in advance, that would've been cripplingly scary and unsolvable. I was outside with a guy named Scott Parazynski, a classmate of mine, really competent fellow, and we practiced for years and years and help invent everything we’re going to do out there. One of the things we had practiced is just in the category of if one of us becomes unable for whatever reason. You might have a loss of communication, so your suit might short out or you might lose oxygen or you might have a leak in your suit or whatever. You might have a heart attack. Who knows? We call that incapacitated crew rescue. 

Scott and I had practiced that. In fact it's one of the things you have to qualify at in order to be trusted to do a spacewalk. In this case I was incapacitated to some degree. I could talk. I could think. I was still fine. I could communicate with everybody. I just couldn’t see. Without being able to see, you really can't do the job out there. I talked to everybody and we ended up realizing that it might be something pretty serious contaminating my suit, and so I opened up the purge valve. The in-consultation with mission control down in Houston opened up the purge valve on my suit to let the contaminated atmosphere around my head flush and squirt out into space and then tapping into my limited reserves of pressurized oxygen in the suit. Listening to the oxygen hiss out of my suit alone out of the universe, and the universe is kind of bit to re-pressurize with one oxygen tank. I knew I was going to lose at that eventually. 

What it did was it brought enough fresh oxygen, and therefore atmosphere into my suit, that it allowed the contamination to evaporate around my eyes and sort of build a crusty ring around my eyes, and my eyes continued tearing. After a while the contamination got dilute enough that I could see again and could get back to work and my eye stopped tearing. 

It turned out just to be the anti-fog that we used on the visor, sort of a mixture of oil and a harsh soap and it’s as if someone had just squirted oily harsh soap into your eye. Your eye doesn't work anymore. Nothing super technical, just a thing, but enough that it definitely upped the danger and decreased our chances of success. We practiced and prepared enough that the mission control allowed us to continue and finish the entire spacewalk actually and got everything done. Since then we've changed the anti-fog solution that we use, when in truth we use Johnson’s No More Tears now, which probably what we should use right from the get go. That little problem manifested itself into me being blind, alone, out of my very first spacewalk, pretty interesting place to be. 

[0:10:57.6] MB: What goes through your mind in that moment when you completely lose your vision and you’re floating in outer space? 

[0:11:06.1] CH: Well, in my case it was, number one, what caused it. I’m thinking, “Okay. What can be causing — What’s irritating my eyes? Why am I struck blind by this?” I’ve studied all of the stuff very carefully. I know how all of the systems in the suit work really well. I’m trying visualize through all of the schematics and chemistry and everything of what might be causing this problem. Two; frustration, because I'm not able to do the things that I’m there for. I’m supposed to be building this huge robot arm to Canada onto the outside of the spaceship and now I’m useless and just there hanging on waiting for this problem to clear. I’m kind of frustrated at this event. 

Then, three, having to tell Houston, because I know just what a grenade that's going to be at mission control to tell everybody down there that I’m blind. They just have a real serious problem to try and give me good advice on. I’m just thinking about all of those things. 

The real bottom line is am I okay or not? As soon as you established yourself that, “Okay. I’m breathing. I’m fine. The only thing is I can’t see. So what? If you close your eyes, you can't see.” It’s just a matter of just something to deal with. Not a problem I wanted to deal with, and hopefully nothing that’s going to strike me permanently blind, but still just one sense out of five that I lost and let's try and solve the problem. Let’s work the problem and get to the solution of that. Let’s not going to worry and panic and overdramatic about the thing. Let’s deal with it and move on. 

[0:12:33.7] MB: How do you cultivate the mental toughness to be in such an incredibly high stress situation and maintain that kind of calm presence of mind to be able to problem solve and work your way through it? 

[0:12:48.9] CH: That’s why NASA hire the astronauts that they do. NASA is currently going through an astronaut selection, and 18,000 people have applied for like 8 or 10 slots, 8 or 10 positions. If you have 18,000 people to choose from, you don't just choose people that are fit or you don't just choose people that have a certain type of university degree. You try and choose people that not only are fit and have a certain type university degree, but also have a proven ability to make good decisions under really complex and high-stakes situations. Who would you hire? You’ll hire test plots, because test pilots are used to balancing all of that stuff, a very dangerous job. Test pilots are killed all the time, because the job itself is dangerous. Also, have that a learned and trained ability to deal with huge number of factors simultaneously. You’re flying the airplane, you're testing something new, you're dealing with unexpected circumstances and you still, at the end of it, have to somehow get home and land. 

Or we hire medical doctors, and not just run-of-the-mill medical doctors, but as competent as possible, or we hire people who have ran large stage of life, or not only do they have all the raw material, but they have the proven ability to make good decisions, but the consequences really truly matter. When you never have enough information, you’ve shown that you are the type of person that can be trusted to make the right call and not just get all panicked. Then that’s how we do it; the right type of people chosen and then years and years of training and preparation and study. 

I was an astronaut for 21 years, and I was only in space for six months. For 20-1/2 years I was training and studying and preparing and helping to support and invent space flight. That’s how you deal with it. 

[0:14:40.5] MB: Wow! That ratio, it really demonstrates the point which I think is vital that training and practice is so important. Talk to me a little bit more about that and how critical that is. For somebody who's — I’m trying to draw this back to almost an actionable insight for someone who’s listening in. How vital is training and how can people integrate that lesson of how they can build toughness in their own lives?

[0:15:05.2] CH: I think a lot of people just count on good looks and charm and luck and such. If you do that, that’s fine. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't, and if the consequences are low, then so what? It’s no big deal. So this didn’t work out. If the consequences of what you’re trying to do are life and death and also it meant financial consequence, or if you get this wrong, that you have wasted an entire shuttle flight or you’ve ruined a piece of equipment that cost a lot of people a lot of money. We take it immensely seriously. 

If that’s the type of thing you're trying to accomplish, then you don't just count on random events. You don’t just count on luck. It changes your entire job. Your job is now to do everything that is possible prior to this event happening so that you could optimize your chances of success. To do that, you don't visualize success. You visualize failure. Like in the book, my first book, the Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, what I call the power of negative thinking. There's not much point in just visualizing success, because if it happens it's great. If it doesn't, then visualizing it didn’t help. 

Visualizing failure serves you well. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. What is the most likely thing to go wrong and am I ready to face it, and how do I know? Let’s practice that thing going wrong and see if I can deal with it. If I can't, let’s practice it again and again and again until, “Okay. If that thing goes wrong, I now know how to deal with it, and then let’s move on to the next most probable thing to go wrong and let's practice that until we understand it and then the next and the next thing.” 

I don’t know. We practiced 10,000 different things, and that's what astronauts do for a living; visualize success. They practice for failure all the time. They live in a world of negative thinking, because then when something's coming along, like space fuck, and suddenly you’re struck blind. You’re like, “Okay. What’s really gone wrong here? What am I dealing with? What could have caused this? What are the impacts? What can I do next? What did we practice? What do we know about this and how can we improve it for the future?” It just changes what your role is. You don't count on luck. You count on your own learned and practiced ability to deal with the probable things that are going to go wrong, and that applies to everything. It applies to driving your car down the highway. 

Eventually in your life, Matt, driving down a road, you are going to have a tire go flat, but how many times have you practiced it? How many times have you actually look at your model of car, whether it's front-wheel-drive, all-wheel-drive, rear wheel drive. W type of steering do you have? What type of run flat tires do you have? All that information, you know in one minute you could look it up. What is the right thing to do if you’re going 60 down the highway and your front left tire blows? What should you do? It’s a thing that's going to happen sometime in your life and you can learn exactly what you're supposed to do in 10 minutes on the Internet and the next time you’re driving your car, you can practice it 10 times. Just say, “Okay. Right now my front left —” on some empty stretch of road while you’re just driving long anyway. “My front left tire just blew up. Okay. What are my actions? Do I break? Do I not break? Do I downshift? Do I go into neutral? What do I do? Do I go left? Do I go right?” Just practice it. After you've done it, looked it up and done it 10 times, then you just file that away inside yourself as, “Okay. this is one of the things I'm now ready for.” Astronauts treat everything, like that flat tire. That’s how we fly in space. 

[0:18:39.8] MB: It’s amazing that when you look across people who’ve been incredibly successful in various different disciplines. I’m thinking about Charlie Monger, Warren Buffett. The business partner, the cochairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a guy we talk about all the time on the show. I’m thinking about people like the ancient Stoics. They all have very, very similar lessons, which is this idea that it's not necessarily about focusing on and visualizing things can go right. It's about figuring out the most probable things that can go wrong and planning and optimizing and building a strategy so that you can minimize those things. 

[0:19:16.3] CH: Yeah. That’s the only way that NASA has been successful in putting people that are up on the space station right now and driving our probe through the plumes of Enceladus that are going around Saturn right now and flying out beyond Pluto and driving the probes around on Mars and all these stuff we’re doing. It is purely the results of setting ourselves a goal and then starting to visualize failure and then learning incrementally better and better, how to get closer and closer to what it is we’re dreaming of and not counting on luck. 

No astronaut launches for space with their fingers crossed. That's not how we deal with risk. That’s just not an actual way to step up to something, and anything we’re doing in life, the people that you just mentioned. They have a set of goals in life. Things that they value, things that they want to get done. Any of the choices that they make have risk. Whether it's personal, reputational, financial, life or death. Anything worth doing in life has risk. Then the real question is, “How are you changing who you are so that you have a better chance of succeeding when you’re faced that particular risk?” That's really the whole recipe for success in spaceflight and really, I think, in anything worthwhile in life. 

[0:20:35.8] MB: That brings up a couple of points that I want to dig into. One of them is the relationship between danger and fear. Being somebody who's been a test pilot, an astronaut, you’ve put yourself in some incredibly dangerous situations, I guess, by most people's estimations. How do you view the interaction between those two things and are they the same? 

[0:21:00.0] CH: People ask you all the time, “Was launch scary?” or “Boy! Doing a spacewalk, that must be scary.” I became aware years and years ago as a test pilot and then as an astronaut that things aren't scary, just people are scared and they’re fundamentally different. 

Some people are afraid of whatever; a mouse or some people aren’t. Some people are afraid of — I don’t know, marriage, and some people are afraid of flying. The thing doesn't change. The mouse doesn't change, whether you’re afraid of it or not, or the airplane or the idea of flight or whatever. The real question is, “What are you prepared for and what are you unprepared for?” 

If you're unprepared for something then, really, the only recourse that we have is to be afraid, because fear causes physiological changes in your body. When you’re afraid, your body changes; you shiver or the blood drains from some part of your body or adrenaline gets released into your veins. Your body recognizes that, “Holy cow! This guy isn't ready for the thing that's happening. This wildebeest that just jumped out of the woods at him, he wasn’t ready for that.” And so I need to change momentarily this person's physiology so that they could deal with it. We call that change of physiology fear, because it allows us maybe for a momentary period to be able to face up to a risk. You don't want to fly a spaceship just by using adrenaline in your veins. It’s harmful to your body, but also it’s transient. That's not exactly how we fly spaceships. It’s not relying on super quick muscle twitch and reaction. It relies on complex reasons, a practiced deep technical understanding of how to do things. 

You can draw the parallel to just about anything. I don’t know, learning to use a skateboard. First time you get on a skateboard, you're useless at it and you fall, and so you’re kind of a little bit scared getting on a skateboard at first when you're a kid or, even worse, as an adult, or you don’t have the skills yet and you have a pretty good chance of falling and least skin in your knee, if not breaking a leg or busting a tooth or something, because you are incompetent at it. 

If you spend a time and you turn your natural talent into a honed ability, if you practice skateboarding until you can get on one, not even think about it, and now you could start to do tricks and jumps and all the cool things that the good skateboarders can do, you get to a point where it is no longer scary at all. In fact it's just sort of freedom. It's a cool thing. The skateboard didn’t change. The skateboards exactly the same. The physics didn’t change. It’s just you that changed, and that’s the difference between fear and danger. Things aren't scary, just people are scared. The only reason you're scared is because you didn't do your homework, you didn't practice, you didn’t get ready. You’re just trying to count on luck to carry you through this thing. It will work for some things in life. 

I think that gives you then the choice of you can go through life afraid, and one of our ways of describing perpetual fear stress. You could be overwhelmed by it, but just pick off one thing at a time. What is the thing that I don't how to do that I wish I could that is causing me danger or causing me stress, and let’s try and get good at that today. Let’s spend the next hour getting good at that thing so I don't longer have to be afraid of that. Then let’s go on to the next thing and the thing after that and the thing after that. That’s how I trained as a pilot. I used to be a downhill ski racer as well, same thing. That’s how I t rained as a test pilot and that is the absolute essence of training to fly in space, is to recognize the difference between danger and fear and then use all the available time to be ready for the risk so that you optimize your chances of success. 

[0:25:05.7] MB: What a great point. I really, really like that idea, that fear is essentially lack of preparation. If you prepare enough, if you train enough, it's possible to overcome any fear. Really, in many ways, fear — The kind of logical conclusion of that, is that fear is simply a signal telling you that you need to do more preparation. 

[0:25:27.4] CH: Yeah, or don't do that thing. I’m afraid of heights. Just generically, I think everybody should be afraid of heights, because if you’re in a position where you can fall without any control, then you don’t have to fall for much higher than your own standing height do yourself damage. You can crack your skull just by falling from your own standing height. That’s kind of the limit of how tall evolution is allowed our bodies to be, because if you fall from any more of your own height, you did. 

If you're standing on the edge of a cliff and one tiny little random gust of wind or lack of attention will kill you, then your body should be screaming at you that this is not where you ought to be, and either anchor yourself to something or do something else, but don't put yourself at risk if there's no benefit to what you’re doing. 

If this is a thing you really want to do, if there’s some great benefit to it. This is accomplishing some goals for you, then that's a different set of circumstances and you need to build all the skills you have so that you won't fall. 

The raw idea of fear is really just trying to protect you against hurting yourself, against ending your life unnecessarily. So you should listen to fear, but you should not keep fear from allowing you to dictate the constraints of your life. If you can't, you should locate, “This is important to me, just because I'm afraid.” Well, the afraid part is just because I’m not good at this yet. Let’s start gaining skills so I can do this thing that’s important to me and not just spend my life being stressed and wringing my hands and crossing my fingers and being afraid. 

[0:26:57.9] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:28:25.7] MB: Another example that you’ve shared around this is the idea of dealing with spiders or fear of spiders and walking through spider webs. Can you share that example? 

[0:28:34.2] CH: what I was trying to explain to folks how is it you can change your own threshold of fear. One of the examples that occurred to me was spiders, because a lot of people are afraid of spiders and there’s a good reason for that, of course, and that some spiders are quite venomous. The venom that they have has a really nasty negative effect and there are some that are really awful that can cause — That’s a neurotoxin or cause really bad damage to the human bodies. Black widow has a certain reputation or a brown recluse. They’ve even got bad names. 

Of course, most spiders are fine. Almost every spider on earth is just a little bug and it’s just being a spider and it’s terrified of you because you’re huge and can squish it any moment. If you have no understanding of spiders at all, then you could treat every single little thing in the corner of your eye that might turn out to be a spider as the most venomous spider that exists, and some people do. They treat every single little bug that they see as potential death, and that’s unreasonable, of course, because the odds of actually running into one of those spiders that does you harm is really low. Rather than spending your life screaming and running every time you see a bug, why not say, “Okay. Some spiders are bad for me, but most aren’t. Where I live, how many spiders are actually poisonous or venomous? How many actually do me harm? 

For a lot of the places in the world, you’ll find that the answer is none. There are spiders at all that exist where you live that are venomous, or maybe there’ just one or two, and you could look up where they actually exist. Maybe they’re only in a certain type of cave or at a certain type of circumstances and maybe they’re easily identifiable. Like a black widow has a great big red hourglass on its back. It couldn’t have a clear, like a danger marking on it just to let you know. 

Then say, “Okay. Now I know what the actual danger is. If it's just any other type of spider, I can treat it like a ladybug. It’s got the same threat to me as a ladybug, but there's a couple of spiders I have to watch out for, or this type, and what do their nest look like, and I won’t walk into one of those type of webs, like the small web, like a black widow that build close to the ground, often dark corners.” 

Then say, “Okay. Now I know what the risk is, but I still have this fundamental sort of gut reaction, my instinctive reaction of fear. Every time I feel a spider web on my face walking in the dusk, I feel that same raw animal fear.” Then say to yourself, “But that can’t be a venomous spider. They don’t build spider webs up here. That can't be it. So I'm just being silly.” 

To overcome it, what I recommend is walk-through spider webs deliberately. Find a spider web that you know actually isn't a threat and walk through it and then find another one and walk-through that. Go up to an attic where there’s a whole bunch of spider webs that are obviously not any sort of threat and just walk through to them. Get over your primitive, illogical, instinctive, fearful reaction and actually look into the information. Find out — Use your brain and figure it out and practice and practice and practice. After you walked through a hundred spider webs with no consequence, then you could start to change your fundamental instinctive reaction. You can start to control your own instinctive fear, and now you can make your decisions based on reality and not just on the same amount of intellect that a simplest forms of life put into their decision-making. 

We treat everything like that in the space business. How does this spider web, or how does this spider actually shape up as a threat? What’s the real threat? What is the real threat look like? How am I going to recognize the real threat from all the noise of the non-threats so that I don't overreact, because if you don't know what to be afraid of, then you're afraid of everything, and I don't think that’s a useful way to go through life. I just think it’s self-destructive. 

[0:32:47.6] MB: I love the example of forcing yourself to walk through spider webs, and I wanted to hear the story, because, to me, I personally am kind of afraid of spiders and so it was very relevant story. I almost instinctively hear, and maybe this is just a lack of knowledge, but I sort of instinctively hear myself saying like, “Yeah. That sounds like a great idea to go walk through some spider webs, but what if?” I think it's the what if that always gets me and like makes me more fearful. It’s like, “What if that web that I happened to walk through happens to be a dangerous spider?”

[0:33:20.4] CH: Right. That’s where your intellect comes into effect, and actually look and do the work in advance. Don't just count on randomness. If you are afraid of jaguars, that doesn't mean you need to be afraid of kittens, house cat kittens, but they’re both cats. You can spend your entire life terrified of kittens because you’re also afraid of jaguars, but it doesn’t make any sense. Yet, for whatever reason, you’re going to put spiders in the same category 

Just do the work in advance. If you have no information, then you have to assume the worst, but you have your whole life to gather information, so why not do it? Why just assume the worst all the time? 

[0:34:04.4] MB: The cat and the kitty jaguar example definitely brings that into light and shows sort of how ridiculous that framework of belief is. 

[0:34:12.0] CH: Yeah. It’s the difference between belief and knowledge. If you’re just running around instinctively reacting on belief, that you may as well be a pug. I have a pug. He’s a delightful dog, but he’s not a deep thinker and he just deals with stuff the best he can and just instinctively reacts to everything, but we’re not pugs. We are the most rational of all beings, and what do you choose to do with your ability to think I think has a big effect on what happens in your life. 

[0:34:42.7] MB: That kind of makes me think we’re transitioning a little bit into another thing that you’ve talked about which I fully agree with is this idea that dovetailing that concept of risk and danger, the Idea that most people's perception of how dangerous their lives are is actually totally disconnected from the reality that today we live in the safest, healthiest period ever in human history and the world is actually a much better place than people realize. 

[0:35:14.1] CH: Absolute. Everybody wants to feel significant, of course. It’s a fundamental human natural need, and that's good, and you should recognize that you are no different than everybody else. You want to feel worthwhile and significant. 

One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate the problems that exist. The people that hold up the sign the end of the world is coming, it's because the world has been here for 4-1/2 billion years and this person has painted a sign and stuck it up here in there, particular 75 years on earth, because they want this to be the most significant 75 years out of all the 4-1/2 billion, because it makes them feel good, but it’s kind of ridiculous. The world isn't about to suddenly end just because this person held up a sign. 

I think that natural lack of temporal perspective of yourself and the desire to feel significant tends to let you over exaggerate the risks that exist in your life. I never been harder to whatever, to raise children or to do anything, it’s never been harder than it is now. Boy! You shouldn’t have to go very far back in human history to find examples that counter that argument. Like gosh, the 400 million people died of smallpox in the last century, which is the population of Europe, or the number of people that were killed in World War I and how, or the influenza epidemic of 1919-1920 that killed millions and hundreds of millions of people around the world, or whatever, child disease. The number of people that make at their full natural lifespan now is higher than it's ever been for our species worldwide. The opportunity just in the cellphone you hold in your hand, you have the library of Alexandria. Some total of human knowledge available to you and we’ve eliminated a lot of the diseases that used to plague us all the time. 

Yeah, life isn't easy, but I think in an effort to sometimes — I don’t know, feel a little more significant, we tend to over exaggerate the problems that face us right now. Looking back into history of studying the problems that our predecessors faced, hopefully the helps put us into a little clearer image in the mirror. 

[0:37:29.1] MB: In many ways, it’s almost the same lesson, which is the idea that the more informed you are, the more you understand how reality really is, the less fear you have about sort of vague things that are out there that people are worried about and afraid of. 

[0:37:44.7] CH: Yeah, I think so. People say often to me, “Gosh! Would you take a one-way trip to Mars?” I sort of remind myself all the time that, “Hey, we’re all in a one-way trip,” that you can't get away from that. You get your years of then life is done. Get over that part. Don't pretend that you’re going to be the first person ever to never die. 

The real focus then is not to prolong some vestige of life for as desperately long as possible, but actually to do things that are important to you while you are alive. That's the real key. What is important to me and what should I be working on? Because there’s a randomness to life, and what should I be working on? How should I be trying to change who I am? What are the things that I love and that I want to do and that I hope to get done? Let's work on those and not just spend my life cowering under the pillows and hope that somehow that will extend my life by one more day. Deal with the difference between fear and danger and recognize that you are kind of the thinking link between those two so that one doesn't need to overpower the other. 

[0:38:56.0] MB: Let’s change directions. I want to talk about another kind of quote or idea that you’ve shared, which is the idea that the sky is not the limit. 

[0:39:03.5] CH: Yeah, I think it's funny when you see some advertising campaign and somebody says the sky's the limit. I’m going, “Wow! Have you ever looked through a telescope? Have you ever gone outside at night?” I’m just thinking, “What a funny phrase? The sky is the limit.” Maybe that made sense before the Wright Brothers got flagged at Kitty Hawk or before Yeager went through the speed of sound during, whatever, ’47, or Al Shepard flew in space in ’61, or Neil and Buzz walked to the moon and ’69, or Peggy, who’s commanding the space station right now when she did — This is her second time commanding the International Space Station. The sky is this ghostly reflection of light that is the tiniest of vestige of onionskin tin sheaf around the hard rock of our planet. That’s what the sky is. To think that sky is the limit, it just makes me laugh. 

[0:39:59.3] MB: I think that kind of hints at the — One of the things that I've heard a lot of astronauts talk about is this idea that viewing the earth from outer space fundamentally shifts your perspective and gives you a much deeper understanding of the shared journey that humanity is on and the fragileness of earth. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience and what that was like? 

[0:40:25.5] CH: Sure. Earth is incredibly tough. Earth has been here 4-1/2 billion year, which is an almost — It’s such a big number. It's almost infinity, 4-1/2 billion years, and we’ve recently found fossils on earth from 4 billion years ago, the earliest of the two worms that were growing at the rift at the bottom of the oceans. There's been life on earth for 4 billion years. Life tough and the earth is tough, but certain little styles of living. They’re transient, of course. They’re fragile, and the earth gets hit by big events, huge electromagnetic pulses from the sun and other stars and huge million year-long volcanic eruptions and caldera and asteroid impacts and stuff. The earth is tough. It withstood all of those. 

Life is precious, and the earth, as far as we can tell, is the only place that life exists so far. We haven’t found life anywhere else. There's lots of probabilities out there, but we have found no evidence of life anywhere except on earth so far, and we’re looking. Maybe we will find it, but we haven’t found it yet. I think you need to balance those when you’re onboard a spaceship and going around the world in 90 minutes. You can see the rugged, self-repairing, ancient nature of the world. You can see the onslaught of life and the flow of it and the undeniable rejuvenated nature of it, because you go from 56 north to 56 south and you see the whole planet has — Or our orbit is tipped from the equator. You get to really truly understand the world without anybody telling you what to think. You just actually get to see it. 

The common shared way that we set up towns and villages and cities. It doesn't matter whether you’re over Timbuktu or Timmons, or Phoenix, or London. It doesn't matter. That pattern of how we choose to live as people is the same worldwide. Our common goals, we have different cultures and languages and histories and religions and beliefs, but the stuff that is common to us way outweighs the stuff that is different amongst us. We tend to exaggerate the differences naturally enough. It’s just human nature, but I think orbiting the world, you are very much struck by the shared nature of human existence and the commonality of it and the transient nature of it, but also the necessity to cherish it. All of those part of being one of the human beings that gets a chance to orbit the world. 

Also, the reason you mentioned at the outset that I’m an author and a speaker and such is not squander that experience to let people see it as clearly as possible. To try and express it through words or images or music or whatever, to let people truly see where we live and the fact that we’re all breathing out of the same bubble. I think those perspectives are fairly new to us as a species. It’s the result of our new technology that allows us to see ourselves that way and what we do with that information I think is important. 

[0:43:49.1] MB: Another idea that you’ve shared is the concept of aiming to be a zero. Can you tell me about that? 

[0:43:55.4] CH: When I was a young man, I, of course, was very confident. Like a lot of young men, that’s sort of bravado and feeling of invincibility, and I was a downhill ski racer and a pilot and becoming a fighter pilot, and so you sort of become over-sure of your own decision-making ability and your own ability to do the right thing. Of course, you're nowhere near perfect and you make some good decisions and you make some bad ones, but you only see the world through your own eyes and sometimes it gets pretty distorted. 

I found the natural thing to do is, especially when younger, was to assume that no matter what I decided, it was probably right. The way I tried to explain it to myself was no matter what I do, I’m going to be a positive influence. If I come in to a situation and I look around and a bunch of people are doing stuff, what they really need is me to tell them what to do, or at least to express my opinion. That'll sort everything out. 

If I can be a positive, I called myself — Like I’m a plus one. No matter what I do, I come in as a positive plus one influence. Of course, if you're coming into a complicated situation that's been going on for a while, there are all sorts of subtle influences and factors and history and things that are going on that you’re unaware of and you’ll come blundering in with some ideal that just occurred to you as if you're the only person that could have thought of that idea, and everybody around you recognize that you’re not a positive. You’re a negative. You’re a minus one, and everybody around you immediately says, “Wow! I’ll wait till this guy leaves, because what an idiot.” 

I tried to be slightly more realistic in my own abilities and instead of just assuming I was a plus one, and inevitably under a lot of complex circumstances in effect being a minus one, I tried to do instead come in to a new situation deliberately saying, “Okay. I’m going to aim initially to be a zero here.” I’m just going to aim to actually not cause harm. To try and give myself time to notice what’s actually happening, to become informed, to become sensitive to the subtleties that actually dictate what's happening here, and then be a lot more selective and deliberate in how I'm going to try and be a plus one and be a positive influence. 

There are lots of times that won’t work. The classic example is if the building is on fire, it's not time for a nuanced interpretation of what needs to be done. You need to take action. Is something bad is happening, then you don't have time for consultation. You just have to go with everything you’ve learned to that point of take action and do your absolute best to be a plus one. But the building is very seldom on fire and yet we often treat it like it always is. 

I think it's good to have a bunch of tricks up your sleeve, but you are better served in life to come into a new situation deliberately targeting yourself as a zero than just assuming that you’re going to be a plus one. I think it'll serve you better, but it will also serve the environment around you a lot better. 

[0:47:02.0] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give for somebody listening to this conversation that they could do to concretely implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today? 

[0:47:12.7] CH: Two things. One is find something that you’re really interested in, that you're passionate about, that expires you, that raises your pulse just to think about it, that makes you want to know more, and start using your free time to become more expert in that area. Actually, if you’re interested in — It doesn't matter what. If you're interested in — I don't know, trees. It doesn’t matter. Spend some time actually studying it, learn about it, become expert in one part of it and then another part of it. Start making expertise in the areas that you’re interested in part of who you are. Try and really tap into what naturally motivates you and then allow yourself the privilege of becoming expert and competent in the areas that motivate you. I think that will serve you well no matter what. 

The other is have a look at what it is that makes you fearful and don't just accept the fear, but actually say, “Why does that make — I could tell when I'm feeling fearful. That unsettled feeling in my gut, that I can feel the cleanliness of my skin. That makes me afraid just to deal with that.” Then start to treat it clinically. What is it about that that actually is the danger? What is the real problem that I'm trying to solve? How can I change who I am so that I could deal with that problem better? What skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself just to be a terrified little chihuahua here when I’m a functioning homo-sapiens? How can I change who I am so that I’m not just relying on fear to deal with that facet of my life? Because fear to me this is a destructive long-term solution to anything. It’s okay in the short term, but you don’t want to have that the way that you deal with something in life. 

I think if you balance those two things, that's probably enough homework for today. 

[0:49:10.0] MB: Chris, where can listeners find you and your books online? 

[0:49:14.7] CH: The books, of course, are available everywhere, any of the online booksellers; Amazon or something. They can go to chrishadfield.ca, Chris Hadfield, chrishadfield.ca, and all of the stuff is available there. Then there're all sorts of stuff available online as well. I perform music with symphonies and have various music available and ideas and the books. Then I speak all over the world. If you go to chrishadfield.ca, you can look under events and see where and when I’m going to be speaking somewhere nearby. Yeah, it’s a world of information and relatively easy to access, but I think you can just Google under my name, then that's probably the best place to start. 

[0:49:57.4] MB: Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your incredible story and all of your wisdom, so many great lessons for the audience. Really, thank you very much. 

[0:50:06.7] CH: It was a pleasure to talk with you, and I look forward to seeing you in person. 

[0:50:10.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. In fact I responded into a number of listener emails this morning from across the globe. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get our exclusive Mindset Monday email. This is something that listeners have been loving. It's short, simple links, stories, articles, things that have us excited in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change the intro music like we rolled out a couple of weeks ago, weigh in on guest questions and much more. Don't miss out on that opportunity. 

Next, you're getting an awesome free guide that we created based on listener feedback and demand, which is our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with all the other perks of being on the email list by signing up and joining the email list today at successpodcast.com. If you join right now you’re going to get another exclusive bonus guide that's a surprise. It's pretty awesome. It’s actually one of favorites personally, and you can get it just by going to the website, signing up, or texting the word “smarter” if you're on the go, just text “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about on the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just to the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Hack Your Biochemistry To Create Spontaneous Weight Loss and Improved Mental Health by Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary

In this episode we discuss how neurology's perspective on the brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system, we look at your gut biome’s role in depression, mood regulation and how the microbiome controls your behavior and emotions, we ask why it is so hard for people to break negative eating habits, talk about the biochemistry of addiction, the incredible importance of understanding your microbiome and gut health with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. 

Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary is a neuroscientist and Ayurveda expert. She has participated in over 20 clinical research studies working with new stem cell therapies for diabetic neuropathy and drug development for the treatment of ALS. Dr. Chaudhary is the author of The Prime: Prepare and Repair Your Body for Spontaneous Weight Loss, and is a regular guest on the Dr. Oz show!

• How Dr. Chaudhary’s personal experience led her down the path of integrative medicine

• The health of the brain is highly dependent on the health of the gut

• Auyerveda is the oldest recorded medical system in the world - one of the oldest forms of “lifestyle medicine"

• Why food is medicine

• The way you live dictates whether you are sick or healthy

• Disease is a result of imbalance and can be cured by changing habits

• How the Neurologist’s perspective on the brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system

• Dr. Chaudhary’s perspective on how eastern & integrative medicine can be integrated with western science to form a more holistic solution for health

• Tumeric is a great example of a spice that has scientifically demonstrated health benefits

• Micro-biome & gut health underpins huge medical issues

• Western medicine is just now catching up with insights from 5000 year old holistic medicines

• 90% of your serotonin comes from your gut and gut health is a major factor in depression

• Scientifically, the mind and mental health are deeply connected and directly related gut health

• Why is it so hard for people to break negative eating habits? Is it really just a question of willpower?

• The neurochemistry and biochemistry that underpins negative eating habits

• Your micro biome itself can shift your eating habits and make you desire and consume certain foods

• The science behind how addictions form in our brains (especially food addictions)

• Why 85% of people cannot change the way they are eating with willpower

• The biochemistry of addiction and food addiction & the role dopamine plays

• How food scientists have engineered junk food to produce massive dopamine spikes

• The dangers of overstimulated dopamine receptors and how they lead to addiction

• An obese person’s brain chemistry responds the same way to sugar as a cocaine addict responds to cocaine

• Environmental toxins and toxic inflammation and how they impact your body

• Enteric nervous system - the “brain inside your gut” which produces 95% of the serotonin and 50% of the dopamine in your body

• “The gut does most of the talking and the brain does most of the listening”

• Who dictates the content of what the gut says? The Microbiome

• "How smart is your gut?"

• How fecal matter transplants in mice can completely reverse genetically engineered personality traits

• Research clearly demonstrates that your micro-biome controls your behavior and emotions

• We are still in the infancy of discovering and understanding the microbiome - there is alot of “noise” that’s hard to understand

• The importance of taking an individualized approach to gut health - its not always about taking probiotics or fermented food

• The most foundational steps to implement in order to improve your gut health

• The simplest interventions are usually the most powerful

• How Tumeric has helped reduced Alzheimers disease by 75% in India

• Foods and spices are more interactive than the “unilateral” approach of western medicines - interacting with multiple cells and systems, rather than a hyper focused intervention

• We discuss a variety of herbs and supplements that Dr. Chaudhary reccomends to improve your gut health and microbiome

• The environment can interact with your genes to change genetic expression

• Dr. Chaudhary’s work as a neurologist revealed many of the same conclusions from Auyervedic medicine

• How your genes interact with the environment, including what you’re eating, to create the outcomes in your life

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] The Prime: Prepare and Repair Your Body for Spontaneous Weight Loss by Kulreet Chaudhary
[Website] The Chopra Center
[Personal Site] Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.1] MB: Welcome to the science of success, the number one evidence based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we discuss how a neurologist’s perspective on your brain, fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system. How your guy biomes roll in depression, mood regulation and how the micro biome controls your behavior and emotions.

We ask why it’s so hard for people to break negative eating habits. We look at the biochemistry of addiction. And, discuss the incredible importance of understanding your micro biome and your gut health and much more with Dr. Kulreet Chaudrhary. I want to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week on Monday.

This is our mindset Monday email. People have been sending us emails, telling us how much they love mindset Monday, this is a quick list of articles, stories and things that have us excited right now.

Lastly, you’re going to get the exclusive opportunity to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music which we did recently based on listener votes for people who are on the mail list and be part of the community. Go to successpodcast.com and join the email list right now or if you’re on your phone, if you’re on the go right now, just text the word smarter to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discuss the darker side of h ow the US military influences human behavior. We touched on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating men sure in candidates.

How this one psychological bias can convince a stranger to murder someone and up to 80% of cases, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses and much more with Chase Hughes. If you want to get to the darker side of influencing other people, listen to that episode.

Now for the interview.

[0:02:43.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show. Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. Dr. Chaudhary is a neuroscientist and RU beta expert. She’s participated in over 20 clinical research studies, working with new stem cell therapies for diabetic, neuropathy and drug development for the treatment of ALS.

She also was the author of the Prime, prepare and repair your body for spontaneous weight loss and is a regular guest on the Dr. Oz show. Kulreet, welcome to the science of success.

[0:03:10.2] KC: Thank you so much Mat, pleasure to be here.

[0:03:13.1] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on today. I’d love to start out with a story that you share about your migraines and how that helped shape the journey that you’ve gone on to really dig into gut bacteria and how all that impacts our wellbeing and our neurology as well?

[0:03:31.6] KC: Sure, kind of like many stories of doctors who have gone into integrative medicine, it often takes a personal experience to kind of bypass all of the biases that you’ve been trained with and my story is no different, I was trained as a neurologist and shortly after I started practice, I developed migraine headaches which you know, for a neurologist seem like no big deal because I have all of the treatments that I could use to control them.

The doctor became the patient and I started myself on the different medications that I give to my patients and I was just absolutely horrified by the side effects, how off like, I could not figure out if the migraines were worse or the side effects from the medications were worse.

That really forced me to go back to my childhood and I turned to my mom as all good neurologist do when they can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, they go to mom.

I said, you know, I can’t seem to get this under control, I remember growing up, we were always exposed to different Ayurvedic remedies and she was the one who referred me to an ayurvedic practitioner.

You know, just as I kind of mentioned in the book, it was a bit of a culture shock at first because you know, I walk in this practitioner, is feeling my pulse to get an estimate of where my health was and the first thing he starts talking about is my digestion.

For me, I felt like you know, this is just some total quack, they don’t know anything about the nervous system because all he asked me was about my digestion. Since I had absolutely nowhere to go from there, I took his recommendations, everything I had done had failed.

So, at this point you know, what did I have to lose? I started working on my digestion and lo and behold within two months, my headaches were completely gone and so that forced me as a neurologist and neuroscientist, I had to take this seriously and look into this.

It forced me to take Ayurveda more seriously and take their perception of the nervous system as an extension of your gut health, that the health of the brain is highly dependent on the health of the GI tract and I started to study it and so that was kind of the beginning of this entire journey.

[0:05:52.7] MB: I want to dig in to a lot of those different concepts. Let’s start with, I’m sure I’m going to completely botch the pronunciation of this but ayurvedic medicine, what is that and how does it approach the human body and as a scientist and a doctor, how do you think about – 

You know, as you said, you had some sort of biases about that, how do you think about the perception or the belief that a lot of people have that it might be sort of woo-woo or out there or not really rooted in science?

[0:06:21.3] KC: Sure, we’ll start kind of with the one thing at a time so yes, first of all, what is it? The way I describe ayurvedic medicine is it’s really kind of the original lifestyle medicine on planet earth, it’s the oldest recorded medical system, originally located or originated I should say in India.

But, as we look at indigenous cultures all over the world, they had a very similar medical concept towards balance and health. I almost hesitate to even call it medical because it was really just a way of living. The basic principles of ayurvedic medicine is that food is medicine, that he way that you live will dictate whether you are sick or whether you are healthy and that there are certain imbalances that result to disease that can be reversed by changing certain habits.

If you look at really the fundamental aspects of ayurvedic medicine, it’s really not that different from a lot of the newer lifestyle medicine coming out today like functional medicine. In fact, functional medicine actually look heavily towards the history of ayurvedic medicine to help come up with some of the formulations and some of the protocols that they use. In terms of you know, how I look at it, what struck me the most, especially as a neurologist because we tend to look at the brain as this protected system in this hard scull.

That is somehow separate from the rest of the body and the biggest shift for me was realizing that the health of any one organ really depends on the health of the entire organism meaning us. You can’t look at disease in any particular area in isolation. When somebody’s sick, there’s a particular story to how the y got there and involves a lot of different systems. If you do not understand that story, you can never really get rid of the underlying disease process.

You bring up a really great question because if you would have asked me 20 years ago if I would be doing what I’m doing, I would have just laughed because I was this very hardcore scientist and people who go into neurology in particular like it because of how black and white it is.

It’s something that can be easily studied, it’s got all of these wonderful tracts and it’s a seemingly knowable system and so I would have said I would have been one of the last people to have immersed myself as deeply as I have but what is amazing really to me about ayurvedic medicine is how it sees the body and the whole person as a dynamic unit and how the environment impacts your body.

How emotions impact your body, it’s just such an unbelievably holistic way of looking at it and because it’s so holistic, there are so many different ways that you can approach an issue that takes into consideration rather than the myriad of symptoms like odd patients coming in with 10 symptoms and I see it as just one simple problem.

The last point you make is really fantastic about, well how is a scientist do you not look at this as kind of woo-woo and what’s been fascinating Mat and I wish I could have taken credit for knowing this and foresight when I first started.

But ayurvedic medicine is so scientific, it is so unbelievably comprehensive and science now is starting to catch up with it. A couple of really simple examples is just looking at the study of the spice turmeric.

I mean, it’s being studied for how many countless different diseases and it’s just a spice, it’s something that people just put in their food every single day. You know, another example is the microbiome. You know, looking at how the bacteria, particularly the bacteria in your gut affects so many different conditions particularly neurological conditions.

The funny thing is as a western scientist and seeing that we are just starting to catch up with the knowledge that was present 5,000 years ago.

[0:10:29.9] MB: That’s fascinating and I think the point that the western approach, in many ways is so dialed in to each specific component and the brain and just how it works with in many ways to the detriment of the understanding of the system at large is why some of these integrative approaches like ayurvedic medicine have really come back recently and started to be more studied and people are starting to understand.

Hey, these ancient cultures are actually on to something and there’s science behind why these herbal remedies, things like turmeric were so effective?

[0:11:05.9] KC: What’s particularly interesting for me Mat, you know, as a neurologist, expecting to see the types of shifts that I saw. What was particularly shocking was, how many psychological conditions that we’d have diagnosed people with were just simply related to their gut health.

Particularly the colony of bacteria that resided in your colon. I would have patients who would come in with you know, 20 year history of depression and I would say, you’re not depressed, you just have the wrong colonization of bacteria and it was so hard for them to believe that it could be that simple.

Sure enough, as we started implementing changes that would shift their bacteria from one population to a healthier population, the depression would simply resolve. Again, we’re just starting to find that out that 90% of the serotonin actually comes from your gut. I never learn that as a neurologist.

If 90% of your serotonin is coming from your gut and you have the wrong people, the wrong organisms growing in your gut and they’re no longer providing that serotonin, of course you’re going to have things like depression.

That was really kind of interesting to me is how deeply connected the mind is, not just when we’re talking about brain health like multiple chlorosis or Parkinson's but our mind, our mental health is directly related to our gut health.

[0:12:26.4] MB: That’s a great point and I think that’s a good segway to dig deeper into a lot of the conclusions from the prime and from your work around how gut health underpins so much more of our broader health.

I’d love to start with – before we dig into it, I absolutely want to get into how gut bacteria can impact things like depression and anxiety because those are topics we talk a lot about on the show.

I’d love to start with negative eating habits and you talk about how negative eating habits and changing them isn’t – is it just a question of willpower if I want to eat more healthily? Do I just not have enough willpower if I have an extra donut or don’t eat my kale salad?

[0:13:09.1] KC: Sure, again, this was another big surprise and this was the real advantage of having a scientific background and being involved in so many clinical trials is when I saw this happening in my practice, I immediately started to investigate deeper into this and say, well why is this?

When I first just started incorporating this information into my medical practice, you know, it seemed like the easiest thing that hey, I’ve got all of this new behaviors that reverse neurological conditions, just implement these dietary changes and you will feel better.

The result was that 15% of people couldn’t do it. 15% of people could not – only 15% could do it, 85% could not change the way that they were eating. I looked at this and you know, these were people who were extremely successful in other areas of their life.

I couldn’t say, well, it’s a lack of willpower, it’s a lack of discipline because they were so disciplined in other areas. Why would you be so disciplined in one area and unable to make a change in another?

The big difference here is the neural chemistry or the biochemistry that was underpinning why they were eating the foods that they were eating. These were not unmotivated people, I mean, they were unbelievably motivated to change because you know, they wanted to make these changes to reverse neurological conditions.

This is as motivated as a group as you could get. What I started to look at was what were the actual obstacles to change and I realized that it was a biochemical obstacle. The biochemistry of it was very well-known to the food industry who has taken full advantage of that biochemistry to make sure that people were tied into these food choices.

Really, the main reason for me writing the book was just to level out the playing field so that people understood what the biochemical challenges of changing the way that you eat in particular are.

So that you can overcome them. And a big part of this challenge again is that microbiome which dictates quite a bit of how you actually choose your foods by releasing certain chemicals that give you that high feeling when you eat certain foods that they need to survive.

If you’ve got the wrong guys in your gut, you can see how their response to a donut will suddenly make you feel so wonderful and elated versus you know, the response to vegetables that you passed by.

What happens is that as you begin to shift the bacteria first by changing the underlying biochemistry that determines which guys live in your gut, your choices for food actually begin to change spontaneously.

The worst part of it Matt is you know, the beginning you might say, okay, well the donut makes me feel good so I’m just going to keep eating it. But over time, there’s a process that happens in the brain called neuro adaptation where it’s no longer a pleasure response and you actually have to eat the donut just to feel okay.

It’s no longer a high, it’s that you actually feel low until that donut goes in. It’s a lot of the same thing that happens like with other addictions except this one is with food which for me is the most dangerous addiction because it’s the most widely available substance and it’s the most cheaply available substance and it’s something that we completely allow for the food industry to market towards us without any regulation.

[0:16:52.7] MB: So, tell me about the science behind how those addictions form in our brain and how we go from eating the donut to feel good to just eating the donut to feel okay?

[0:17:05.1] KC: Absolutely. This is the wonderful part is we’ve actually made quite a bit of progress in the biochemistry of addiction which is why we approach addiction so differently but we have not made the connection that food is also acting like an addicting substance.

Much of it has to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine in particular. Now, there’s many other neurotransmitters involved but it’s easiest to talk about the response to dopamine. Dopamine is our feel good neurotransmitter and we need it, if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t survive.

Let’s say, you know, let’s go back several thousands of years ago. If you were to find a fruit tree in the middle of spring and you aid it and you got that sweet sensation, your brain would send you a signal that hey, this is good, go ahead and eat this now because later on, in the winter, this is not going to be available.

You would get a small response of dopamine in the brain and you would feel good when you ate it. If for example, if sex didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t do it and it’s the same thing. When you have sex, you release dopamine and that’s why it actually is pleasurable.

These things are present, this release of dopamine, this messages in our brain are present to sustain the human race basically. You know, if food didn’t taste good, we wouldn’t consume it, if sex didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t do it and we wouldn’t reproduce.

Now, fast forward to our modern world, and what has happened is that – there’s an actual industry called food scientist. They have figured out what is the most powerful combination of sugar, fat and salt that produces a massive dopamine spike.

Now, you might say, well, gosh that sounds fantastic because if a little dopamine feels good, imagine how wonderful a huge spike of dopamine would feel? The problem is, whenever your brain experiences something new, so out of balance, it sees it as a stress.

Even though dopamine is supposed to make you feel good, your brain sees this massive overstimulation as a problem and it is a problem because it’s basically overstimulating your dopamine receptors.

The brain, which is an incredibly intelligent organ, looks for a way to counteract this response. You’re eating the food and going, my god, this feels so good, I never had anything taste better than this glazed donut.

Every time you eat it, your brain is now dampening your dopamine response to the stimuli. Now, what happens over time Mat is now, the foods that would naturally cause that dopamine to rise a little bit to make you feel good, they’re not doing anything.

Now, when you have like just a fruit for example, it’s not even giving you a  little bit of pleasure or now, and this happens and often times in relationships, now, even being with a partner or  having sex is n to giving you that same dopamine.

Now you have to eat more and more of that particular substance to get the same response, except it’s not a response of pleasure, it’s a response to just feel normal.

We see this process happen with multiple different addictions but what our studies are starting to show and what our images of the brain are starting to show is that when you have somebody who is obese, they respond to sugar the same way that a cocaine addict would respond to cocaine.

We’re talking about brain chemistry here. When you start to look at the underlying neuro chemistry of why we are actually eating the way we are and you look at what’s happening in the brain, what’s happening in the gut, you realize, this is not just some simple process of hey, just shift how you’re eating.

If it was that easy, we would have figured it out but instead, people are spending billions of dollars to try to reverse this but they’re doing it by doing the hardest part first which is trying to change behaviors rather than just simply changing your biochemistry.

[0:21:28.7] MB: Before we dig in to more of the interventions to potentially remap the gut and help change this biochemistry, I want to bring in the other component of this which are toxins. Tell me a little bit about toxins in our environment and how they impact us?

[0:21:45.7] KC: This is becoming one of my favorite topics because it’s becoming such a huge issue and now, what’s interesting though Mat, it’s not just the toxins in our environment, although they play a huge part but it’s also the toxins inside of our body that we’re creating by simply eating the wrong foods.

There’s a general term for toxins in ayurvedic medicine called ama. We don’t have exactly anything that corresponds to that in the western world but I kind of summarize it as toxic inflammation.

Ama, or these toxins, they come from undigested products and one of the greatest things about ayurvedic Matt is it looks not only at physical body but how these toxins accumulate both and the mind as well as in your emotions.

You can have mental ama, you can have emotional ama, it’s basically anything that has been undigested. Let’s say you went through a very stressful time, maybe experience a loss or went through a divorce or something like that.

If there was something unprocessed from that, that would actually turn into ama that gets stuck in your body. One of the main premises in Ayurveda is that it’s the accumulation of these toxins or this ama that eventually becomes the night for disease as it accumulate into the different organ systems, they start to trigger autoimmunity.

Now, take just kind of life in the modern world, you know, let’s separate that just from the environmental toxins, we’re already under a lot of stress. Let’s say you lived in a perfectly pristine environment, you would still have a toxic accumulation just because of the amount of stress that we go through and how quickly people are eating your food.

The lack of connection really with cooking anymore but now add on top of that, all of the environmental toxins that we are simply being bombarded by and the bodies having a very difficult time just simply moving these toxins out.

There’s a process that happens in the body, particularly in the lyrical bio transformation and when there is a traffic jam, meaning there’s more toxins that need to be processed than availability within the lyric to remove them, what happens is these toxins just start to float around freely in the body and this is a tremendous trigger as I mentioned before for auto immunity and just damage to the organs.

[0:24:19.7] MB: How does that tie back in with dumb gut and leaky gut syndrome and all of t hose kind of symptoms or problems?

[0:24:29.2] KC: That’s a great question. One of the organ systems that gets damaged as these toxins start to bio-accumulate. When they can’t be bio transformed, they get accumulated in the body, is the GI tract. Because remember, your gut is where a lot of the external toxins that are present in your food.

For example, if you’re eating a lot of foods that have chemicals, our pesticides and a lot of people make the assumption that the chemicals placed in our food have been tested for safety and that’s not the case at all.

A lot of the chemicals that are sprayed on our foods is the same scenario, they’re not tested for safety. Your gut is actually seeing these toxins firsthand and it directly damages the gut mucosa and the gut mucosa is where all of the magic happens from your digestion.

It’s where the enzymes are secreted, it’s where food is actually transformed into nutrients, it’s where absorption occurs and so, over time, you start to damage this invaluable membrane and this is also the home of all your healthy bacteria that want to support you.

As it becomes damaged, you have more pathogens that begin to grow there but in addition to the toxins that you ingest that impact the gut, now your liver is trying to get rid of all the toxins that you’re breathing in from the air, that you’re putting on your skin from your skincare products.

A lot of people are shocked to find out that you actually absorb 80% of the things that go on your skin. My general advice is if you can’t eat it, don’t put it on your skin but your body’s absorbing all these toxins and it’s getting processed with liver and whatever the liver can’t process is also getting dumped into the GI tract.

The GI tract becomes kind of this common final pathway where a lot of these toxins get thrown into and then your GI tract can’t remove it either. It becomes this horrific cycle and so if you are accumulating what we would call ama in the GI tract, you start to build up a bio film and this is this thick mucosal layer where all of the pathogens begin to grow and it becomes very difficult to absorb nutrients from your food.

You’re getting a shutdown of one of the most important systems that provides nutrients to the entire body but it’s actually now starting to become a source of toxic exposure both directly from the actual toxins you’re absorbing but also the toxins being released now by these pathogenic bacteria that are now inhabiting your gut.

[0:27:09.0] MB: I’m sure if you’re listening to the show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities and that’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week skill share.

Skill share is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography.

And, you can get unlimited access to the entire catalogue for low monthly price so you don’t have to pay per class like many other sites. They have some really cool courses on there, they have a course on ever note mastery. You know how much I love ever note.

Ever note runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps.

Mind maps are awesome, I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I’m looking at right now for the art of learning by Josh Weiskin. I love mind maps, the incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it’s a really cool tool to remember things.

There’s so many fascinating courses on skill share and the cool thing is, they’ve been so kind to the show, they’ve been incredible sponsor and they’re giving all of our listeners a free month of access. Get in there, you can get free classes for up to a month, completely for free, you can check out all of these courses, just go to Skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month.

[0:28:37.3] MB: I think this is a good opportunity to tie in gut health back up to both sort of mental health and more broadly, general health. Tell me about, actually, before we do that, tell me about one of the key components of that which is you talk about the concept of the brain in your gut or the ENS. Tell me what that is and how that plays into this interaction?

[0:28:59.5] KC: Absolutely, so the ENS is the enteric nervous system and for some reason in neurology we don’t really study it very much but it is very much a part of the nervous system and it’s an incredibly important part and it basically is the brain inside of your gut and it helps to coordinate the production of different digestive enzymes, the functioning of different vales. If the enteric nervous system is not functioning properly there are certain valves that prevent gut bacteria from going into your small intestine for example that begin to dysfunction. 

So this enteric nervous system is this relay communication between your gut and your brain. Now the assumption was that the brain was doing most of the talking and the gut was doing most of the hearing but what our studies are showing is it’s the exact opposite that the gut is actually doing most of the talking and the brain is doing most of the hearing and so the next question should be well who’s doing all of the talking then? 

Who is dictating the content of what is being sent up through the enteric nervous system and what we’re finding is that micro biome or the host of bacteria and other microorganism that live in your gut are actually giving the content for the messages going to the brain and they do it in multiple different ways but there is a lot of neurotransmitters that are released from your gut and the neurotransmitters, you can look at them as the vocabulary words that are sent up to the brain. 

So you’re gut bacteria is actually sending 90% of the messages via the enteric nervous system to your brain. So you should start asking them, “Well how smart is your gut and that’s really the whole purpose and the prime is to make your gut a smart gut because if you have a dumb gut think about what messages are going up to the brain and it’s absolutely amazing even the studies that we have seen with animals, when you change the gut bacteria you can take a mouse that has been genetically bred to be confident and turn it into a timid mouse. 

Just simply by changing the gut bacteria through a fecal transplant from a mouse that has been genetically engineered to be timid. So there’s this personality traits that we have that we consider to be just part of us that we’re somehow inherently in control of it through willpower and it has more to do with the type of bacteria living in your GI track. 

[0:31:49.3] MB: The study about the mice I find really fascinating and I love to know more, I heard the fringes of bio hacking and other health once people talk about fecal matter transplants in humans. Is that something that you think is an intervention people should look at or do you think that they are still unproven? What is the science behind those and what do you think about them? 

[0:32:17.3] KC: Well I think it is something to consider in very, very extreme circumstances but what people don’t appreciate is how quickly your micro biome changes just simply to your own behavior. So for example, we’ve seen in studies that if you have a very stressful event your micro biome changes within 24 hours. Same thing is you start to introduce a very healthy habit your micro biome again changes within 24 hours. 

So that your micro biome is this unbelievably dynamic – it’s really like an organ, it’s like an organ with consciousness. It really is like having a second brain working with you but it very, very dynamic organism that changes and so most people who go for the fecal transplants and I know I have patients come into my office ready to do it, I said, “Okay but what have you done with your diet? What have you done to manage your stress? What have you actually done to change your micro biome?” 

And they did absolutely nothing. So those are interventions that I reserve when there’s a really severe pathogen that has completely colonize the colon and nothing else worked but that is not the case for the majority of people. For the majority of the people all you have to do is make some really very simple interventions and that’s essentially the entire program in the book. It’s just simple interventions that spontaneously change your micro biome. 

But it always amazes me that people are more willing to look into getting a fecal sample from another human being and importing that into your body before looking at simple changes they can make that will simple spontaneously change your micro biome. 

[0:33:59.0] MB: And I think the challenge is even from my own perspective thinking about there is so much out there about gut health, gut bacteria, your micro biome, probiotics, prebiotics, all of these information. It’s hard to distill or determine what are the right interventions, what are the wrong interventions and what actually produces the right results? So I love to hear your thoughts about how you delineate between those and maybe talk a little bit about some of the interventions that you found through research to be the most effective.

[0:34:31.8] KC: So that’s a great question and one of the gifts of Ayurvedic medicine is it gives very, very clear guidance for this. So what we are starting to find we are just in the infancy of understanding the micro biome and so people are in this discovery stage and what they are discovering is, “Hey I found out this works. I wonder if this works for everyone” and so they’ll make the assumption that if it works for one person, it works for absolutely everyone. 

And the beauty of Ayurvedic medicine is it’s extremely personalized, it’s extremely individualized. Even in the program in the Prime, I have suggestions for people who have more of this tendency they should do this or people who have more of that tendency should refrain from doing this intervention and so when we were talking about what is best for your micro biome, the first question that comes up is what are you talking about, which person are talking about? 

What are their tendencies and so Ayurvedic medicine makes recommendations for the micro biome that extremely individualized and there is a tremendous amount of confidence in a system that has lasted for so long. You know it’s been around just from a written standpoint for 5,000 years but even around much, much longer as an oral tradition and so a lot of the things that we are now just discovering about the micro biome has been written in Ayurvedic medicine for so long. 

But with the caveat that they explained who to give it to, when to give it to them and when not to give it to them. So instead of having to do all of these guest work and I totally agree with you and people are often times surprised when I say, “Whoa, no you should not be on any fermented food. Your gut is not in a state to tolerate any fermented foods” or I’ll have patients come in and I’ll look at some of the supplements they’ve started. 

And I’ll say, “You’re not even at a point where you can absorb or digest this” or you’ve added a supplementation for detoxification before you even entered the nutrients into your body to support the detoxification process. So there is this intelligence towards how you approach changing the micro biome, approaching detoxification and Ayurvedic medicine just has so many guidelines for that because it’s an extremely mature system. 

So as we’re starting to grapple with who should be eating what type of diet, in Ayurvedic medicine it’s already set there based on what’s your constitution, what season is it, what is your current imbalance, what were their genetic tendencies from birth and we take all of that into consideration and so what I put into the prime is basically a very, very, very foundational program that has worked for the majority of my patients which I then further personalized in the clinic. 

But it is such a foundational program for the micro biome that the majority of people can do it and again, it’s something that is done step by step by step and you don’t ever take the next step until your body is ready to do so.

[0:37:47.2] MB: So what are some of the – I know it is very individualized but what are some of the basic steps or interventions that you recommend as a starting place to implement some of these ideas and improve people’s gut health? 

[0:38:02.9] KC: Absolutely. So the absolute most foundational steps are what the entire program in the Prime are and people are usually shocked by how simple the steps are and yet how profound the results are and so one of the steps in stage one is an herb called Triphala and I am almost even hesitant to call it an herb because it is really a combination of three berries and it is something that is often times is found in the Indian diet and so we wouldn’t even consider it as a supplement per say. 

But it’s an herb called Triphala and it literary translates into three berries or three fruits and each one of these berries in it of itself has such a profound yet gentle impact on the body. Just an example is Amla or Amalaki is one of the berries and it is just one of the most powerful antioxidants on the planet. It has been shown to help to treat diabetes, it helps maintain blood sugar regulation, reduces inflammation. So just Amla on its own is so powerful but that’s just one of the three berries in Triphala. 

But when you take all three together, it just becomes this very, very powerful again but gentle tonic for the GI track and for removing all of these accumulated toxins. So that’s one of the things that we add into stage one. Another example is just a simple tea. Again, very easy to make, very gentle. It is a combination of cumin, coriander and fennel and you just take the seeds about a teaspoon of each, boil it in about four to five cups of water for about five to 10 minutes. 

Depending on how strong you like it, strain out the seeds and you just sip that all throughout the day but these three seeds, these three ingredients are amazing for healing the gut rekindling what we call Ugni or digestive fire in the GI track. So you can naturally begin to burn up the toxins in your gut and so there’s all of these simple types of interventions throughout the book that help you to essentially raise the IQ of your gut from a dumb gut to a smart gut. 

[0:40:24.7] MB: And you know I can hear a listener now thinking or saying to themselves, “How is that something as simple as coriander and fennel seeds can have such a positive impact on my micro biome?” so how do you think about that or how would you address a listener who might be thinking something like that? 

[0:40:44.8] KC: One thing that I have found in life and especially as I have gotten deeper and deeper into Ayurveda is that these simplest interventions are usually the most powerful and the more complicated we get with things, I mean if you look at just the complexity of our food sourcing now, what are often times recommendations people give when they want to get their health? They say, “Go back to eating really simple foods”. Go back to practicing really simple habits. 

So simplicity is quite powerful and given the way that we live can often times be very difficult. So even when it comes to relationships for example just the power of something like forgiveness can be so unbelievably transformative but it’s not necessarily and easy thing to do. So why would something so simple should have a great benefit? Well this is one of the things we’re asking even as a scientific community. So take turmeric for example. 

Scientists in America are starting to identify turmeric as potentially being one of the main spices in Indian cooking that has helped reduced Alzheimer’s disease in the Indian population by 75% compared to the US population. So why are these individual foods essentially so powerful? The reason is unlike our medications that have only one effect, so they go in and they have a single unilateral effect. So they will effect one particular bio chemical reaction and only in one direction. 

With these food and with these spices have the capacity to do is to change hundreds if not thousands of different biochemical reactions but not in a unilateral way. In other words, you can look at it as a scripted intelligence in food that goes in and actually interacts with your biochemistry, interacts with your DNA and describe it as have a conversation with your body to determine where is it most needed. So if we could create a pill that did that it would be unbelievably powerful. 

Another example is just simply looking at a study done with a particular type of mice that is genetically developed to have diabetes, have high cholesterol, have heart disease and all they did was feed the pregnant mice B12. That’s it, just a B12 vitamin and what they found is that the babies even though they still have the genetic mutation for all of those things didn’t have any of the disorders. So why are these simple interventions so powerful? 

Because they actually go in and interact and communicate with your body and then set forth a chain reaction that has the ability to benefit so many different cells through your body rather than just simply going in like our medications do and in fact, one particular reaction always in a unidirectional way. 

[0:44:01.2] MB: In many ways that almost mirrors the highly focused approach of western medicine to intervene and solve one particular thing as oppose to the broader holistically integrated approach that you are describing. 

[0:44:15.5] KC: Very much so and it’s interesting because as we start to study these Ayurvedic supplementations from the western standpoint like we are starting to study turmeric, Ashwagandha, Boswellia, so many of the different herbs it makes me laugh just a little bit because you know they’re finding all of these benefits but as an Ayurvedic practitioner, we would never give just a single herb. We’re always giving multiple different recommendations at the same time. 

So even though the scientists are absolutely amazed by the results, in terms of an Ayurvedic protocol it would be considered a very, very weak protocol because we always give multiple interventions at the same time that are all synergistic making it even a more powerful response. 

[0:45:02.9] MB: So one of the pieces from the book that I struggled to grasp and understand and I am curious to get your take on it, I totally follow the parts about the micro biome and how it impacts our mental health and the vital importance of really cultivating a really healthy micro biome but the part of the Doshas, that to me was the part that I really struggled with. Tell me a little bit about that and how you reconcile that piece of it with sort of science? 

[0:45:33.3] KC: Absolutely. So we’re starting to find out even in science through the field of epigenetics is that genes can be altered by the environment. In other words, you come with a certain percentage of genetic expression that would have a certain typical expression. So a certain type of physical expression but that the environment can interact with your genes to change that expression. So I look at the Doshas as essentially ways in which the ancient Ayurvedic practitioners were able to describe this process of a genetic predisposition interacting with the environment resulting in certain characteristics. 

So it’s really looking at the mind, body and emotional types as they interact with different stresses in the environment, different elements in the environment and again, what was so amazing about this and especially as I started going deeper and deeper into the field of epigenetics and again, I really look at Ayurvedic medicine as the original lifestyle medicine and so even the way that they described epigenetic changes, we see that in the different Doshas when they’re exposed to different environmental factors. 

The way that I really saw it in my own practice was even just how the seasonal changes would cause certain neurological conditions to be worst. So in certain seasons I always saw migraine headaches would suddenly become much more aggravated. In other seasons, we would see peripheral neuropathies get much more aggravated and this explains again how the Doshas were interacting with the environment to bring about certain imbalances. 

And so we actually started to proactively in our clinic send out emails to people who had migraine headaches one season prior just reminding them that this season has this impact. So it’s really nothing more, how I see the Doshas is it’s really nothing more than looking at how your genes are interacting with the environment including what you’re eating to create a certain physical, mental and emotional outcome.

[0:47:55.5] MB: So for me, I struggled with placing myself within a Dosha. I feel like my answers were very mixed with some of the different segments and so maybe that is part of the reason I struggled with as a framework because I felt that some of the answers were like spot on describing the way I felt about something but then the same answer for that Dosha for another one would be completely the opposite of the way that I think or feel. 

[0:48:20.1] KC: Part of it is most people have more than one dominant Dosha but you can also have a Dosha out of balance that it’s not your original genetic makeup and so those quizzes are really there to give you just a general introduction into the Doshas but the way that you actually answer this question is through an evaluation with an Ayurvedic practitioner. So the quizzes are just a little glimpse into that window but when you sit down with an Ayurvedic practitioner they do a full examination. 

They do a full history and then they also do what we call pulse diagnosis and through that process, that’s actually how we determine which Dosha is out of balance and which one we need to work on the most. So that’s explains why a lot of people when they take the test they’ll feel a little bit confused but again, it’s meant to be just kind of an example of how they Doshas may be expressed in your life but the true diagnostic tool is always sitting down with an actual practitioner to determine it. 

[0:49:24.2] MB: And just for listeners who have been listening to us for the last five minutes wondering what we are talking about, I’ll give my brief description but essentially my understanding is that Doshas are an Ayurvedic method that looks at different body types based on your weight and are you hot, are you cold, etcetera and prescribe specific diets around how to balance that depending on sort of different types of your body. Is that an accurate description or how would you describe that? 

[0:49:53.6] KC: That’s a partial description but the Doshas are actually tendencies in nature and because we’re seen as a part of nature, we have those particular tendencies as well but you can describe the different seasons in terms of different Doshas. You can describe different plants in terms of the different Doshas. So it goes beyond just a description of the human experience to more of a general description of nature like even the ocean has certain tendencies like being around the ocean. 

Your body will change in a certain way so it’s described in a way to have more than one particular Dosha than another. So the Doshas are really just an aspect of nature but what we attempt to do in Ayurvedic medicine is to determine which Doshas are out of balance and bringing them back into balance using different lifestyle recommendations. 

[0:50:47.3] MB: You know one of the last conclusions that I just wanted to touch on because we haven’t really directly stated this which I found fascinating about your work, you embarked on this path of Ayurvedic medicine first to discover sort of the under pining cause of many different mental health problems and neurological problems and yet one of the biggest side effects of that, the interventions that you recommended was that people actually had a huge amount of weight loss as well. Can you just talk about that then describe that for a moment? 

[0:51:18.2] KC: Sure, so I would have never guessed as a neurologist I would write a book that on the cover is advertising weight loss but what I found is my goal and the whole reason I created this program was for my neurological patients and the goal was really to change the micro biome, to remove these toxins from the body so that neurological disease can begin to heal and through the process what so many of my patients would say and these are patients that had weight to loss. 

I often get the question of, “I don’t have to lose weight. If I do this will I lose weight?” I’m like, “No, this is only if you have weight to lose that would it make you lose weight. If you don’t have weight to lose, it will just help to increase your energy and improve mental clarity and get all the other benefits” but one of the things that my patients would routinely come back and say is, “You know I started this and I lost 20” 30, 40 pounds. “If you would have told me this in the beginning, I would have jumped on even faster”. 

And so even though it’s a program for neurological repair, it was the weight loss that got people most excited and so there was a point in the process for many years I just kind of pushed it aside and just said, “Okay yeah that’s fine so you lost weight but that is really not what the program is about” and there was a point where I finally realized that if I just told people that up front just simply because of the way our culture tends to really focus on physical beauty. 

That if I told people that upfront they were even more motivated to begin. So I just decided instead of try to fight the current just to jump in and say, “Yes this will help you to lose weight” and that became one of the main reasons that people then became so compliant with it and the weight loss was not – I should say this, it’s not that it was unintended. It was just spontaneous. They weren’t trying to lose weight, it’s simply that as your body detoxes, as your micro biome changes weight comes off. 

[0:53:23.1] MB: So what would be a starting piece of homework that you would give for a listener who wants to implement some of the things that we’ve talked about today? Kind of a first piece of homework for them to begin down this path? 

[0:53:35.5] KC: Well the reason I wrote the book was it really contains all of the fundamental principles to understand why you need to do this and then gives you a tremendous amount of guidance of how to approach a program. So the book is a really starting point but for those who say, “Even the book would be too big of a step first” I would simply say start with the Triphala. It is very easily available. The brand that I use is from Mapi it’s called Digest Tone. 

It’s just Triphala and just start with that. Start with one tablet in the evening and then start with two tablets in the evening if you feel like you need to go up to two and just start with the tea recipe. Just those two simple interventions have such a profound healing effect and I think for most people once they start that, they say, “Hey this is actually working and I am not working hard at it. It’s taking me a total of a few minutes a day to implement this. I want to learn more”. 

[0:54:39.9] MB: And where can listeners find you and the book and all of these resources online? 

[0:54:45.5] KC: The book is very readily available on Amazon and I have a website, drkulreetchaudhary.com and I usually post all of my information there and I do consultations at the Chopra center and I will be there from now until next May and so you can call the Chopra center in Carlsbad California to schedule an appointment and then starting next May, I will actually be moving to India to head up an international team of physicians and scientists and ayurvedic wellness center where we’re going to be doing even deeper research into how to repair the nervous system using some of these even more ancient techniques from ayurvedic medicines.

I’m very excited about that and I’ll continue to write but from now until next May, I will be available at the Chopra center.

[0:55:41.4] MB: Well, Kulreet, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of this wisdom, there are some really interesting takeaways and I think the fundamental conclusion that our gut impacts our brain health and our mental health.

So much more than we know or realize is really powerful. Thank you for coming on here and sharing all of this.

[0:56:04.0] KC: It was my pleasure and Matt, I have to thank you. You asked really intelligent questions and I always appreciate it when somebody comes in armed with these very well-thought out questions. It really made this quite a bit of fun for me.

[0:56:19.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get exclusive, curated, weekly emails from us every single week. Including mindset Monday which listeners have been loving which is our list of our favorite articles, TED Talks, and ideas that we came across that week.

Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, help us pick new intro music, like the new intro we rolled out a couple of weeks ago and much more. Be sure to not to miss out on that opportunity. 

Lastly and most importantly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our guide called, how to organize and remember everything. It’s our most popular guide which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide that you have to sign up to get by joining our email list. Just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right on the home page or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Every single review, every single subscription, boosts our ranking in the iTunes algorithm and it really is super important.
 
Don’t forget, of you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out the show notes which you can also get at successpodcast.com. Just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science Of Success.

The Military Influence Training that Maps Out Human Weakness, Harnesses Confusion, and Triggers Obedience in Others With Chase Hughes

In this episode we discuss the darker side of how the US military influences human behavior - we touch on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating Manchurian candidates, how this one psychological bias can convince strangers to murder someone more than 80% of the time, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses, and much more with Chase Hughes. 

Chase Hughes is the founder of Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and the amazon bestselling author of The Ellipsis Manual. Chase previously served in the US Navy as part of the correctional and prisoner management departments. Chase speaks on a variety of topics including brainwashing and attraction and frequently develops new programs for the US Government and members of anti human-trafficking teams around the world.

We discuss:

• How seeing "how weak and vulnerable everyone was" transformed Chase’s worldview

• Is it possible to create real world Manchurian candidates?

• Why you’re grossly underestimating the work necessary to read human body language and understand human behavior

• Why the typical strategies of influence won’t work unless you can profile and understand the individual - and tailor what you’re saying and doing to meet that individuals weaknesses and needs

• One of the best things you can start doing every single day

• Simple questions you can use to “disengage someone from autopilot” and break the pattern they are stuck in

• How you can develop “FIC" to hack human behavior

• Focus

  1. Interest

  2. Curiosity

• The “RAS” - reticular activation system - constantly looking for things that are threats and things that are socially valuable

• Social authority and perceived authority are more important than influence in shaping human behavior

• How the Milgrim experiment fundamentally demonstrates the incredible power of the authority bias

• The one strategy that can be effective influencing strangers to commit murder more than 80% of the time

• The 5 key factors you can use to hack authority and trigger an “obedient” response

• Dominance / ambition

  1. Discipline

  2. Leadership

  3. Gratitude

  4. Fun / sense of adventure

• When we interact with authority we go through an “agentic” shift - our brain shifts responsibility for our own actions onto the person who instructed us to do it - you can make people take extreme behaviors if you get them to give YOU responsibility for their actions

• Master yourself first before you can influence others

• Master environment first

  1. Master your time - keeping a plan and sticking to it

  2. Master the mechanics of your habits

  3. Master your attention span

• Tactics for mastering authority today

• Express genuine interest in other people and make them feel INTERESTING not interested

  1. Remember the phrase - LEADERSHIP through SUPPORT

• The people who think they are alpha males are usually NOT the alpha male - big dogs don’t feel the need to bark

• The Columbo method - make deliberate social errors, be vulnerable, start with an insecurity - that helps open people up to influence

• Chase offers a challenge to you - Talk to a stranger every single day. And once that gets easy, you have to push out your comfort zone even further.

• The Texas crosswalk study - why wearing a suit makes you more likely to get people to follow you than wearing jeans

• Why you should ask unique questions and do unique things

• The 3 tools you can use to develop a profile of anyone

• Social Weakness Chart

  1. Human Needs Map

  2. Behavioral Table of Elements

• There’s no vaccination to being socially vulnerable - if you become socially invulnerable it makes you a nasty person - it diminishes your ability to connect with others and takes away your ability to feel empathy and anxiety for others.

• Be completely real with your self, and with others, as it can help build more genuine connections

• Trying to manage your own behavior and body language really starts to suck up alot of your own “CPU power” and Chase doesn't recommend it

• How you can watch a video of an interview or interrogation - using this special tool - and decode the behavior and determine

• Why a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is typically biased against people telling the truth

• How Conan Obrien can help you become a better human lie detector

• Simple exercises you can use to start RIGHT NOW to develop an understanding of human body language and behavior

• The concept of embedded commands and how you can use them to make a person have a thought without it being conscious of it

• Confusion statements and embedded commands - they will go straight to the subconscious

• Why you should ask yourself "What does this person like to be complimented on, what makes them feel significant”

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] The Ellipsis Manual: analysis and engineering of human behavior by Chase Hughes
[Website] Ellipsis Behavior
[Image] Behavioral Table of Elements
[Blog] THE NEW HUMAN NEEDS MAP - Ellipsis Behavior
[Article] THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT by Saul McLeod
[SoS Episode] Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash
[SoS Episode] Weapons of Influence Series

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with now more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss the darker side of how the U.S. Military influences human behavior. We touch on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating Manchurian candidates. How this one psychological bias can convince strangers to murder someone more than 80% of the time, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses and much more with Chase Hughes. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our popular guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another sweet surprise bonus guide by joining our email list today.

Next; if you join your email list, you’re going to get an email from us every single Monday, called Mindset Monday. It’s a short list of articles, videos TED Talks and ideas that have us fascinated and excited about evidence-based growth. Lastly, by being on the email list you get a chance to shape the show. Vote on guests, questions and even changing things like our intro music. When we launched our new intro music a few weeks ago, listeners like you on who are on the email list voted on it and that’s what we picked. 

Remember, you can sign up for the email list now by going to successpodcast.com and signing up, or if you're on your phone and you can’t get to it right now, just text the words “smarter” to number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Don’t make me use some of these influence tactics to get you to sign up. 

In a previous episode we looked at the question of human influence from a lighter angle. Surprisingly, with an FBI spy recruiter had hacked evolutionary psychology to learn how to change anyone's behavior. We discussed the five steps for strategizing trust. How to get someone's brain to reward them for engaging with you, the vital importance of self-awareness, the how are not keeping score and much more with Robin Dreeke. If you want to get more information on the lighter side of influencing others, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

[0:02:41.4] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Chase Hughes. Chase is the founder of the Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and the Amazon best-selling author of the Ellipsis Manual. He previously served in the U.S. Navy as part of a correctional and prisoner management department. Chase speaks on a variety of topics including brainwashing and attraction and frequently develops new programs for the U.S. government and members of antihuman trafficking teams around the world. 

Chase, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:10.8] CH: Thanks, Matt. It's good to here. Thanks for having me on. 

[0:03:13.4] MB: We’re really excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and your story, tell us a little bit about your background and the world that you come for. 

[0:03:21.6] CH: I’m in the military and I grew up in the military pretty much. I went to military school when I was a kid, and around the age of 19 I had this kind of epiphany experience to where I finally got the realization that I didn't really get human behavior and it was at a bar. I went home that night and I remember spending hours on Google just s printing out every document I could find. I just went on there, I typed in how to tell when girls like you. That was the catalyst that served for me learning all of these and just kind of getting so deep into this. 

[0:04:03.4] MB: You've obviously gone very, very deep in this. Tell me about —You named your book the Ellipsis Manual. Why ellipsis and what does that mean? 

[0:04:13.2] CH: We chose to name the company ellipsis, because I think it’s a grammatical or punctuation symbol where you have the three dots. The meaning of that is just removed or omitted language or language that isn't there. I also just thought it sounded cool. We use that as a company named just it because it kind of has a little cool back story to it. 

[0:04:36.8] MB: You mentioned that you kind of started going down this rabbit hole by Googling how to tell if women were interested in you. I find that really fascinating. Pick up and that kind of associated world is something that I've done a little bit of research and digging on and it's amazing all of the different kind of behavior patterns and things that you can really pick up. Tell me a little bit about how that informed your journey into understanding a lot of the nonverbal elements of human behavior and how to kind of design and engineer human behavior.

[0:05:08.7] CH: When I first got started in doing body language reading, it was very revealing, because I spent a lot of time on it and it. It got to a point where at first it's depressing almost at the beginning because you just see that every human being is suffering in one way or another. I think that we’re all suffering so much that seeing the way that someone hides their suffering is usually the most powerful and revealing piece of information you can get. 

After that period, it kind of just humanizes everybody to the point where you can see those weaknesses or those fears or insecurities and is not a point of looking down on so on, because you can see all that. It's a point of just that guy is just like me. That guy who used to be threatening is just as scared as I am in the situation, or just as flawed as I am. 

Seeing that was just a huge eye-opener for me that changed the way I see people forever. I wanted more of that, and it's very addicting especially when you really dig into it and spend some time learning behavior. It got to the point where I started social profiling and behavior profiling, and then I got into conversations into how to analyze what people are saying. Then it got into the hypnosis aspect of it, and then it got into behavior engineering and then interrogation started coming into it that kind of intertwined with some stuff I was doing. It was just kind of along a snowball effect of information that all kind of revolved around the main theme of trying to discover how vulnerable all of us are. In the end, it's kind of scary to see that we all walk around thinking that we've got some kind of firewall mechanism or some kind of antivirus systems to where we know BS when we see it, but we don't. Just seeing through the development phase, like just seeing how weak we all are or how vulnerable we all are is a truly shocking revelation. 

[0:07:32.8] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that. When you say seeing how weak and vulnerable everyone is, what does that mean and how did you come to that conclusion? 

[0:07:41.6] CH: I wanted to see with persuasion. I wanted to see how far we could go. I thought like the end, like the greatest thing — This was maybe 10 years ago. I thought the greatest thing that we might be able to do this by creating a Manchurian candidate in real life. It turns out it's been done before in a much different way where they used drugs and all kinds of dangerous stuff, but I thought maybe that there is some therapeutic applications of that. Maybe we could work on depression or even schizophrenia with that kind of stuff. Going through that with the vulnerability aspect that you just asked about, I specifically mean how we can be talked into doing things that are not in our best interest very easily. 

[0:08:31.4] MB: Give me an example. How can somebody be either sort of manipulated or hacked into doing something that's not necessarily in their best interest? 

[0:08:40.9] CH: A good example would be if you look up people that are hypnotist bank robbers that go up to the bank and use some really just preschool level skills. Of course, the guy might be really suggestible behind the counter, but I think an example of that would be you talking someone into doing something against their will, like buying something or going home with someone or using the skills for a business negotiation or at a job interview. 

[0:09:14.9] MB: I want to dig in to specifically some of the tools and strategies around how to engineer that type of behavior. What are some of the tactics that you’ve seen from your research, from your work in the military engineering human behavior that can help people either recognize when someone is trying to do that to them or use some of these strategies to influence others? 

[0:09:39.7] CH: Sure. I can give you guys some basic ones. I want to touch on this real quick if you don't mind me going off a little bit here, Matt. When we see like one of those articles online about learn body language quickly, or like quick tips to do X, Y, and Z, I think a lot of us grossly underestimate how much work is usually involved in mastering something or being really good at something. 

If you take a piano for example, there's plenty of videos on YouTube where you can just walk through a song. You know what I’m saying? 

[0:10:15.3] MB: Yeah. 

[0:10:16.3] CH: To where you could just walk through a song and you might be able to maybe impress a few people for 30 seconds at a party, but to get really good at this you'll need an investment and time. One of the things that I always kind of compare this to is like the first level would be like the paramedic. He knows some basic skills just enough to kind of be dangerous, and then you have a nurse who studied for several years, then you have a doctor who studied this in depth. Way down at the bottom, underneath the paramedic, you have the guy who watches like Gray’s Anatomy and thinks he's a doctor.

I think that just estimating how much time it will take is usually if you think it’s less than a year to get really good at this stuff. I would say more power to you, but this stuff is incredibly complex and it’s far more complex than a piano. In fact, if you can imagine mastering a piano and then every time you sat down at it, the keys were in different places. That’s kind of where we’re at with just basically human behavior engineering. 

With body language and behavior profiling, that's what makes the difference between really being able to influence someone and just knowing a few tricks, because if you read any influence book nowadays they’re going to give you all these methods that are supposed to work for all people, but every single person that you talk to is different and is fundamentally different from the core of their being. If you can't see that and you can't profile that and kind of tailor what you're saying and doing to meet that person's needs or their fears or weaknesses, whatever you’re trying to do with that person, you’re going to get some really basic level of success. That's why we tried to integrate every single part of this, every aspect inside of the ellipsis manual to be able to get that engineered scenario to where you can create an outcome that you'd like. 

For your listeners specifically, I would say one of the main things you need to start doing every single day is disengage people's autopilot response, and the autopilot response is basically the roles that we play or the hats that we put on. If you’re at work, you have a workout on and you talk to people as if you’re at work. It’s going to be completely different than the way you talk to your wife. It's going to be completely different than how you talk to your kids. 

We change roles throughout the day, and once we get into a roll, our neurons that have kind of connected for that role start to fire in sequence there just to where everything is kind of automated and we’re not really paying much attention to what's going on. When someone is in autopilot, it’s usually a role. So like an employee and a customer, that's one that you’re probably going to encounter every single day. 

I would say breaking someone's autopilot is the most fantastic way to start capturing that focus and the attention that you’re going to need, and breaking autopilot can be done with anything that breaks them out of their mental state. If you're getting a coffee at Starbucks and you ask really quickly which direction Northeast is, just to make them start — They've never been asked that question before. They start going internal to their head and they kind of break out of that employee mode for just a few seconds, and then you start doing what we call FIC, which stands for focus interest and curiosity, which you want to develop in sequence. A really good technique for developing focus is just talking about focus. 

Does that make sense? 

[0:14:06.9] MB: Tell me more about that. 

[0:14:08.8] CH: Okay. I didn’t know how far you wanted to go in here. 

[0:14:10.7] MB: Yeah. No, I want to dig in. I want to learn a lot. Tell me about FIC and tell me specifically about how we can kind of cultivate each of those pieces. Then I still want to drill down a little bit more as well and kind of how we can break someone out of a pattern. 

[0:14:24.4] CH: Okay. FIC is focus, interest and curiosity. The first part of that is focus, and the easiest way to establish or get someone to start focusing on you is to have authority. I know you wanted to talk about that, and this would be a great segue to that. 

[0:14:42.1] MB: Perfect. Let’s dig in to authority and then we’ll come back to FIC. 

[0:14:47.0] CH: Great. Let's talk about focus. The main way, the number one way that human beings start to focus on something or view it as important is when someone has authority. Authority is probably the most important thing that you can possibly master. There's a thing in our brains called a reticular activation system or the RAS, which is kind of like a precursor to the fight or flight response. This RAS is consistently looking for threats, things that are threatening to you or things that are socially valuable. If you're in a doctor’s office, all of your attention is going to go to the doctor. If you get pulled over by police, all of your attention is going to go to that person. If you're sitting in a restaurant and George Clooney walks in and starts talking to you, all of your attention, no matter what you were doing is going to go to George Clooney. That has to do with social authority or perceived authority.

My goal is to try to convince your listeners that authority is more important and more effective than influence. The main reason being that — Are you familiar with the Milgram Study? 

[0:16:03.0] MB: Oh, yeah. Definitely. 

[0:16:05.0] CH: Okay. Just for your listeners who haven't heard of this, this was done at Yale University. It was by a man named Dr. Stanley Milgram whose parents were refugees from the Nazis. He came to America and he did this study where a guy walks into a room and they say, “This is a learning experiment. There's a guy with a lab coat on and they're taking down notes on clipboard,” and he says, “You’re going to shock this guy in the other room,” and every time he gets this set of words wrong so to speak. 

The guy goes in the other room, gets hooked up to a shocking machine and this other guy who’s being experimented on is sitting there, he’s supposed to shock this guy on the side of this wall every time the guy gets words wrong. Td the guy just keeps repeatedly doing it and the guy continues to ramp up the voltage in accordance with the instructions of the guy wearing the lab coat. It turned out that almost 80% of the people who did this experiment shock the person on the other side of the wall to the point of death. To death. Social psychologist, before the experiment was conducted, estimated that .011% of people would shock someone to death, and it was almost 80%. 

A lot of people got some stuff out of that and they got a lot of scientific research out of that, but I took away something completely different. Of course, they got away like people who say, “I was just following orders,” like a lot of Nazis did after they're brought in front of a tribunal for war crimes. 

Think about the authority aspect of this. A guy just standing there in a gray lab coat tells you to shock another human being to death and you do it. Stand up and leave, you don’t protest. Of course, everyone — 100% of people would say, “No. I would never do that,” but then 80% of people do. 

A man with no medical name tag on, he has no identifying marks other than he’s just wearing a tie and a lab coat and he's uttering phrases, he’s not ordering anyone to do it. He just speak in phrases like it's important that the experiment continues or it's important that you continue. Just little phrases like that. 

Let's go back to influence and contrast these two things together. With influence, it might take you two hours to talk somebody into buying a new car per se. A guy in a lab coat in less than 45 minutes suggested that a stranger kill another person and they did it. 80% of people, which is better than most sales numbers. That's with no neurolinguistic programming. No hypnosis. No Robert Cialdini influence methods. None of that, and you just have that tiny bit of authority, just that perceived social authority. The guy was a nobody, he was just a volunteer who was an actor. Just that is enough to convince a stranger to commit murder, that tiny bit of social authority. 

[0:19:18.5] MB: That's fascinating. The Milgram experiment obviously is one of the kind of groundbreaking and fundamental experiments in psychology. For listeners who wanted to get it, we actually have a previous episode which I’ll link to in the show notes where we go super deep on the authority bias. I'm curious, tell me what are some — You write about and talk about the idea of hacking this sort of authority and how we can create it. What are some of the factors that we can use in order to hack authority? 

[0:19:45.1] CH: There are five basic qualities that dictate authority, and one of them is interchangeable. I’ll give them to you now. There are dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun, or just having a sense of adventure. The first one, dominance, does not mean being domineering. You can be dominant and still be completely supportive and nice to everyone around you. It's a common misconception that you have to be mean or serious all the time in order to be dominant. You can be a really fun person and just be a natural leader. 

The only thing that dominance can really be replaced with is ambition. If you think about like a starving artist who is opening a new art gallery or something like that. That's the only thing that we found that can be replaced. Those five qualities really dictate whether or not other people will respond to you, and especially the opposite sex. Whether or not you will have that automatic kind of obedient response, and it’s not necessarily an obedience response. What happens when we get exposed to authority, we go through what Dr. Milgram called an agentic shift. While this shift is taking place, our brain actually shifts responsibility for our own actions on to the person that's telling us to do something. That is profound, and I think a lot of people really look over that piece of information when they read the research. A person makes a shift to where they no longer feel responsible for their actions just in the presence of someone they think might be an authority figure. 

Developing that level of authority takes time and I it’s hard for me to get that point across to my students sometimes that somebody will come up and say, “Hey, man. I want to fly out there and do training with you for a few weeks.” Somehow they’ve got all the money to do that, but they're the type of person who's got a pile of dishes in the sink. They’ve got clothes piled up in their bedroom. I know for a fact this guy does not make his bed every day. He doesn't even trim his fingernails. He doesn’t even have his own wife together and he wants to come and learn how to take control of another human being. 

You have got some master yourself first, and with the students that I teach for private coaching, we have a few steps that you need to master environment first if you're trying to get this authority. It has to start with the environment. It has to start with cleaning your house, living in a clean place, hanging out with good friends, then mastering your time, keeping a planner and really sticking to it and starting to learn how to discipline yourself into habits, because discipline only needs to last long enough to get the habit done, and then you’re good. Then you can kind of cool off a little bit. You just only do one at a time. After you master the environment, then it becomes mastery of time, and after time you start to master your mechanics every day. What you're studying and mastering your attention span. You pick one thing to do every day. Today I’m going to study whether or not people are breathing from their chest or their stomach. Today I’m going to watch pupil dilation. Today I’m going to do X, Y and Z. 

Developing the authority is almost more important than learning any kind of influence method. I know a lot of people really are into influence and they’re into learning sales, but if you don't have that authority or you basically don't have your “shit together” you won't get the results you want. 

I would like to suggest if your listeners could just try this on for a month or two, that the results you want socially, the results you want from other people, especially when someone’s into studying influence, those things start to happen as a byproduct of you just making your life better and starting to master authority. 

We have one chapter in the Ellipsis Manual called authority, and it talks about this and it’s got a step-by-step system and it’s got a bunch of ways to kind of hack it. I'll give you a couple here if I'm not droning on too long here, Matt. 

[0:24:19.4] MB: No. That’s perfect. I'd love to hear some of those strategies. I think that’d be great. 

[0:24:23.3] CH: Okay. If you just want to start mastering authority today, start to express genuine interest in other people and make them feel interesting, not interested. Find out what they're excited about and remember the phrase leadership through support. Leadership through support. You have to make the other people understand that you are genuinely interested in them, and that level of interest will start to help you get more comfortable with having authority over other people. 

Because as soon as someone who’s new or just start studying this, they get that first taste of authority or somebody completely goes into the agentic state in front of them. It makes people immediately pull the plug and start to back out. It's a strange feeling, especially when it's your first time. Not necessarily having control over another human, but having that authority for the first time is strange, but it addicting, so it’s a good thing especially if you have good motives and you want to help others.

I would say especially with people who are the alpha male types who I would not describe as alpha males, but the people who we think are alpha males are usually not the alpha males. They’re the ones who want people to think they’re alpha males, because it’s usually the tiniest, the smallest dogs that barks the most. The Chihuahuas always worried about getting attacked, and the giant dogs don't really feel the need to bark. 

Dealing with those type of people, try what we call the Colombo method. I don’t know if you're familiar with that show, Matt. 

[0:26:08.7] MB: Yeah, the old detective show. 

[0:26:11.7] CH: Yeah, it is fantastic. I would say that is the point where you need to make some deliberate expression of insecurity. Then you can still have authority and you can still make deliberate errors, like maybe look insecure on purpose or make a deliberate social error, like your shirttail is hanging out or something like that. Those people need to feel dominant at the beginning of a conversation in order to relax. 

It works the same in an interrogation room. If I paid a police officer to yell at me like I was in trouble as I was walking in the room or I tripped on purpose or had a giant coffee stain on my shirt. It depends on who you're talking to. I would say start working on yourself immediately. That is going to be the game changer for you. We tend to seek things outside of us. All of these stuff we see on the Internet, we think the products or the things are going to make us better, but I strongly encourage your listeners to start from the inside out, especially when you're learning influence. That will help you basically to talk to strangers every day. I think using that level of social skill, you should be talking to a stranger every single day. You should make it a goal to discover a fact about a stranger in your area every single day. 

[0:27:38.5] MB: I love that strategy, and something that I'm a big fan of is kind of the idea or rejection therapy and the whole notion of constantly be sort of putting yourself out there failing, talking to people, pushing your comfort zone and even something as simple as talking to a stranger every day can be a great way to start to get outside that comfort zone and work on your ability to interact and connect and talk to people. 

[0:28:02.1] CH: Absolutely. I think the conference zone thing is really what's going to hold people back, and starting a conversation starts to get easy, then you need to take it to the next step, because you’re back in your comfort zone once it becomes easy. Then you need to start going further. 

[0:28:18.6] MB: Yeah, it's so key. As soon as it becomes easy for, you need to find kind of that next challenge and start pushing through the resistance. 

We talk all time on the show about how important it is to master new skills and abilities, and that’s why I’m so excited to tell you about sponsor for this episode, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo designed, to social media marketing, to street photography, and they offer unlimited access for a single low monthly price so you don't pay per class. 

There's some really cool courses on Skillshare. They have an absolutely awesome course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. It basically runs my entire life. They also have a really, really cool course on productivity planning. They have a number of those actually. A course that piqued my interest when I was looking at it today that looks absolutely awesome, which is a course on how to create awesome mind maps. If you don’t what mind maps are, they’re so cool. It’s an amazing tool for note taking and remembering and summarizing things that speaks directly to your mind. It’s an absolutely fascinating strategy, and I use mind maps to record or kind of keep notes on things like book ideas or summarizing or even brainstorming. 

Skillshare is giving my listeners this month in month of unlimited access. You can get Skillshare completely for free for one month. All you have to do is to go to skillshare.com/success to redeem a free month of classes. I would highly recommend checking that out. If mind mapping sounds cool, go check out the mind mapping class. You can get all these course for free for a month. If you’re looking to add some new skills, if you want pickup to some productivity tips or even get into something like drawing, definitely check out Skillshare. 

Going back to these five key factors that you can use to hack authority, we got dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun/sense of adventure. Tell me about — I guess is leadership kind of encapsulated in authority as well or is that sort of a separate piece of the puzzle, and then what about gratitude and fun? I think those are kind of surprising things to see on a list of hacking social authority. 

[0:30:40.6] CH: I think that gratitude and self-discipline are both extremely contagious and they're both extremely visible on your body. Somebody else might call it energy, and I don't profess to know how. It just beams out of you, but it really does. You can tell when you meet somebody that's really got their stuff together. It just shines through everything that they do. It almost puts every person into kind of a followership role to where they want to keep experiencing that. Leadership and authority are very, very closely related. Authority is something you want people to perceive and leadership is something that you're doing internally, the thought processes that you have. 

[0:31:31.0] MB: What are those internal thought processes behind leadership? 

[0:31:35.7] CH: I would say the number one thing you can do is just continually ask yourself how can I lift this person up or these people up. The authority would be a natural byproduct of having your stuff together and just managing your life. 

[0:31:54.4] MB: Essentially, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding this, but essentially the idea is that if you have your life together, if you're firing on all cylinders, you’re having fun, you’re grateful, you have kind of positive energy beaming out from you, you’re organized, you’re getting things done, that sort of state naturally puts people around you into a mode where they defer to you almost or feel like they want to do what you tell them to do. 

[0:32:23.2] CH: Yes. We’re got a huge section on there on how to kind of hack that for lack of a better term. That definitely makes the agentic shift start to happen. Just as an example of this, how looks matter. They did a crosswalk, what they called a crosswalk study in Texas and this was decades ago. It’s been repeated several times, but this guy in a blue jeans and t-shirt in a downtown area, busy traffic, decides to break the crosswalk signal and just — Of course, the street is open, like there's no cars coming, but he goes against the crosswalk signal that tells him not to go. A couple of people follow him, and the same guy goes back to his apartment or wherever and changes into a really nice business suit and decides to break that crosswalk and go ahead and cross the street. The chances of people following him were increased by 89%, just because of his clothing. Just changing your clothes or changing that guy’s clothes made people break the law where they otherwise wouldn't have. 

[0:33:34.8] MB: Fascinating, and that's a really good sort of crystalline demonstration of the idea that even simple shifts in the way that people perceive you can lead to massive changes in the way that they react to you and their behavior. 

[0:33:49.3] CH: Absolutely, and it's not just how they perceive you just your clothing. You will, once you start getting that self-discipline, and you’ve got your social skills all these stuff start to get handled, you will walk differently. You don't need a tactic anymore. You don’t need conversation starter tactics anymore. Once all of these stuff happens and once you get those five qualities kind of hammered down, everything else starts to become a byproduct. The success is a byproduct of having that stuff figured out.

[0:34:19.4] MB: Let’s go back up to the concept of a FIC that you talked about before and how cultivating focus, interest in curiosity are keystones of hacking human behavior for lack of a better term. How does authority tie back into that? 

[0:34:35.2] CH: Okay. Authority activates that reticular activation system we talked about, which starts the beginning processes of interest. When a person becomes interested, that is when you would start to ask a really unique questions, you’d start to do something that is just unusual that they don't see all the time, even if you're asking them for help on a setting on your iPhone. 

The authority gives you permission to do that to where another person asking the exact same question with the exact same words won't get away with that. They can't get away with that. They don’t develop that interest. The curiosity — Imagine if you're saying, ask them what kind of book they like, and as the person talks about the book they like you respond with its incredible how easy it is to just become so captivated. When you say captivated, you touch your own chest. Like you're pointing toward yourself and completely get lost in something and you point at yourself one more time. You say the whole entire world around you just completely disappears. This is a very crude example here, but I want to give you the nuts and bolts so it makes sense. 

Everything around you just kind of disappears and you gesture away from yourself, and that would start to establish the curiosity. With the curiosity, if I asked you what kind of book was your favorite or what book did you really, really get totally wrapped up in. I'm literally sending electricity to all of those little memories and triggering them and getting them warmed up. I'm not even saying anything. You're doing most of the work, and this is just the first maybe 10 to 25 seconds of the conversation.

[0:36:21.5] MB: What happens after that? 

[0:36:23.1] CH: There is a very long process here depending on what you want to do. Then you would start to develop a profile of the person that you're speaking to, and we have three tools that we made for that. One is a social weakness chart based on who you’re talking to. It'll illustrate what type of weaknesses they have that you can either speak to or choose to avoid to develop a deep rapport. Then we use a human needs map. There's only seven needs on this needs map. If you can identify these needs, it will also identify fears and insecurities for that person. The needs map is publicly available on our website. It's on just Google images or wherever you want to look for it. Just type in Ellipsis needs map. Finally, with that profile development, you’re using the behavioral table of elements for seeing the effectiveness of your methods.

[0:37:14.8] MB: I want to dig in to each of those. Tell me about, when you say social weakness, what is a social weakness. What does that mean? 

[0:37:22.9] CH: A social weakness might be a fear of abandonment, a fear of public judgment or a fear that you will be emasculated in front of a large crowd. That would be a social weakness, and those are typically personality weaknesses we have that involve something being witnessed by multiple people.

[0:37:42.9] MB: And is this something you think that everyone has social weakness or only certain people have them? 

[0:37:47.7] CH: I think we all do. I think we’re hardwired to have social weaknesses that kept us in line 10,000 years ago when we’re kind of a nomadic tribes people, the average tribe was around 60 to 100 people. If people had no social consideration for what’s going on, they probably get killed pretty fast. 

[0:38:09.4] MB: Do you start out when you're kind of going down this journey, do you look at yourself and figure out what are my social weaknesses? 

[0:38:15.9] CH: Oh, yeah. Man! I dug into it really — It was a dark place, and I started seeing everything that I was doing. Of course, I got to work trying to fix everything and finally I got to the point where a lot of people ask if I manage my body language and I control all of these blinking and breathing and all that, like, “No. I made the choice to just let go.” 

[0:38:45.5] MB: For somebody who's listening that maybe wants to drill down and understand their own social weaknesses, what are the strategies or kind of exercise you might recommend to peel back the layers and start to understand what your fears are and how those are driving your behavior. 

[0:39:01.7] CH: Oh, yeah. I would say definitely use the needs map. If you don't have the Ellipsis Manual with you, the needs map, you can download, just put it on your phone. Have your friends go through the needs map and pick out what your needs are, and then you can look at that social weakness chart which has the needs associated with fears and insecurities and you can start to just go to work on all of that stuff. 

I would caution a lot of people that when I first started I thought if I worked on those needs hard enough, like I would just be a human that’s free of needs, like some enlightened Tibetan monk. It doesn't work like that. There's no vaccination to being socially vulnerable to other people. In fact if you become socially invulnerable to people it will just make you just a nasty person in general. 

[0:39:55.4] MB: Why is that? 

[0:39:56.5] CH: I think it diminishes your ability to connect with others and it takes away your ability to feel empathy and nervousness for other people during conversations. 

[0:40:07.8] MB: In many ways, being foldable and having these weaknesses are things that you can use to your advantage. 

[0:40:15.1] MB: Absolutely, I think being vulnerable isn't some tactic you could apply, although it's in the book. There's part of the book that tells you how to make confessions to other people about small little things that make you seem like a more caring person. I would strongly suggest that you just be actually vulnerable and say what's really going on and be completely real especially with your own self, so you’re not hiding anything. 

Not only just so you're a good person, but trying to hide stuff and manage her body language or manage any part of your behavior really starts to suck up some of your CPU power, so you're paying less attention what's going on, you’re paying less attention to your ability to influence the other person and you’re just kind of — You’re running on fumes at that point when it comes to your ability to influence, because you're managing herself so hard. 

[0:41:13.8] MB: You also talked about having your friends go through the needs map and figure out what your needs are. Why would you recommend doing that as supposed to doing it herself? 

[0:41:22.3] CH: I think like the old quote, “A fish under water and a man unto himself,” where I think we’re blind to a lot of our own idiosyncrasies, I’ll call them. I think our friends especially we’ll be able to pick them out faster than we can ourselves. I know my friends absolutely good. 

[0:41:42.9] MB: That’s a great quote, and I think it's such a true statement that often times it's so hard to see our own predicaments with the same objectivity that we have when we look at a friend coming to us for advice even if it's kind of the exact same scenario. 

[0:41:58.6] CH: Absolutely. 

[0:41:59.8] MB: Let's dig in to you. You touched on the behavior table of elements, and we talked about that before the interview began, but we haven't really dug in to it in this conservation. I found that to be one of the most fascinating concepts and pieces of the book. You go through everything from having your hands in your pockets, to whether your legs are crossed, the tilt of your head, your lip retractions, so many different elements. How do those all factored together, and what is that behavior table of elements and how do you use it in the work that you do? 

[0:42:31.1] CH: I originally designed this thing. I’ll give you one to put in the show notes. This thing looks like the periodic table, and we designed it to be a reference guide so people watching a video of an interrogation would be able to break down the lies that we’re told, the insecurities every time a person reached like a critical point where we knew they had more information. This thing kind of makes it into a universal or semi-universal grading system to where on the top of the behavior table you have the top of the head, on the very bottom you have the feet, and there's two rows that are disconnected that take place outside of the human body. 

Every little cell where you would see like tungsten or copper or nickel or something like that, every one of these cells is a different human behavior and they all have different deception ratings on them, and this is not that anyone gesture means deception, but a group of behaviors can mean deception. From the left to the right side of the table, it goes from least deceptive, or let's call it least stressful to the right side, which is the highest stress. 

[0:43:54.0] MB: There's a ton of stuff on the behavioral table developments. I’m looking at a copy of it right now. How did you come up with all the different pieces on here and how do you practically implement it when you're using it yourself? 

[0:44:08.0] CH: The bibliography for this thing alone was astounding. I went through a lot of research to make sure this was culturally relevant. Some of these I wanted to see like the no gesture is less common in Belgium when we shake our head no. 

All of the cultural implications had to be included in there, because I’d know where an interrogation was going to be taking place. The way that we put this together — I laid all of these stuff out in my living floor on little notecards and that was probably three years of going through these notecards and building the research. Every night I’d just pile them up and put a rubber band around them and the following morning I’d lay them all back out again and continue with the research. It was a long process. 

[0:45:03.5] MB: Using a tool like the behavior table of elements, for somebody that’s listening, how could they take this which is a very information-dense document and apply it or use it in their day-to-day lives? 

[0:45:17.2] CH: We found out a lot of people are doing that and it was never in my head that this would be a body language training tool, and it’s become one. With the evolution of the table, it started to become a training element for a lot of law enforcement teams and a lot of interrogation teams around the country. Basically, just reading through the behavior table and then reading through the book about every single gesture and then using that to either conduct post-analysis, so you go through your day, you take a bunch of notes on what you see your coworker is doing and then you want to go home and look up what it was, or you watch something on YouTube or you watch somebody who's like a suspected murderer get interviewed on a news television show and you go back through that video and start looking at the behavior table to figure out whether or not there was deception involved in the interview. 

Eventually your ability to see the table and see behavior at the same time starts to become a kind of like speaking a language, and this thing is just ultimately designed to be a quick reference for behavior now. It's got everything you could pretty much see another person do and you can locate it on here without knowing the meaning of what it is. You can tell whether it's deceptive, whether it's not deceptive or whether it's associated with being happy or sad or all kinds of other emotions. 

[0:46:49.6] MB: Is it possible to using a tool like this determine if somebody's lying? 

[0:46:54.6] CH: There is nothing that’s a hundred percent, and a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is actually biased against people that are telling the truth. This gives you a fairly good estimation from what I've seen so far that it is accurate especially in interview situations and where there is a genuine conversation between two people. If it's one person talking to a group, it's probably 10 times harder to detect deception anyway. This really gives you the edge as far as profiling tools and lie detection tools go. This is probably your best bet. 

[0:47:39.1] MB: I think I remember you talking about a possible strategy for using something like this behavioral table of elements to hone your own ability to detect stress and potentially deceptive body language would be to watch interviews on YouTube and kind of seeing when guests react a certain way and jot it down, kind of go back and look through your notes and determine what you think they may or may not have been lying about. 

[0:48:06.5] CH: Absolutely. I was talking to Jordan Harbinger and I told him one of the videos that we really like to use in our training scenarios is videos of Conan O'Brien interviewing walk-on celebrities, and Conan has this incredible ability to just produce that just high anxiety, socially awkward situations on to people and the body language of on the right side of the behavior table, the more stressed-out body language starts to really ramp up with those interviews and it's really apparent. If you're just looking to spot stress and deception, Conan O'Brien is a fantastic place to start. 

[0:48:51.5] MB: Zooming out a little bit, and we talked about this earlier. I know what a long journey it can be really master a lot of these ideas and tools and truly understand the complexity of human behavior and try to decipher body language and understand what it means. For somebody who wants to just start out and kind of slowly begin internalizing a lot of these mental models, how would you recommend beginning the journey of studying human behavior and starting to build this knowledge? 

[0:49:25.7] CH: For that I would say grab a body language book. It doesn't have to be the Ellipsis Manual. I would recommend it just because you can flip to a number really quick that’s on the behavior table, but in the beginning you should spend several weeks, especially somebody that's beginning, if you have the time, you should take the time to just to observe behavior on its own without trying to interpret it, without trying to make meaning out of it. It’s like this person is crossing their arms. It doesn't mean you automatically assume they’re being defensive. It doesn't mean you think about the temperature in the room, whether or not the person is cold. Just notice that they do it. Just start to become mindful of the behavior, and then once you're mindful of the behavior, you watching behavior starts to become an unconscious process. Then work on the next conscious chunk. Then you’re going to start interpreting some of that. Then once you start interpreting most of behavior, it kind of becomes an unconscious thing. Ten grab the next piece. Then start with lie detection. 

I would say only focus on one jam. Use your conscious mind over and over again to jam a habit into your subconscious. Then once it's in there, boom, start on the next thing, which would be lie detection, behavioral profiling, deception or the influence stuff that we talked about in the Ellipsis Manual. 

[0:50:47.5] MB: I think you touched on this earlier, but one of the concepts that I was really curious about is the idea of embedded commands. Tell me a little bit more about that. 

[0:50:55.3] CH: On embedded command is something that was — I don’t want to say invented, but it was kind of made popular or conceptualized by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Those guys are the founders of NLP, and embedded commands are a hidden command that's kind of couched inside of a sentence and it's designed to make a person start to take action or to have a thought without it being inside of their conscious awareness. 

I wouldn't say like if you mixed up like a confusion statement. Are you familiar with those? 

[0:51:34.1] MB: No, I’m not. 

[0:51:34.9] CH: One of the things that — Like to go to weapon that I teach for days at a time is how to use confusion and conversation. When you confuse a person, you can also throw an embedded command immediately after that and that goes directly to the subconscious part of the brain processing center. 

The theory with confusion is that a person that's drowning will grab onto the nearest solid object that touches their hand. Does that make sense? 

[0:52:06.0] MB: Definitely. 

[0:52:07.2] CH: With confusion, your brain is trying to make sense of what's going on. It’s trying to process a statement that is kind of confusing, and it will accept the first thing that it hears. I would say you can use embedded commands at any time, but they are 10 times more effective when you mix them in with confusion. 

An example, a confusion statement would be what is the difference between not thinking and realizing what you aren’t thinking about? 

[0:52:37.5] MB: That’s definitely confusing. 

[0:52:39.2] CH: Okay. On the end of that, so let's throw a small leading statement followed by an embedded command. This is an extremely powerful phrase right here if anybody wants to write it down. Are you ready, Matt? 

[0:52:53.3] MB: I’m ready. 

[0:52:54.5] CH: Alright. What's the difference between not thinking and realizing what you aren’t thinking about? Everyone knows the real difference is in choosing to let go and allow the world to spin or just surrendering and becoming in control of yourself. There were a couple of embedded commands in there and a lot of people say you're supposed to say the volume louder or supposed to space them out a little bit. It doesn't matter. 

[0:53:17.6] MB: I kind of felt when you said that like the first phrase obviously is very confusing, and then after that I was like, “Yeah, that didn’t make a lot of sense, but I'm going to go with this let go thing, because that makes sense and that’s like the next thing that he said.” 

[0:53:31.3] CH: Yeah. That would be a phrase that you would throw out there for somebody who was into yoga or something like that. If some into golf, I would throw a little golf metaphor with the exact same let go phrase. The only time you ever suck at golf is when you don't really let go. Does that make sense? 

[0:53:50.8] MB: Yeah. It definitely makes sense. 

[0:53:52.4] CH: Okay. That’s an example of an embedded command for anybody that’s not familiar with it. 

[0:53:58.5] MB: What would you use an embedded command for? 

[0:54:01.0] CH: You can use them for anything. An example for just the beginning of a conversation, if you said it's just really hard to focus right now. Focus right now is an embedded command, and you can maybe say it louder. That starts to get the subconscious mind in the direction that you’re trying to push it at the end of your outcome or whatever goal you're trying to achieve.

[0:54:25.9] MB: Got it. I think that makes sense. For someone who wants to drill down or maybe integrate some of these confusion statements into their strategies of influence, is there a resource or a way that they can kind of come up with or create more of them? 

[0:54:44.2] CH: Oh, man! There is a formula to do it inside the Ellipsis Manual, and I think there's like 20 or 30 examples there. 

[0:54:51.5] MB: Awesome. We’ll make sure to have obviously all the resources you talked about, the needs map, the behavior table of elements, everything in the show notes and links of the book as well. For listeners who’ve been listening to our conversation, want to start somewhere simply and easily, what would kind of one piece of homework that you would give to them be to just begin down this journey? 

[0:55:13.8] CH: For the next week, ask yourself the question internally, not externally, whenever you see another person, ask yourself the question; what does this person like to be complimented on and what makes them feel significant? Those two questions will start to get you to see the inner part of people. I want you to ask those questions to even the people that are annoying, some guy that cuts you off in traffic or the guy wearing the giant tap out fight shirt standing line in front of you in Starbucks. Start asking those questions and you’ll start seeing people differently. That will change you a lot if you do it for a week. 

[0:55:52.1] MB: Chase, this has been a fascinating conversation. So many different avenues and strategies and lots and lots of things to dig into the show notes, but thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your wisdom. 

[0:56:03.4] CH: You bet, Matt. I had a good time. 

[0:56:05.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, say hi, share your story, shoot me an interesting article, tell me about your life, whatever you want to do, shoot me an email. I get them all the time. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listeners that reaches out to me. 

I’ll give you three reasons right now why you should sign up and join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an amazing free guide that we created based on your feedback and listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything and it lets you keep track of all the information you get from reading books, article, podcasts, etc., and it's an awesome system. It’s a system I personally use to organize my entire life. You’d get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, where we tell you articles, stories, ideas, things that are fascinating us right now in the world of evidence-based growth. Lastly, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, become part of the Science of Success, voting on guests, questions, changing our into music and must more. The new into we recently rolled out was from listener feedback like yours. So sign up on the email list, just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right in the homepage, or if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referrals to a friend, either live or online. It really means a tremendous amount, and the way the show has grown is through word-of-mouth referrals from people like you. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. It really matters. Every single review impacts the iTunes algorithm. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the information that we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts books, etc., be sure to check out the show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com just by hitting the show notes button at the top of the page. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How This Government Agency Spy Recruiter Hacked Psychology To Change Anyone’s Behavior with Robin Dreeke

How this government agency spy recruiter hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior, 5 steps for “strategizing” trust, how to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you, the vital importance of self awareness, the power of not keeping score, and much more with Robin Dreeke. 

Robin began his career in law enforcement in 1997 after serving in the United States Marine Corp. Robin has directed the behavior analysis program of a federal law enforcement agency and has received training and operational experience in social psychology and the science of relationship management. Robin is currently an agent of the FBI and the author of “It’s Not All About “Me”” and the upcoming book The Code of Trust.

• How Robin went from being a hard charging type-a individual to learning the principles of actually inspiring people and changing behavior

• Robin’s main job was to recruit spies

• How manipulating, pressuring, bullying people doesn’t work - and why learning that lessons in counter-intelligence is one of the most powerful places to learn the lesson

• The Art Form of Inspirating Anyone and Getting them to do what you want

• The New Car Effect - and what that has to do with influencing and inspiring anyone

• "Strategizing Trust" - the five steps of trust

• How the old conception of leadership is flawed and ineffective

• How being hard charging, type-a, and in your face is backwards from what you need to be successful

• How the crucible of counter-ingellience doesn’t afford you the luxury of making mistakes - and the strategies that come out of that for influencing others

• When people don’t have to talk to you and don’t care about your title and position - you have to find the strategies that work

• The vital importance of self awareness and honest self assessment

• What you think you’re projecting to the world is often not what the world is seeing

• How ego, vanity, and insecurities can hijack what you say and do

• Listen to the people around you, take feedback, and learn how you can change

• How strategies of inspiration and influence focus almost exclusively on the other person

• Focus on other people, what their priorities are, and what’s important to them - that’s how you can change their behavior and influence them

• Why should someone want to talk to you, listen to you, and do what you want?

• Think in terms of inspiring other people, not manipulating them

• You have to know what someone’s priorities are, and you have to speak about things in relation to their priorities

• How seeking other people's thoughts and opinions can help you neurobiologically build trust with them

• Leaders don’t keep scorecards. Give and let go. And wait.

• When you honor the healthy and happy relationships - everything falls into place and flows very easily

• How to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you

• Honesty is one of the critical factors

• Why you shouldn’t convince, cajole, and manipulate people

• How the FBI spy recruits hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior

• What is manipulation?

• How the use of lies and deception can destroy trust forever

• Why it’s important to understand that Robin is not judging the right or wrong of any of these strategies - its just a question of what’s the most effective

• It cost nothing to make it about other people and its one of the simplest strategies in the world - and can have a huge impact on your ability to influence and inspire

• Become an available resource for other people’s prosperity

• How we can become non-judgemental and cultivate nonjudgemental validation

• Don’t judge, but seek to understand - everyone has a reason that they believe what they believe in

• When you dig in, you start getting context for someone’s understanding of reality, and that helps build tolerance

• You are the cause of most of the negative interactions in your life

• Most people do not care what’s important to you - they care about their own priorities

• How to recognize and prevent yourself from getting emotionally hijacked

• The core principles of the code of trust

• Great leaders are very empathetic and focused on OTHER people

• Why Robin doesn’t give advice or guidance, he only asks discovery questions

• The 5 principles of trust

• Suspend your ego

  1. Be nonjudgemental

  2. Honor Reason

  3. Validate Others

  4. Be Generous

• The CORE of the Code

• Happy healthy relationships

  1. open honest communication

  2. available resource for prosperity of others

• Why should discover the GREATNESS of others - don’t focus on what people are doing wrong, focus on their greatness and what they are doing RIGHT

• How to make relationships bloom - find out what other people’s priorities are, their needs, wants, aspirations and dreams.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] It's Not All About Me: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone by Robin Dreeke

• [Book] The Code of Trust by Robin Dreeke, Cameron Stauth, and Joe Navarro

• [SoS Episode] Simple Strategies You Can Use To Persuade Anyone with The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini

• [SoS Episode] Influence Anyone With Secret Lessons Learned From The World’s Top Hostage Negotiators with Former FBI Negotiator Chris Voss

• [Website] People Formula, LLC

• [Twitter] @rdreeke

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.7] MB: Welcome to The Science Of Success, the number one evidence based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we discuss how this FBI spy recruiter hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior. We look at the five steps for strategizing trust. Talk about how to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you. The vital importance of self-awareness, the power of not keeping score and much more with Robin Dreeke.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday which our listeners have been loving.

These are TED Talks, articles, ideas, things that have us excited and we want to share them with you, it’s super short and easy to digest. Next, you’re going to get listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show. Vote on guests, change our intro music, vote on guest questions, et cetera. The new intro that we just recently rolled out was voted on by people who are on our email list. 

Lastly and most importantly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. Our most popular guide is called, How to Organize and Remember Everything and you can get it completely for free along with another sweet bonus guide that we’re not going to tell you about until you sign up.

By joining our email list today. Again, you can join it by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page or if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we asked, do you have to be ruthless in order to succeed? We examined how compassion is powerfully linked with success. We discuss the essential task of challenging your own world view and seeking evidence that you disagree with.

We talked about learning how to ask great questions and much more with Dr. Chris Cook. If you want to learn more about the power of compassion and how it can make you successful, listen to that episode. Now for the interview.

[0:02:27.4] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show. Robin Dreeke. Robin began his career in law enforcement after serving in the United States Marine Corps. He has directed the Behavior Analysis Program of a federal law enforcement agency and received training and operational experience in social psychology and the science of relationship management.

Robin is currently an agent at the FBI and the author of It’s Not All About Me and the upcoming book The Code Of Trust. Robin, welcome to The Science Of Success.

[0:02:55.7] RD: Hey, thanks Matt. Excited to be here, excited to be sharing with you and your audience, all the great things I’ve learned in my life and I’m sure everything that you all learn in your life as well.

[0:03:05.0] MB: Well, you have an incredible background and story and some of the work you’ve done at the FBI is fascinating. Would you share kind of your journey with the listeners?

[0:03:14.3] RD: Yeah, sure Matt. It’s actually pretty funny and remarkable. Not in the things I’ve achieved but because in what I’ve done with my life and career, completely opposite of what my biological and genetic coding is for and what I mean is this.

You’ve read part of it, you know, my bio and background, yes, I’m a naval academy graduate, Marine Corps officer. I came into law enforcement and the FBI 1997, I served in New York City Norfolk, FBI headquarters, Quantico, I ran our behavioral team, all those things. 

You know, they sound pretty neat on paper and they kind of scream at you, “Hard charging, type A.” But in reality, which I am, there’s no doubt. In reality, when you work in the world of counterintelligence like I do. It’s completely backwards from the behavior you really need for success.

What I mean by that is what I learned, when I first got assigned to New York City, working counterintelligence, I was very fortunate that I got on a squad of individuals that had probably 20, 25 years in the FBI all doing that job and working counterintelligence is different than anything else in the FBI really in the world.

It is related mostly anywhere else, to sales. I basically sell a concept that protecting America is a great idea and the way I’m going to compensate you for that is through a great relationship with me mostly, not much else, you know, government funded me, is what it is.

It really comes down to this feeling of patriotism and having a great relationship that’s going to be the inspiration behind why people are going to want to cooperate with you.

Also, working in counterintelligence, it’s all leadership because the people that I interact with, day in and day out, they don’t commit crimes. I mean, it’s very rare that my main job in New York was to recruit spies. 99.99% of the time, they’re just getting regular information.

Open source information and sourcing it to an individual so it has value. Most of the information like I said, is open source. Who it comes from, makes it valuable. The people I interact with are great American citizens as well.

The challenge is alright, if you’re a hard charging type A that’s used to trying to convince and coerce and manipulate people into giving you things it doesn’t work, it just does not work because you know, as soon as someone walks away from any engagement with you, think to themselves, “Wow, I really wonder what he really wanted?” You’ve totally failed.

Because there’s doubt, there’s subterfuge and people are very keen to pick up on these things because what generally happens and we’ve all experienced it whether it’s been a shady car salesman or any other kind of salesman, that is actually there for profit and gain, to take advantage of you. People pickup on that because there’s incongruence between people’s words and the things they say.

Which they might be saying all the slick lines, everything really great but their body language becomes very incongruent with what they’re saying and our inter mammalian brain really picks up on these things and it gives us that creepy feeling.

Well, when you’re actually genuinely make it about everyone else and that’s what The Code Of Trust Is About, how to make it about everyone else but yourself. But you have a lot of clarity, you know, the destination that you hope to move to but you’ve realized that you can only do that through being an available resource for the prosperity of others.

That’s what the whole thing is about. I did the three years on the street, I got on our behavioral team and again, I’m not a naturally born leader, not naturally born doing this but I was surrounded by greats that were showing me and modeling the way.

You learn these things through on the job training, osmosis and observation. But what really started happening was I started writing because I was asked to write about it and when I got down to Quantico, when they started asking me to teach about it.

You start making this artform as it is and a personal artform of a paint by number. You start getting labels and meaning of things so people can start recognizing the behaviors, they’ve already been doing.

I call it the “new car effect” and I always get a puzzled look when I say that. But really, what it comes down to, you know, the day you buy your new car or any car, all of a sudden you start seeing that vehicle everywhere.

I own a Tundra, the day I bought my Tundra, I swear, I think 300 people in my town bought the same darn truck because it has that label and meaning. That’s all I do is I give labels and meanings to all the behaviors that we do when we’re having a great relationship, so you can repeat that behavior. And understand also, the ones that you might have failed at or are more challenged at.

To understand exactly what you were and weren’t during those situations so you can stop doing those behaviors. That’s been the journey, probably The Code Of Trust came about around 2013. I was running our behavioral team and someone asked me to do an article again on counter intelligence and I said well, “I can’t really talk about hooky spooky spy stuff,” but I said, “Let me talk about what my team does.”

I had never really sat down and contemplated. You know, when I sit down and strategize any kind of operation I’m doing, “What am I actually doing?” Then I reflected on every instance in my entire life, my career, in the Marine Corps, in the naval academy and with my friends, family, kids.

I started realizing that “Wow, in ever encounter, all I’m ever doing is strategizing trust.” I came out with The Five Steps Of Trust and all of a sudden, when I gave myself that “Green Tundra effect,” as I call it or the “New car effect.”

I started seeing the code of trust everywhere. It’s become my guiding light in my life, I live it every day and it creates amazing prosperity as a byproduct but if you – the core thing of the code of trust is, if you focus on yourself, it undermines the entire process so it really comes down to first and foremost, good, healthy relationships, open eyes communication and being an available resource for the prosperity of others.

When you want those things first, everything else falls into place. That’s kind of a brief overview of almost 49 years of my life.

[0:08:59.0] MB: You know, the funny thing about and there’s so much to unpack there, there’s a number of things I want to ask you about. One of the most fascinating things to me about fields like counterintelligence is that there’s no room for error, right? 

These tactics have to work and in many cases, literally life and death situations and so, I think it’s such a beautiful format for really – it’s almost a crucible for cultivating the absolute, most effective strategies for doing something. You know, you talked about how your old sort of perception of what leadership meant isn’t necessarily what actually works and actually changes behavior.

Can you tell me about how that transformation took place and how the old conception of kind of the hard charging, manipulating, pressuring, bullying, framework of leadership doesn’t really work?

[0:09:44.9] RD: Yeah, absolutely. You know, my form of leadership is what I witnessed. You know, the things that we witnessed between ages of nine and 19, you know, really form our generational outlook on the world because our prefrontal lobes are not fully developed yet. The emotional impresses we have really form how we see the world.

You know, during those years, you know, I wanted to go to naval academy. I want to be navy pilot, aerospace engineer, an astronaut, you know, my form of leadership is what I watched in the movies and TV.

The first movie I saw in leadership that I thought was strong leadership was you know, was Patton and you know, screaming at people, yelling, kick him in the butt, poke them in the eye. I figured leadership was getting people to do what you want and so that’s what I – 

That’s the behaviorized modeling and at a young age, you know, many people get rewarded for that kind of behavior because just think of sports teams you’ve been on or clubs or any other kind of position where you know, an adult or a superior asked you to accomplish something with a group of people and you ask politely all the group of people to do what was asked.

No one goes along with what it is you want them to do and so, you now get chastised for being a weak leader, now, next thing you do is you yell and scream and these people do what you want them to do and now you’re rewarded for being a good leader.

The negative behavior on convincing and condoling gets rewarded. So you start at a young age thinking that’s the way in order to get things done. In reality, what you just did is, you manipulated people through fear and reprisal to take action and the action they’re giving you is probably about five, maybe five to 10% effort.

Just to get you to shut up and go away and that can work fine in situations where there is a position of reprisal that people can take against you but again, you’re not going to get the best out of anyone because you know, loathing starts seeping in against you and people are just going to stop performing.

That makes the now leader, you know, look extremely bad and can’t be productive and that leader now thinks, “Well, what’s happened, why am I not being productive, why am I no longer getting promoted?”

Well, they now think they’ve gotten soft and so the way to undo getting soft, they think they have to get harder. This is where the bully in the workplace starts and that kind of leadership.

In reality, what I found, both in the Marine Corps and coming in the FBI, especially working like you said, counterintelligence where you know, I get up every day open, I don’t make a mistake and cause myself a humbling moment because every relationship is potentially you know, helping our national security protect our country, protect my community.

I don’t have the luxury of making mistakes. I mean, I’m extremely hyper critical of myself and all my conversation dialogues. I care passionately about not making a mistake and what I found is especially when you work in the world as I described to you.

There are no criminals, very few are criminals and even if someone is manipulated, good naturedly, by accident by someone trying to take advantage of them. They’re very unwitting that they’ve even done anything wrong. So, in my entire life and career, the last 20 years, I’ve never made an arrest in the area I’ve done.

I’ve only done things that you know, hopefully build relationship strong enough so we can garner the information we need to protect our country. When people don’t have to talk to you and you can’t rely on your title and position.

You better know what to do and that’s – the only thing I really found out too is that people do not care about your title and position whatsoever. I mean, being an FBI in New York City, knock on their front door and see what people think about you if you start showing a badge and everything.

Really comes down to your title and position but how you treat them. If you treat them and talk in terms of their priorities, you validate them, you validate their context, you don’t argue their point of view on things and you genuinely and this is the real key, you got to be genuine and sincere about your desire to understand them as a human being. Their motivations and priorities in life.

[0:13:37.5] MB: Before we get in too deep into that because I really want to go deep down that track. Tell me about, you mentioned the importance of kind of really honest, self-awareness and self-assessment.

[0:13:49.8] RD: Yeah. I was in Marine Corps, there was a 14th leadership principle I learned was “Know yourself and seek self-improvement.” One of my more humbling “Aha! Moments” in life was I remember I was stationed at Cherry Point.

I was in the air wing but on the ground side and so weren’t really bottom, we had a lot of junior officers and I think we had about 14 or 15 of my rank, the second lieutenant. I remember my first assessment, I was ranked last of them all.

I remember you know, walking up to my major that rated me and said, “Alright, I get it, I’m doing something wrong. What am I doing?” And all he could say was, “You just need to be a better leader.”

It was very subjective and so, I didn’t understand what that meant but it bothered me, I was like “Alright, I am doing something wrong.” And what I started discovering was, and everyone has this ,that what I thought I was projecting to the world was not what the rest of the world is seeing.

Taking an honest self-assessment is actually hearing the word people say about you and to you but really, ideally about you where you can be a fly on the wall and hear people’s honest impression of you. This is not a self-loathing or “Woe as me,” if you hear something you don’t like.

It’s an assessment of what people see when they see you. It’s funny, I often – anytime I bump into someone I knew 25 years ago, I usually give them a big hug and thank them for tolerating me 25 years ago in their lives.

The one thing that I’ve heard when I apologize for being a self-centered jerk years ago, they said, “No Robin, you were just intense.” When I hear something twice, I do an assessment of it and so I analyze what intense looked like to other people.

Intense look like just me being a good guy to me because very rarely do people get up in the morning and say, “Alright, today, I’m going to treat people really horribly and be a jerk.”

Ultimately, that happens sometimes, not because we want to but because there’s this incongruence again between what we feel and what almost get hijacked out of our mouth because of ego, vanity and insecurities.

I define that, I looked at that intentionally and actually saw what that meant. It’s a typical type A response and it’s, you know, “You have something you’re trying to achieve, a goal of some sort, a very tangible means goal…” I call them instead of an ends goal. Ends goals are states of mind and I’ll tell you more about that later maybe.

But a means goal is you know, “I want a promotion, I’m trying to do well on this project. I want to better salary, I want to move.” All those things are very specific and we become so focused on them that we totally disregard, not by intent, but by our genetic design that anyone else around us is doing anything.

We’ve gone wholly focused on what we’re trying to do and again, we’re not regarding really people around us that are actually might be working on other things, that you’re not making yourself available to. Or pretty much ignoring. And you combine that with a tempo that is out of sync with the others around you because again, you have that higher tempo of activity.

It really becomes off-putting to other people. It looks like a narcissistic maniac jerk. Was that in the heart and soul of the individual, the type A? No, they are totally clueless about this until you actually have those “Aha! Moments,” and listen to the people around you. Take feedback and ask yourself, “Is that the behavior I want to be exhibiting or not?”

If it’s not, what can I add to myself to have that behavior stop being that way. Again, especially when you’re working in areas and fields where whether you’re in sales and doing cold calls or, or people who are already dealing with individuals and companies that give them products and services. So why should they want to go with you, why should they even listen to you?

You come across with that kind of intensity, people are just going to shut down. Because you’re not really regarding them, you’re more focused on what you’re trying to do, rather than being a resource for all those to reach prosperity.

That was probably the first time where I had the, I’ve had multiple – you know, I think everyone does, you know, multiple moments in your life where you create yourself a humbling moment. You know, every day I wake up and I hope I don’t cause another one that day.

I haven’t had one in a while and it’s important to get that ego and vanity in check because when you don’t, the mouth will run up and away and you become self-centered and unfocused and there’s no reason why anyone, any individual should want to listen to you, if you’re not talking in terms of what’s important to them.

[0:17:55.4] MB: I think that segways into one of the other really important things that you mentioned and you write and talk a lot about; which is all of these strategies and influences that – sorry, not influence because we talked about this before the show. But all of these strategies have a root in not focusing on yourself and focusing really deeply on the other person. Can you tell me about the importance of that?

[0:18:18.1] RD: You know, the influence. Influence is important to understand how to influence and what influence is but what I found is, this is part of where all these things came from, focusing on others. Influence still has a connotation in my mind when I use the word.

Again, this is purely me, there is no right or wrong, it’s just definitions. It’s not a connotation of influencing another individual to do something that’s in my mind. When you understand, you know, how that works and what’s going on there and you want to be more effective at influence, what happens is, you start realizing that “Wow, I just need to move beyond influence because I need to focus on other people in what their priorities are and the resources for them,” because then what you do is you start moving into a realm of inspiration.

When you’re in the realm of inspiration, it’s completely about the other person. So here’s how this process works and why it’s important. Individuals you know, you go back to ancient tribal man where tribes of 30, 40 or 50. It was the first form of social welfare, healthcare and survival, if you were not part of the tribe, the likelihood of your genetic coding being passed on was extremely low.

Our brain rewards us for being valued and part of a collective and a group and a tribe and so, if we use language that demonstrates value and demonstrates that we are vested in you and your prosperity, however the individual defines prosperity, they are naturally going to keep listening to you and keep regarding you and want to collaborate. Because it’s in their best nature, because it’s in their best interest to do so.

You know, anytime I have a project or something, again, this isn’t, you know, you can make it all about someone else and many people in life do but they then get accused of being a carpet and being walked over. That’s where The Code Of Trust comes in and make sure that doesn’t happen and in the sense that the first step in The Code Of Trust is, understanding what your goals and priorities are, what it is you’re trying to accomplish?

The second part of that first question of what your goal is, is reversing it now and think in terms of, “Why should someone want to?” Here’s the difference between that influencing and manipulating or anything like that, people then start thinking, “How can I make them want to do that or how can I influence them to do that?”

But The Code Of Trust is what I’m talking about in order to make it about the other person is, I don’t think about that at all, I start reversing. I think in terms of, “How can I inspire them to want to?” That’s the key. If I’m thinking in terms of inspiring someone to take action – because I know what my goals are. I give myself my own new car effect by naming and stating the things I’m hoping to achieve. Now I completely let go of those because I reverse it, just like you don’t have to try to see the car once you bought it.

You just see it. That’s why giving labels and meanings to things that are important to you, that’s all you have to do. You don’t have to try to make an effort because if you make an effort on your own behalf, you’re now manipulating or influencing anything because it’s all about you and you’re only slightly regarding the other person.

I let go of it, it’s got label and meaning, now you reverse it, I think in terms of, “How can I inspire someone to maybe align with me?” In order to inspire someone, I have to know what their priorities are, long term, short term, personal, professional. 

I have to talk in terms of those priorities. I have to demonstrate their value and I demonstrate value by four really simple statements, I always include in conversations, emails, I’m going to seek thoughts and opinions because when I demonstrate that I’m seeking your thoughts and opinions, I’m demonstrating you have value.

Human beings do not ask other human beings what they think unless there’s – they have value. When you do that, people’s brains are rewarded with dopamine because you’re demonstrating their affiliation when they’re affiliated, that means it’s good for their survival, dopamine’s released in the brain, oxytocin, catenin, all the pleasure centers are far in because you’re demonstrating value and you’re demonstrating affiliation. 

Next, I’m also going to talk in terms of their priorities. If I don’t know what their priorities are, I’m going to ask them what are their priorities. Next, I’m going to validate them and validation, it’s a beautiful, very broad term that demonstrates that you’re trying to understand without judgment the human being you’re engaging with.

It doesn’t mean you necessarily agree, because this isn’t about agreeing with them, just play cadence, it’s about validation. It means understanding. And finally I empower you with choice. Again, we do not give people choice unless we value them and there’s affiliation.

Now, here’s the fun part. If I know what your priorities are and I make myself an available resource to your priorities and your prosperity and I already know what mine are because I’ve already labeled them before I’ve engaged.

When I empower someone with choice, I’m empowering them a choice with naturally overlapping priorities, mine and theirs. Then it’s up to them whether they accept it or not and if they don’t, that’s fine too.

Because it’s all about them, their timing, their perspective and here’s what I can guarantee, I can absolutely guarantee you if I know exactly what your priorities are, as I said, again, long term, short term, personal, professional and I’m making resources available for you, your success and prosperity in those areas.

I guarantee you’re going to take that action. There hasn’t been a time yet when it hasn’t. Now, what happens is, most time triggers is the need to reciprocate by other individuals that you’re a resource for their prosperity. You can’t keep a scorecard, one of my things I love to say is “Leaders don’t keep score cards,” because then there’s an expectation on process and then you really did it for you and not them.

I don’t keep a scorecard, I give, I let go and I just wait and it’s really been pretty ridiculous when you honor the core of the code which is that healthy professional or happy relationship and you’re an open, honest communications, everything falls into place. It just – it flows very easily and the more you create these healthy relationships with more and more people.

They actually have – it’s also very common effect on your own mind because you can’t really engage people successfully if you’re emotionally hijacked all the time. You know, stress, anger, discontentment, resentment, frustration, all those things cloud our judgment. The code of trust clears the cloud and you can actually objectively see exactly path to where you're trying to go. More importantly, where others are trying to go.

[0:24:02.0] MB: One of the things you touched on, again, there’s so many things I want to get into from that, but one of the things you touched on was this idea that in the counterintelligence world, in many cases, people either don’t want to reach out to you or explicitly are trying to avoid contacting you.

You have to almost reverse engineer them wanting to reach out to you. Can you talk about that strategy and more broadly, about the strategy of getting someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you?

[0:24:32.0] RD: I’ll start with your last question first because it will be easier to answer the first and if I lose track of it because as you can tell man, I can talk forever about this. I get sidetracked in my own brain on it, so I apologize if I do.

The goal for me at every engagement with everyone, is to get their brain to reward them chemically for engaging with you and we’ve already covered how that works, you know?

If you demonstrate value and you demonstrate affiliation and you understand someone’s priorities and you talk in terms of their priorities and even more importantly, if you have resources for them to move forward on those priorities and their own prosperities they define, their brain’s going to reward them, guaranteed.

I guarantee you, shields will be down, there will be no resistance and there will be a great dialogue in conversation. Where it goes from there is really up to them and their tempo. It’s a very simple concept that I just keep my mind is that you know, what does every human being I’m engaging with, what do they need, want and dream of.

Just make sure that I’m talking in terms of those things. Honesty is really the key of this too because if you’re making stuff up, do people pick up on that, absolutely. You know, that’s where you start to get that incongruence of you know, the mind and the heart and the mouth of what’s going on.

When I do validation, I only start out conversations, especially if they’re going to be a little more challenging than others or it’s a brand new person I’m meeting. I always start out with a specific, non-judgmental validation of a strength attribute or action that I’ve witnessed in their life.

Or in that immediate time or anything. If I have nothing to validate in that opening statement, the biggest thing I’m going to do is I’m going to validate their time because people’s time is very valuable and to have them share it with me, I am beyond grateful for it. So if I have nothing that I can validate at the start, I’m going to validate the time because again, I’m just very grateful for it.

Now, translating that into you know, working in counterintelligence, to me it’s really working anywhere that sometimes you’re going to deal with people on that might not want to have a relationship with you. That’s completely okay. Matter of fact, one of the most challenging…

You know, every now and then, you hit this situations where you got to cold call to try to get a piece of information or just a question and answer on something and people do not want to engage with you.

The first thing I do in those situations is I validate that “Yeah, I can honestly, I understand how you don’t want to deal with someone like me from the United States government. I completely understand.”

“If you want me to leave you alone, if you just respond to this and tell me to leave you alone, I’ll do it but if not, if you can provide this and here’s reason why I’d like that, it might be of a help to others, is that something that interest you? Let me know.”

“Again, just respond to me if you don’t want me to engage you and I’ll leave you alone.” That way, at least get a response and what did I just do? I talked in terms of them, their priorities because what’s their priority? “Leave me alone.”

Again, I don’t judge. I can’t judge whether that priority is aligned with yours or not, who cares, it’s all about them. Those are the ones that are resistant but in all honesty, the times that happens are exceptionally rare.

Because again, if you’re talking in terms and figuring out what someone’s needs, wants, dreams and aspirations are in their personal, professional. And you’re talking in terms of those, you seek and understand those, you’re validating those and you bring to bear resources to further those for them. Why wouldn’t they talk to you?

The only reason they wouldn’t is either they lied about their priorities, their subterfuge or some other thing that they didn’t make you aware of. Again, it’s not what you did or didn’t do, it’s all on them. It’s not going to be a very good relationship anyway because they don’t want one, so why force it? You know you can save a lot of time and just break contact. Then even in those instances you’ve got to leave them feeling better for having that with you and having engaged with you, those brain rewards and why? Branding is everything. You know I have no problem if someone tells me they don’t want to talk or they don’t want to share. 

They don’t want to cooperate because you know what? It’s not you, it will be someone else and I will never get anyone else if you break contact with me and I ruined your day. I mean just think about this, say you met me and we had a conversation at 09:00 or 10:00 in the morning and it went horrible. I tried to convince you of things, I could try to cajole you, try to manipulate you and you just walked away feeling horrendous. 

Whether we even talked about me or not for the rest of the day it put you in a bad mood. Now everyone you touch, in your entire sphere of influence that entire day, or even a couple of days, maybe a week, maybe a month who knows? They’re touching you and seeing stress, anxiety all the negative emotions you caused and it leaks out where it came from. It came from this engagement with this Robin guy. Now contrary to that, if I leave you feeling better for having met me and I made you feel great for the conversation. 

Your brain is rewarding you, I demonstrated your value. I am talking in terms of your parties, even if you say no you don’t want to cooperate or have a relationship or if you’re in sales and buy what you are selling. If you are completely fine with that and you let it go now for the rest of the day, weeks and months again, someone is leaving the engagement with you with a very positive emotion in a great state of mind and people like to feel that way. 

And so they are going to start seeing that. So in other words, you caused the common effect here. It is going to cause a common effect on the entire sphere of influence and again, that goes to branding. So I never think ever about just the one person I’m engaging with. I think about the entire sphere of influence from that point on. I always want good branding and again, if someone doesn’t want to engage that’s fine. It’s fine because when you empower people with choice with walking away and not dealing with you. 

You know how many times I’ve actually had someone walk away and not want to deal with me? Zero so far since The Code Of Trust and why? Because I keep talking in terms of them. Think about this, on average think to yourself how many times a day do you hear words in every single statement that someone says they are completely about you? Meaning is someone asking your thoughts and opinions? Is someone talking in terms of your priorities? 

Is someone empowering you with choice? Is someone validating your thoughts, ideas and context on how you see the world in every single statement you say? No, on average I think even our closest friends and family maybe do it 2% to 5% a day. You know when you actually do that 100% of the time when you’re engaging with someone. So every statement that comes out of your mouth, your brain, is rewarding them for you for being around you. Why wouldn’t they want to be around you? 

[0:30:41.8] MB: And so what are the core principles of aspiring people, is the idea that you just talked about which is essentially this notion that if you focus really deeply on other people making your statements about them, speaking in terms of their priorities, seeking out their thoughts and opinions. In a very biological sense their brain is releasing hormones and chemicals that are making them like you, want to engage with you and want to be part of what you’re doing. 

[0:31:06.7] RD: 100% and again it goes to evolutionary psychology. You know the ancient tribal brain it’s rooted in us. The best analogy I can give without going into I think it was April around 2012 at Harvard, did the study where they actually wired up people’s brains and saw that when people are talking about themselves and their priorities dopamine was released. But the easiest demonstration you can do with this is, I always ask this question with a crowd that I am engaging with and training. 

I always ask how many of you have actually travelled overseas for pleasure. A lot of hands go up, I say, “Great. What happens when you bump into another American?” And without fail everyone starts smiling and laughing and yeah because what you initially do is you ask where are you from and if they’re from anywhere even near your state, you start collaborating and thinking about things that you’ve been doing in the same areas. You start thinking about places you might have travelled in the same time frame. 

Then you actually start talking about do you know so and so, you keep trying to build linkages because your brain is saying, “Ah someone from my tribe and it brings comfort.” So we keep trying to build that comfort. That’s why when you go to a new place and you’ve taken training or you’ve given a conference or even in a crowd, we generally coalesce into our mini-tribes. When I give training to law enforcement or something, all the different apartments they sit together. 

You don’t have to tell people where to sit. People clump together according to their comfort and their tribe. It is just a naturally human reaction and so knowing that, you can actually use your language to demonstrate that affiliation and that’s what people do all the time. I mean every one time someone shares a story or an anecdote, which is most of life when engaging, all you’re doing is demonstrating value and demonstrating affiliation. 

And people are just so anxious to tell their side of the story, to tell the thing that they did on the weekend because they are seeking that validation and acceptance as well. They’re not even listening to anyone else. They are just waiting for people to shut up, so they can tell their story again because their brain is saying, “Go-go-go!”

[0:33:00.1] MB: We talk all the time on the show about how important it is to master new skills and abilities and that’s why I am so excited to tell you about our sponsor for this episode, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, in business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography and they offer unlimited access for a single low monthly price, so you don’t have to pay per class. 

There’s some really cool courses on Skillshare. They have an absolutely awesome course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. It basically runs my entire life. They also have a really, really cool course on productivity planning. They have a number of those actually and a course that piqued my interest when I was looking at it today, that looks absolutely awesome which is a course on how to create awesome mind maps. 

If you don’t know what mind maps are, they’re so cool. It’s an amazing tool for note taking and remembering and summarizing things that speaks directly to your mind. It is an absolutely fascinating strategy and I use mind maps to record or keep notes on things like book ideas or summarizing or even brain storming. Skillshare is giving my listeners this month a month of unlimited access. So you can get Skillshare completely for free for one month. 

All you have to do is to go to Skillshare.com/success to redeem a free month of classes. I would highly recommend checking that out. If mind mapping sounds cool, go check out the mind mapping class. You can get all these courses for free for a month. So if you are looking to add some new skills, if you want to pick up some productivity tips or even get into something like drawing, definitely check out Skillshare. 

[0:34:45.8] MB: You also mentioned that you never lie to anybody. It’s funny because a previous guest, you may be familiar with this, a gentleman names Chris Voss. 

[0:34:53.1] RD: I know Chris Voss, yeah. 

[0:34:54.7] MB: Yeah, he’s a hostage negotiator for the FBI for a long time and he had the same principle. His was a little bit different, which is never lie to anyone that you’re not going to kill. But I find it fascinating that someone who we encountered, tells us that as a recruited spy essentially, you never lie to anyone. 

[0:35:13.2] RD: Yes, now I don’t ever lie. So let me first describe, I define manipulation because understanding manipulation first – because I think people can agree if someone is discovered to have been attempting to manipulate you, it destroys trust, does it not? Yeah it does and so identifying what manipulation is, manipulation is attempt of control with use to sub-diffuse, lies and deception because some people do need to control certain situations. 

But if you do so openly and honestly explaining why, if you do have time, but if you have trust established that’s no problem. But it is the use of deception that really can blow trust because as soon as it’s discovered you will never have it again and I have done a lot of undercover work especially when I was in New York. Undercover work is lying. I remember thinking to myself at the time, “Oh these are genuine relationships, these are real and true,” and to me they were. 

But they were based on a lie and as soon as they were discovered, there was no trust. It never would have been again. So all the things that come to believe and I live now with The Code Of Trust, it’s an evolution that I have to do those types of things in the past, sure because it will help me understand the cause and effect of – if you actually are using deception anyway. You can have very short term gains if you need to and again, I am not judging the right or wrong on any of these things because there isn’t. 

It is just a very, very causal effect in every single action. I can guarantee you if you’d lie and use manipulation, when discovered and it will be at some point whether it’s today, tomorrow or when you die. When it’s discovered, trust will be extinguished and the likelihood and improbability of ever coming back is slim to none. So that’s why I just don’t do it. It’s just a complete waste of your time because you know, Chris is so funny. He is such a good guy. 

He’s got such mad skills doesn’t he? Another guy Robert Cialdini wrote a book Influence and one of the principles in his, that is so sound and so easy to follow, as well as The Code Of Trust is you’ve got to answer three things on the first engagement with anyone. Is who you are, what you want and when you’re leaving. If you are using deception or any of those things, you have no trust and it’s just I also remember sitting on consults as well when we’re talking with case agents trying to come up with strategies for them to engage people. 

I remember, it’s great to come up with these great outlandish undercover operations and using all these different resources but in reality working and whether you were in a company or government or anywhere. The number of resources that you have allocated to are generally pretty slim. So as simple and easy as you can make it for another person to an act, a strategy for developing a relationship and trust the better. So that’s why, I am straight up honest with you from the get go. 

And if I can’t tell you something, I’ll tell you exactly why I can’t tell you. Again, open and honest because anything else will just backfire on you. Whether it’s there tomorrow. And then it’s branding. You lied and deceived someone, you try to convince, cajole and manipulate in anyway, once that’s found out what does that do your branding? You’re done. 

[0:38:07.7] MB: I think you made a really, really good point which is that you are not judging whether these strategies are right or wrong. It’s only a question of what are most effective strategies and these happen to be some of the most effective ways to change or impact people’s behavior. 

[0:38:23.7] RD: Because one of the core principles of The Code Of Trust is to not judge, be non-judgmental because as soon as I start judging someone else’s behavior of the things they do, what goes up? Shields, they don’t want to engage and they start judging me because they think they are not affiliating or valuing their tribe and their input or anything like that. And that is counterproductive to The Code Of Trust. So it’s just understanding the cause and effect of how you’re going to engage with a human being. 

Because again, I keep going back to what does every human being on the face of this planet –as long as you follow in the normal patterns of human behavior, you don’t have too many malformations or the brain chemical imbalances, and you start edging up towards the fringes –every human being seeks and craves non-judgmental validation and acceptance for who they are. Their thoughts and opinions, ideas in how they see the world. 

If you don’t demonstrate that through your language their shields are going to be partially up. If you don’t demonstrate that at all, their shields are going to be completely up. They are not going to hear any word you are saying. If you dishonor their priorities, if you use deception, I guarantee you are going to blow trust and there isn’t any instance in life even driving down a highway where you’re trusting the other person in the opposite direction isn’t going to hit you. 

Everything in life, where you’re dealing with another human being, you have to have some sentiment of trust. So why not maximize it the best you can for every situation because it costs you nothing to do. I mean talk in terms of someone else’s priorities, not arguing their context with them, not judging them, what does that actually cost you? It cost you nothing. So why not do that? One of the questions I love asking law enforcement when I do this training, I always start out with law first. 

“Alright, how many of you in the audience are every gotten a criminal to confess,” and all the hands go up. I say, “Great, why do they confess to you? Is it because you sat across that table and judged what they did?” All heads start shaking no and I say, “Yeah that’s right and what did you do? You actually sat there? You help them rationalize what they did? You don’t project the blame if you can? You help them minimize the impact of what they did and then you talk in terms of priorities and options.” 

“And you talked in terms of what their choices were and you made yourself you were the available resource for them to be able to facilitate those options and priorities and so you didn’t judge.” So all the heads are nodding they say, “Yeah that’s what I was doing.” I say, “Alright so why do we do anything else with anyone else in our lives?” It really is that simple. If you just know how to make it about everyone else, again with those four statements that I build in. 

Carry everything I say as right, why not? It caused nothing to make it about other people and it’s really the simplest thing in the world. The last thing I would say about this is people ask me all the time, “So Robin if your dopamine is released,” again I have mentioned this before, roughly 40% of every day we spend talking about our own thoughts, ideas and priorities. They find out through that same research about the dopamine flow.  

If you take your 40% and give it over to someone else, you are now doubling the potential for developing a relationship and trust and someone once asked me, “Well Robin if you take your 40% and give it over, when do you get your dopamine hit?” I say, “That’s really easy, what happens when you achieve goals?” And they say, “Yeah, dopamine hit.” I said, “What if your goal is to be an available resource at the prosperity of others?”

That’s where leadership – well they always say “Leaders make it about everyone else.” The very subjective thing to say unless you actually understand the steps to it, this is the steps to it. When you make it about everyone else and you’re an unavailable resource to their prosperity and again, don’t keep the score card. And you understand where your destination is as well, you sense that that ties them to your priorities. If they eventually want to reciprocate or not, it’s up to them, that’s what exactly happens. 

[0:41:54.7] MB: So tell me a little bit about – you talked about non-judgmental awareness or non-judgmental validation. Tell me how can we cultivate that ability to be non-judgmental? 

[0:42:06.9] RD: It’s hard, someone laughed at me once. They said, “Robin only you could write a book you know?” My first one, 10 Techniques To Equip Rapport and the next one the Code Of Trust. I say, “Why is that?” He said, “Because you are only one who could actually articulate how not to be you.” Because I started out life, especially at the naval canvass, as extremely judgmental. We’re taught at a very young age to judge everyone, you know our parents and rightly so. 

You know our parents get us to be safe in life the first nine to 10 years of our lives, by teaching us morals, ethics and our moral code and our compass, personal compasses according to them and according to how they judge the world around you and everyone’s got a different one. The hard thing is to get beyond that. I mean it was forced on me because it worked. Every time something happens in the world and I am told to go out and interview a bunch of people from that country. 

That region that belief system. If I go in pre-judging what I think of them and their point of view and their beliefs or anything else what’s the likelihood I can inspire them to want to share information? They won’t, I guarantee you they won’t and so my saying I use, “I will never take a side because once you take a side half the world is going to line up against you and that goes against The Code Of Trust.” The thing I do because it was a learned trait was to not judge but to seek to understand. And that is what validation is. 

So everyone in this world has a very firm belief in things they believe in and there is a reason they do. Find out that reason because most of the time when you start digging deep, without judging, how they came across about feeling the way they feel, what you start getting is context and when you get context of how the other people sees the world through their optic – that’s when tolerance starts rising incredibly. So you start understanding different points of view. 

Different visions of the way they think things should be and again, what are you doing when you are doing that? You are validating, what’s validating? You are demonstrating the value and you’re demonstrating the affiliation and again it has nothing to do with agreeing with someone. People aren’t necessarily looking to be agreed with. They are looking to be heard and when you are doing these things what are you doing? You are hearing their point of view without challenging it in any way. 

[0:44:12.2] MB: And I think it goes hand and hand with this, but another one of the core principles that you write about and we talked about earlier in the conversation, is suspending your ego. As someone as you self-describe as somebody that’s very type A – hard charging, how are you able to suspend your ego put it on the back burner to be able to implement some of these strategies?

[0:44:34.2] RD: A few things. I got – like I think many people get is you get sick of being angry. You get sick of being frustrated, you get sick of all the negative emotions and then when I sat back and analyzed, “Well what is causing this emotion, why am I feeling this way?” You start understanding it was actually you that caused that situations because what causes stressful confrontation with someone else? Easy you are arguing a point of view. Someone wants you to do something you don’t think you could do it that way. “I want to do it this way.”

Well what are you actually doing? If you let vanity get in your way because you think you are better than someone else, you think you are more important, you think your opinion matters more, what a bunch of hog wash. So when I decided that I no longer wanted to be frustrated with life, combined with the fact that I started learning that the more you are talking about yourself and what’s important to you, most people do not care whatsoever. 

So how was that working out for me? So you combine those two things together and you start realizing, “Wow, it was my ego and vanity. It was actually my hindrance all along not the people around me. It was completely a 100% me.” I called The Code Of Trust flawless because The Code Of Trust is completely flawless. Because when you honor those three things as I said open honest communication, having healthy relationships and being an available resource and prosperity of others – The Code Of Trust becomes flawless. 

The only thing that causes it to derail itself is when your ego and vanity getting away. So here’s a trapping of the code, you will have and I have had amazing successes because of living The Code Of Trust and what happens is all of a sudden you say, “Hey look, I got this stuff down now. I can wield the power of the code for my benefit.” Well what did you just do? Your ego and vanity got in the way and you start using it for self-gain and I guarantee you, the code will derail immediately. 

[0:46:25.6] MB: So what were you able to do to kind of coach your ego in check? 

[0:46:30.6] RD: So it’s a checklist. So one you understand what you do when you get emotionally stressed and whatever emotion it is, negative emotion you have – recognize it. As soon as – what’s happening is when you get stressed, fight or flight kicks in and you go into survival mode. When you do that’s when the mouth starts running without cognating on what’s coming out of it. We get defensive, we get insecure, whatever it is the mouth starts running and usually the statements coming out are very, very egocentric statements. 

Again which are not inspiring trust in anyone. So the way to overwrite that and not get into emotional high jacking, when you are hitting fight or flight is to immediate recognize when you’re getting emotionally high jacked, so understand what behaviors you do. For me, my assertiveness spikes when I get emotionally stressed and so as soon as I recognized it, I immediately go to The Code Of Trust. So what I do and I say to myself, then the core of the code is – happy healthy relationships, open house communication and available resource and prosperity of others. 

So I then ask myself as soon as I recognize the emotional high jacking is, “What I’m about to say and do and coming out of my mouth going to help or hinder those core principles of The Code Of Trust?” And if they are going to hinder it, I shut up and again, that’s my regulatory way of maintaining cognitive thought and maintaining the statements and everything I am doing completely about them. What happens is, like anything in life, you do something where you keep repeating behaviors. 

You build muscle memory for it. It just doesn’t happen anymore because I become so sensitive to negative emotions. I rapidly won’t do them and identify the cause of point of it and I eliminate it. Another reason why I do it and why ego is such an underminer of The Code, especially with leadership, is leaders are about everyone else and one of the things that leaders do is they are very empathetic. Great leaders are very empathetic and The Code Of Trust is very empathetic. 

All the ways we’ve talked about interacting with another human being, is all about the other person which creates empathy. But if you get emotionally attached to other people’s decisions, you start riding the rollercoaster with them and leaders don’t. Leaders maintain objectivity and that’s what this little technique, I just told you does. When I can recognize emotional high jacking, it allows me to pull back and go back to The Code. 

And when I pull back and go back to The Code, it allows me to maintain objectivity so I can see and be compassionate about the destination you are trying to go to but I am being objective about the questions I can ask you to help you discover your path. Because that’s another thing that’s really key in the code too, is I don’t get to give advice or guidance ever. I ask a lot of what I call discovery questions. Discovery questions are questions that naturally come to mind when you know someone’s destination; where they’re trying to go to and your objective about it. 

I just ask questions simple, like I ask myself. “How is the action you’re going to take help or hinder where you are trying to go?” So it helps yourself and it helps others to maintain that objectivity because you have an ability, because of this technique, to keep yourself from getting emotionally high jacked and suspending your ego. 

[0:49:37.6] MB: And just so listeners can get a sense one more time, would you share briefly the core principles of The Code Of Trust? 

[0:49:44.8] RD: Sure I articulate them in different ways. I am going to give the five principles of trust and then I am going to tell you if you have a second, the three things I honor. The five principles is very easy: are suspend your ego and we talked about that. The second is be non-judgmental and we talked about that. Three is honoring reason and honoring reason is basically how you keep from your ego getting involved in things and being objective, that’s what that is. 

Validation of others and we talked about that and finally five is being generous and that’s where you are making yourself an available resource of the prosperity of others, without keeping a score card. Those are the five principles of trust and how to make it about someone else. But the core of The Code that I live and honor are those three things: Happy healthy relationships. I do and say everything that’s congruent with those. 

Open honest communication, is the honesty factor, and the third is available resource for the prosperity of others. Those are the three things I honor above all and if something gets in the way of it, a material thing in some way or anything else, I will never ever ruin a relationship over a thing with anyone. I will always let go of the thing and honor the relationship first. 

[0:50:52.8] MB: What would be a piece of homework or starting point you would give to somebody listening that wants to concretely implement some of these ideas? 

[0:51:01.4] RD: Great question. There’s two things I think will keep people on the path they are if they’re doing things really well in their lives and they can reflect on why their relationships going well and then think about the times when you’ve had some challenging ones and this is very simple. The first thing I like to do is I love discovering the greatness in others. In other words don’t focus your time on trying to figure out people are doing wrong and commenting on it and gossiping about it. 

Just focus on their greatness. Every human being has greatness somewhere from their perspective, whether it’s work related or person related, find their greatness. Take time to discover it. And the second thing I would do is practice this with everyone and I guarantee you, relationships are going to start blooming with much greater trust. Find out what other people’s priorities are in their lives. Their challenges, their needs, wants, dreams and aspirations. 

If you take time and do this without judging them either, take time to figure out what someone else’s priorities are. I am telling you, who doesn’t want to talk to someone who isn’t actually interested in the things that they are important to them? You do those two things and I guarantee you, you’re going to start inspiring trust around you. 

[0:52:03.9] MB: And where can listeners find you and the books online? 

[0:52:07.3] RD: My first book, It’s Not All About Me is on Amazon and a few other places. The one coming out, The Code Of Trust will absolutely be everywhere but you can get links to them as well as my Twitter feed as well as LinkedIn. My website which is www.peopleformula.com and my Twitter handles @rdreeke. Things I post, I don’t self-grandiose on these things. If I see great research and great ideas by others, those things I do. 

I am not the guy who is going to wear you out with overwhelming amount of tweets or anything. Just a couple of them that are inspiring as life comes along but also I’d take any questions that anyone wants as well. That’s it. 

[0:52:50.2] MB: Well Robin thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all of these wisdom. You have a fascinating background and story and I think it’s amazing what lessons have come out of your vast experience. 

[0:53:01.6] RD: No, I can’t thank you enough. You have some really great deep questions and I thank for the time because yeah, it’s compiling an entire lifetime of learning into a couple of minutes is not all of that easy but you did a great job of getting it out of me. So I appreciate that and I appreciate you sharing with your listeners as well. 

[0:53:18.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize And Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another awesome bonus guide that’s a surprise by joining the email list. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday. This includes articles, TED Talk, videos things that are top of mind for us that we find really exciting in the world of evidence based growth. Lastly, you are going to get a chance to vote on and shape the show, impact our guests, change our intro music and much more. The new intro we recently rolled out was voted on by listeners who are on our email list. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Every single review, every single subscription, makes a huge impact on the iTunes algorithm and we would appreciate every single one that you give us. 

Now don’t forget, of you want to get all the incredible information on this episode, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com by hitting the show notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.