Why You Should Always Ask the Guy in the Blue Jacket for Help

February 02, 2016 by Austin Fabel in Weapons of Influence, Influence & Communication

Based on the bestselling book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini, this is the third week of our six-part "Weapons of Influence" miniseries within "The Science of Success". If you loved the book, this will be a great refresher on the core concepts. And if you haven't yet read it, some of this stuff is gonna blow your mind.

So what are the 6 weapons of influence?

Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your toolbelt - and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone, each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives and in social situations - but together - or combined - they can create huge impacts.

Today’s episode covers the third weapon of influence - Social Proof. In it, we'll cover:

How social proof can over-ride people’s will to liveWhy news coverage makes mass shootings more likelyWhy TV shows use canned laughterHow someone could be stabbed in front of 38 people without any helpHow you should ask for help in a dangerous situation

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today you’re going to learn why news coverage makes school shootings more likely by a factor of more than 30 times, which is pretty insane; how someone can get stabbed to death in front of 38 people and no one does a thing; and why you should always point at the dude in the blue jacket and tell him to help you. If you missed last week’s episode about weapons of influence, don’t worry. I explain the series now, but you should absolutely go back and listen to it. 
For those of you who were here last week this is going to serve as a quick refresher on the topic. This is the third episode in a six part series based on the bestselling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. If you love that book you’re going to find this to be a great refresher on the core concepts, and if you haven’t read it yet some of this stuff is going to blow your mind.
So, what are the six weapons of influence? “Reciprocation”, which we talked about two weeks ago. Highly recommend you go back and listen to that episode, as well as the second one, which is “consistency and commitment tendency”, which we talked about last week; “social proof”, which we’re going to talk about today; “liking”, “authority”, and “scarcity”. Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your tool belt, and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives, and in social situations, but together or combined, they can result in huge impacts.
In episode one we talked about the biological limits of the human mind. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet you should really go back and check it out after you listen to the Weapons of Influence series, or even just after you listen to this particular podcast, because it explains how these automatic click-whirr responses get triggered when cognitive biases, like social proof, come into play. It explains how some of these evolutionarily beneficial traits and behaviors can sometimes result in crazy, ridiculous outcomes. 
In episode one we talked about the example of the mother turkey taking care of a polecat, which is one of those examples, and in the last two episodes of Weapons of Influence we’ve gone through dozens of research studies and examples that show how tiny little tweaks in behavior can result in substantial differences in outcome solely based on activating, or triggering, cognitive biases. 
The weapons of Influence series- and this is again the third part; we’re going to talk about “social proof”- is really going to dig into the meat of some of the most powerful cognitive biases that can impact your mind, and we’re going to learn how these can be used to manipulate you if you don’t know how to defend against them, and how they can be part of your arsenal if you learn how to harness them. Here’s how Cialdini describes the impact of these weapons of influence: Quote, “Each principle has the ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic mindless compliance from people that is a willingness to say ‘yes’ without thinking first.” 
Today we’re going to talk about “social proof”. It’s so powerful it can literally override someone’s desire to live. Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t know what was going on? Maybe in a foreign country, or a new city, and you get caught up in something and think, “What am I supposed to do next? What am I supposed to do here?” Do you ever have that tendency to look around and see what other people are doing? They probably know what to do so you follow them; get in line; etcetera; right? That’s “social proof” and sometimes social proof can be totally conscious. If you’re in a foreign country and you go somewhere and you don’t know where to stand; you don’t know where to line up; you don’t know how to eat your food; you don’t know what the customs are; you look around and you figure out, “How’s everybody else doing it?” and you consciously imitate them. That’s a conscious example of social proof, but there are also a number of ways social proof can manifest itself totally subconsciously. Like I said at the top, “It is an incredibly powerful phenomenon.” Literally in many cases can override the desire to live. Here’s how Cialdini describes it in Influence: “This principle states that we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct. The principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior. We view a behavior as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”
This week is going to get a bit darker than some of the other weeks as we look at some of the crazy things social proof can motivate people to do. As I said before, “It’s literally so powerful that it some instances it can result in people committing suicide as a result of social proof.”
Here’s another quote from Influence: “Work like Phillips helps us appreciate the awesome influence of the behavior of similar others. Once the enormity of that force is recognized it becomes possible to understand one of the most spectacular acts of compliance of our time, the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana. If you remember- if you’ve ever heard of Jonestown- it’s the instance where a huge cult of people all drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and killed themselves, and that’s something the we will talk about in a minute, but something that is a striking and haunting example of the ridiculous power of social proof.
One of the most simple experiments, and it’s just something -it’s a little bit more uplifting than some of these other ones- but I call it “The Dog Terror Experiment”, and it was conducted in 1967 on nursery school age children. They were chosen because specifically they were terrified of dogs, and the experiment was really basic. Essentially they had these children who were really scared of dogs watch a little boy play with the dog, and have a lot of fun, and be happy for 20 minutes a day. These children- the result of just watching that video produced such as drastic change in these children that were terrified of dogs that after only four days 67% of them were willing to climb in a playpen and play with a dog, with being literally terrified of dogs four days earlier. That shows you how someone who’s very similar to you- and similarity is one of the key drivers of social proof- people who are really similar to you, just watching a video of them doing something can subconsciously change your perception. It can overcome phobias; that’s how powerful social proof is as a phenomenon.
The next instance of social proof, and this isn’t necessarily an experiment, but it demonstrates a concept which is called “pluralistic ignorance”. It’s something that’s pretty shocking, but you may have heard of it if you’ve dug in or done much reading about psychology, but it’s the infamous incident of Kitty Genovese. I’ll read you this quote from Influence: “For more than half an hour 38 respectable law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. Twice the sound of their voices, and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights, interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault. One witness called after the woman was dead. That was two weeks ago today, but assistant chief inspector Fredrick M. Wilson, in charge of the borough’s detective activities and a veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations, is still shocked. He can give a matter-of-fact resuscitation of many murders, but the Kew Gardens slaying baffles him. Not because it is a murder, but because quote unquote: ‘Good people failed to call the police,’ end quote. How does something like that happen? How does somebody get stabbed in front of 38 people and nobody does anything to stop it? Again, it’s a phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance”, and it’s a manifestation of social proof. What happened in the Kitty Genovese stabbing, and a lot of psychologist have talked about this; have researched this; have written about it; but essentially it’s the idea- and I’m sure everybody has thought this or felt this at some time: If you’ve ever driven by somebody with their car broken down on the side of the road and you think, “Oh, somebody’s going to help them,” right? That’s what pluralistic ignorance is. It’s the idea that every one of those 38 people saw this happening, heard this happening, and they thought to themselves, “Somebodies got to be calling the police. Somebodies got to be doing something. Somebody else is helping, so I don’t need to help,” or “I don’t want to help,” or “I don’t want to be another phone call into the police,” or whatever. The reality is because every single person felt that way, and thought the same thing, no one did anything and she was murdered in front of 38 bystanders, all of them which could have potentially saved her life. That’s pretty shocking and it shows you how social proof can have a huge impact.
Another similar experiment was conducted in Toronto in 1971. They had a single bystander- they created situations where there was a single bystander, and then they sort of created some kind of faux “emergency situation”; somebody collapsed on the ground, or something like that. In the instances where there was a single bystander, 90% of the time the single person helped the person who was having some kind of an emergency situation. In the instance where they then planted two passive bystanders to simply sit there and watch as the emergency situation- quote unquote- unfolded. In that instance only 16% of people helped the person who looked like they were having the emergency situation. So, if it happened to be one person walking down the street, and this person collapses on the ground and is writhing around, 90% of the time that person is going to help the person who’s on the ground struggling, but if you just plant two people standing there and watching, only 16% of people will then help the person who’s on the ground. And again, that’s “pluralistic ignorance” manifesting itself. It’s an example of how social proof can shape our behavior even if we’re not cognizant of it; even at a subconscious level.
The next example of social proof is something called the “Werther effect”, or as I like to call it, “Why I don’t like the evening news.” The Werther effect is this fascinating phenomenon where they discovered that every time a suicide is published in the news, there’s a massive uptick in suicides, and related suicides, and suicides that are very similar to that particular kind. I’ll quote here from Influence: “The Werther effect from examining the suicide statistics of the United States between 1947 and 1968 found that within two months of every front page suicide story, an average of 58 more people than usual killed themselves. In a sense, each suicide story killed 58 people who otherwise would have gone on living.” That’s pretty wild; it’s pretty fascinating. Again, they did a statistical analysis over a 20 year period where they controlled for seasonality; they controlled for age; they controlled for all these different factors; and they basically found that because of the idea that these people- again it’s about similar others; people who are like you- there’s this subconscious tendency that as soon as you see somebody who is like you doing something, it suddenly kind of enters the realm of “acceptable behavior”, or behavior that’s okay for you to do. Or maybe it’s like, “Oh, well somebody just like me did this. Maybe it’s something that I should be thinking about. Maybe it’s something that I should be doing.” Sometimes that can be good; sometimes that can be bad; sometimes it can be really, really bad. It blows my mind, but every time they publish a front page story about a suicide 58 more people, then otherwise would have, kill themselves. 
There’s actually a related inference from the Werther effect, and I’m sure you might be thinking about it now, but I’ll read this quote from Influence and then we’ll talk about it: “Back in the 1970s our attention was brought to the phenomenon in the form of airplane hijackings, which seemed to spread like airborne viruses. In the 1980s our focus shifted to product tamperings, such as the famous case of Tylenol capsules injected with cyanide, and Gerber baby food products laced with glass. According to FBI forensics experts, each nationally publicized incident of this sort spawned an average of 30 more incidents. More recently we’ve been jolted by the specter of contagious mass murders occurring first in the workplace setting, and then, incredibly, in the schools of our nation. I don’t think that could be timely, or more relevant, today. When you think about the fact that mass shootings have become something that everybody’s talking about now in the United States, and it’s amazing, but when you think about it: every time we publish, and blow up, and talk nonstop incessantly about these things, FBI research and statistical analysis has shown every time one of these events gets publicized it creates 30 copycat events. That’s mind-blowing to me, and it’s one of the reasons that- and maybe we’ll talk about this in a future podcast- but I really… I don’t read the local news; I don’t read the evening news because it’s filled with so much negativity, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole right now. 
So, what are the practical takeaways that we can learn about social proof, and this incredibly powerful phenomenon, and how can we take these lessons and apply them to our daily lives? Remember “social proof” is the conclusion that people often use other’s behavior in order to decide how they should handle situations. Especially when dealing with uncertainty. To quote Cialdini again: “The principle of social proof states that one important means that people use to decide what to believe, or how to act in a situation, is to look at what other people are believing or doing there. Powerful imitative effects have been found among both children and adults, and in such diverse activities as: purchase decisions, charity donations, and phobia remission. The principle of social proof can be used to stimulate a person’s compliance with a request by informing the person that many other individuals- the more the better- are, or have been, complying with it.” 
Cialdini also nails the two most important implications of social proof in this quote: “Social proof is most influential under two conditions. The first is “uncertainty”. When people are unsure, when the situation is ambiguous, they are more likely to attend to the actions of others and to accept those actions as correct. In ambiguous situations, for instance, the decisions of bystanders to help are much more influenced by the actions of other bystanders then when the situation is a clear-cut emergency. The second condition under which social proof is most influential is “similarity”. People are more inclined to follow the lead of similar others.” 
So, how do people make use of that? How do you see that manifesting itself in everyday life? Obviously there’s a lot of those negative consequences. One of the smaller ways that you see it, or one of the ways that people apply it in a sales context, is through the use of testimonials, or through the use of: “50 million households can’t be wrong that they’re buying XYZ,” right? Or, when you see your friends doing something and you want to do it as well, right? Trends- in a lot of ways- are kind of manifestations of social proof, but another way that you can kind of combat some of the implications of pluralistic ignorance, which is the Kitty Genovese phenomenon that we talked about before, is by using specific call-outs. Here is what Cialdini says, “Point directly at that person and no one else: ‘you sir in the blue jacket, I need help. Call an ambulance.’ With that one utterance you would dispel all the uncertainties that might prevent or delay help. With that one statement you will have put the man in the blue jacket in the role of the rescuer.” So, if you’re ever in a situation, and it’s an emergency and you’re being robbed, or being- you’re choking, or have some kind of medical situation and there’s a group of people, single out an individual person. Point to them and ask them specifically to help you. That eliminates the pluralistic ignorance; that eliminates social proof from kind of combating people from potentially being able to help you.
Another way that you can potentially use social proof to your advantage is by figuring how to arrange group conditions. If you’re in a management context- or something like that- to leverage social proof for your benefit. You want to be able to kind of demonstrate: “Hey, here’s how XYZ is doing it. Here’s how our competitors are doing it. Here’s how similar others are doing it,” right? Because similarity is one of the most powerful drivers of social proof, but there’s a lot of applications of social proof in day-to-day life and sales testimonials; all kinds of different things. So, it’s something that has these huge social implications. If you think about school shootings; you think about mass suicide- all this type of stuff- but it also has a lot of implications in our day-to-day life, and it’s something that- it’s really, really hard bias to combat. One of the ways you can defend yourself against it is kind of cultivating that ability to stop and say, “Hey, why am I doing this?” If you catch yourself saying, “Well, everybody’s doing this so I should think about doing it too,” that’s a red flag, and that’s something that you should really think about: “Hey, hold on. Pump the brakes. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing that. Maybe I should think this through,” and more logically really come to a conclusion then just be influenced by similar others, and kind of fall prey to social proof.

The Power and Danger of a Seemingly Innocuous Commitment

January 26, 2016 by Austin Fabel in Weapons of Influence, Influence & Communication

Based on the bestselling book Influence by Robert Cialdini, this is the second part of a new six-part miniseries within "The Science of Success" called "Weapons of Influence". If you loved Cialdini's book, this will be a great refresher on the core concepts in it. And if you haven't yet read it, some of this stuff is gonna blow your mind.

So what are the 6 weapons of influence?

Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your belt - and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone, each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives and in social situations, but together they can have huge impacts.

Today’s episode covers the second weapon of influence: Consistency & Commitment Bias. We'll cover:

The powerful application of the “foot in the door” techniqueWhy hard won commitments are the most powerfulThe dangers of seemingly innocuous commitmentsHow commitment builds its own internal justificationsHow you can defend yourself against falling prey to commitment bias

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today, you’re going to learn why you should always ask that stranger to guard your bag at the airport; how a simple phone call increased donations to the American Cancer Society by 700%; how people get slowly roped into huge commitments without realizing in, and much more.

If you missed last week’s episode about weapons of influence don’t worry, I’ll explain the series now, but you should go back and listen to it. For those of you who tuned in last week, here’s a quick refresher on the Weapons of Influence series. This is the second of a six part series based on the bestselling book, Influence, by Robert Cialdini. If you loved that book this will be a great refresher on the core concepts, and if you haven’t read it yet some of this stuff is going to blow your mind.

So, what are the six weapons of influence? Reciprocation, which we talked about last week, and I highly recommend after you listen to this, go back and listen to Reciprocation so that you can get all six of the weapons; consistency and commitment, that’s what we’re going to talk about this week; social proof, that’s next week’s episode; liking, authority, and scarcity. Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your tool belt, and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives, and in social situations, but together or combined, they can result in huge impacts.

If you remember in episode one we talked about the biological limits of the human mind. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet you should absolutely go back and check it out. In that episode we talked about the automatic click whirr response that gets triggered when a cognitive bias comes into play; how evolutionarily beneficial traits and behaviors can sometimes manifest themselves in ridiculous outcomes, like the example of a mother turkey taking care of a polecat, which happens to be its natural predator and enemy. These weapons of influence are exactly those kinds of cognitive biases. We’re really going to get into the meat of some of the most powerful cognitive biases that cause human decision making to go haywire. These weapons of influence can be used to manipulate you if you don’t know how to defend against them, and can be part of your arsenal if you learn how to harness them. As Cialdini described weapons of influence in his book, Influence: Each principle has the ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic mindless compliance from people. That is a willingness to say ‘yes’ without thinking first. 

The topic today is weapon of influence number two, consistency and commitment. I will start with an overview of what consistency and commitment bias is, then we will dive into a number of ridiculous research studies that demonstrate this behavior in the real world, and lastly we will look at some of the practical implications of how you can use this in real life.

So, what is consistency and commitment tendency? Here’s how Cialdini puts it: “It is quite simply our desire to be, and to appear, consistent with what we have already done. Once we make a choice, or take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.” He continues later in the book, “To understand why consistency is so powerful a motive we should recognize that in most circumstances consistency is valued and adaptive.” Remember this all comes back to the biological limits of the mind. The traits and characteristics that were super valuable from an evolutionary standpoint- that’s why he says it’s adaptive- can often go haywire when they collide with modern day society. Okay, so what? People like to be consistent. Why does that matter? Well, that simple bias toward staying consistent with what you have said, and more importantly with what you have done, because research shows that actions commit us more strongly at a subconscious level. 

Here’s another quote from Cialdini about the importance of the commitment and consistency bias: “Psychologists have long recognized a desire in most people to be and look consistent within their words, beliefs, attitudes, and deeds. This tendency for consistency is fed from three sources. First, good personal consistency is highly valued by society. Second, aside from its effect on public image, generally consistent conduct provides a beneficial approach to daily life. Third, a consistent orientation affords a valuable shortcut through the complexity of modern existence. By being consistent with earlier decisions one reduces the need to process all the relevant information in future similar situations. Instead, one merely needs to recall the earlier decision, and to respond consistently with it. Within the realm of compliance, securing an initial commitment is the key. After making a commitment that is taking a stand or position, people are more willing to agree to requests that are in keeping with their prior commitment.”

Now let’s dig into the research. The first experiment that we’re going to talk about today is what I call ‘the blanket experiment’. This experiment was done in 1975. The control scenario: They had somebody sitting outside with their stuff, and they simply got up, walked away, and then they had a sort of staged theft where someone would come in, steal their bag, and run off. They did this 20 separate times and on four occasions somebody stepped in and did something to stop, or prevent, or say something: “Hey, what are you doing? Why are you taking that person’s bag?” whatever. Then they did the experiment a little bit differently with a slight twist, and the results were dramatically different. In this instance they have the same person come by, set down their bag, and then walk off, with the exception that they then asked somebody nearby to, “Watch my things”. That was the only difference. Three words, “Watch my things.” In that instance, 19 out of the 20 instances, that person who was asked became as they say in Influence, “virtual vigilantes running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, often restraining the thief physically, or snatching the object back.” That’s pretty amazing when you think about that. Simply by committing a total stranger to a simple sentence with a three word question, or a three word statement: “Watch my things,” they went from 4 out of 20 people stopping them from taking the bag, to 19 out of 20 people stopping them, and becoming, as they say, “virtual vigilantes”. That’s what happens when you get people to commit to something very simple. They stay locked in and become extremely consistent. They want to stay consistent with their behavior. So, that little toehold, that little question, causes them to suddenly be chasing after a thief, which is something that could be incredibly dangerous, right? 

This next experiment is also pretty fascinating, and the results are astounding. This took place in 1980 in Bloomington, Indiana. A social psychologist named Steven J. Sherman conducted this experiment. He had the control group, where he simply called people and asked them: “Hey, would you be willing to spend three hours volunteering for the American Cancer Society going door-to-door collecting money?” He then had the experiment group where they called people and asked them ahead of time, “As a hypothetical, would you be willing to spend three hours volunteering for the American Cancer Society?” Not wanting to be rude or uncharitable, people said, you know in thinking about, “Yeah, of cour- yeah, I’d be willing to do that. Yeah, hypothetically.” Then they had that group… they had them call again three days later and ask those people, “Hey, can you volunteer at such and such date, and can you actually go door-to-door and canvas for three hours for the American Cancer Society?” They had a 700% increase in volunteers in their success rate when they did that. That’s an astounding result if you think about it. A 700% increase simply by calling three days ahead of time and saying, “Hypothetically, would you be willing to volunteer?” and people said, “ Yeah, of course. I love volunteering. I love helping people fighting cancer. Yeah, I’d, in theory, I’d volunteer,” right? That little tiny subconscious commitment days later resulted in a 700% increase in volunteers. It’s fascinating. 

Another experiment, which I call the ‘yard sign experiment’, was conducted in 1966 by Jonathan Friedman and Scott Frasier, and I’ll quote here from Cialdini’s Influence: “A researcher posing as a volunteer worker had gone door-to-door in a residential California neighborhood making a preposterous request of homeowners. The homeowners were asked to allow a public service billboard to be installed on their front lawns. To get an idea of the way this sign would look they were shown a photograph depicting an attractive house, the view of which was almost completely obscured by a very large, poorly lettered sign reading, ‘Drive Carefully’.” In that instance only 17% of the people said yes to this request. This is where it gets really interesting. They conducted another study. They went door-to-door, same thing, asked people to display a ridiculously oversized drive carefully sign, but in this instance 76% of the people said yes. From 17% to 76%. What was the change? Two weeks before that a door-to-door canvasser had come by and asked those homeowners to display a small three inch sign on their driveway that said, “Be a safe driver.” That tiny little commitment two weeks beforehand resulted in 76% of the people being willing to display a gaudy, ridiculous, oversized billboard on their front yard that said, “Drive Carefully,” whereas only 17% of the people who were asked to do that without a prior commitment did it. That shows you how powerful it can be when you commit something, when you commit to something, even the smallest fashion. You kind of escalate into it, and subconsciously want to be consistent with what you’ve done, and so you get roped into it, or sucked into it, and all of a sudden you don’t even realize that it’s a completely subconscious process, and suddenly you’ve got a giant billboard on your front yard.

Interestingly, Friedman and Frasier conducted a similar experiment where they had someone go door-to-door and get people to sign a petition about state beautification. They then came by a couple weeks later and asked again, “Would you like to put a giant ‘Drive Carefully’ sign in your yard?” and of those people, nearly half of them said yes. So, it wasn’t quite the 76% jump. It was from 17% to 50%, or so, which is still a pretty astounding leap. That’s still almost a tripling of the compliance rate. What caused people to do that? They speculated that because people somehow now viewed themselves as civic-minded citizens, because they had signed a simple petition weeks earlier about state beautification, something totally unrelated, they now were willing to put that billboard in their driveway. As Cialdini says in Influence, “What the Friedman and Frasier findings tell us, then, is to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests because that agreement can influence our self-concepts,” and that’s why this is such an insidious tendency. In this instance, whether it’s simply agreeing to a hypothetical, “Hey, yeah I’d be willing to volunteer my time, in theory,” or signing a petition, “Yeah, I’m in favor of state beautification,” or putting a tiny little sign in your yard, again and again these simple, innocuous commitments can result in an escalation that you get sort of drawn in, and sucked in, and before you know it you’re doing all kinds of stuff because you’ve built up this image in your mind that you’re trying subconsciously to stay consistent to, and that’s why it’s such a powerful cognitive bias.

So, those are a couple examples of the research and how different research studies have demonstrated this tendency, and it’s been demonstrated many more times than that, but those are just three examples that I thought you would find really interesting. Now, I want to talk about: What are some of the practical implications of the consistency and the commitment bias? Here’s a great quote from Cialdini that sums it up very nicely: “It appears that the commitments most affective in changing a person’s self-image and future behavior are those that are active, public, and effortful.” So, let’s dig into a couple of these practical implications. The first is the concept of the foot in the door technique, and that’s what they demonstrated with the yard sign experiments, is that a lot of times if you can land, or if you can get, just this innocuous initial concession you can kind of build on that, and suddenly get people to agree to things that internally to them seem very consistent with their self-image, but started with this tiny little commitment. An example of that in negotiations is to give somebody a reputation to live up to. Here’s a quote from Influence talking about Anwar Sadat: “One of the best at it was former President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. Before international negotiations began, Sadat would assure his bargaining opponents that they, and the citizens of their country, were widely known for their cooperativeness and fairness. With this kind of flattery he would not only create positive feelings, but he also connected his opponent’s identities to a course of action that served his goals.” Remember public commitments are more powerful. That’s why if you put something in your yard, or you state publicly a position, it’s really hard to back down from that. It’s really hard to change course from that, and the research shows again and again that the more publicly committed to something you are, the more it’s kind of engrained in your identity. Hard one conclusions are the most valued, as Cialdini says, and he actually uses the example in the book Influence of fraternity hazing, right? The more you suffer and toil away for a conclusion, or a piece of your identity, the more you want to stay committed to that. The more it means something to you, and the harder it is to see that blind spot in your mind, to see that bias that’s shading your vision, or your actions.

Another really important take away is that the most effective commitments are focused internally, not externally. There’s an experiment that is fascinating, and a little, in some ways, shows how twisted psychologists can be, but I call it the ‘toy robot experiment’, and in this experiment they had 22 kids come and visit this psychologist, and they would leave the kids alone in a room with a number of different toys. In the first example the psychologist said to the child, before they left them alone and then went around to watch them through a one way mirror, “It is wrong to play with the robot. If you play with the robot, I’ll be very angry and will have to do something about it.” So, they had five or six toys in there. All of them were pretty lame, except the robot was like, totally awesome, so the kids had this natural incentive to go play with the robot, or it was like, a rubber duck and a bunch of other junk toys, but in that survey, only 1 out of the 22 children played with the robot. 

They did another study where the psychologist simply said, “It is wrong to play with the robot.” That’s it, they didn’t have any threat. They didn’t say they were going to be angry, whatever. In that research, in that study, again, 1 out of the 22 children played with the robot initially, but this is where it gets really fascinating. In the scenario where they threatened the students, where they had this external punishment: “I’m going to be angry and do something about it,” six weeks later they had the kids come back, put them in the same room, didn’t say anything to them, and let them play with whatever. The kids who had been threatened, 77% of those children, went back and played with the robot when they were in the room six weeks later. That’s because the external threat didn’t matter as much then. They weren’t as committed to it. They didn’t feel the need to stay as consistent with it. The kids who had been told only, “It is wrong to play with the robot,” no threat, more of an internal motivation, something they internalized, only 33% of those children played with the robot. So, less than half of the kids played with the robot in that scenario, and that demonstrates how much more powerful a commitment is if it’s internalized. Whether somebody’s trying to get you to internalize a commitment, or you can get someone to internalize a commitment, it shows you that to be super powerful, if these commitments are internalized, they’re- in this instance- more than doubly effective.

Another practical application is what’s called the ‘low ball technique’. That’s what Cialdini refers to it as, and I’ll read this quote from Influence, “When calling one sample of students, we immediately informed them of the 7 AM starting time. Only 27% were willing to participate.” He’s talking here about an activity that they wanted the students to participate in. The quote continues: “However, when calling a second sample of students we threw a low ball. We first asked if they wanted to participate in a study of thinking process, and after they responded, 56% of them positively; we mentioned the 7 AM start time and gave them a chance to change their minds. None of them did. What’s more, in keeping with their commitment to participate, 95% of the low balled students came to the psychology building at 7 AM, as promised.” So, that’s kind of a strategy where you get somebody to commit to something and then you layer in the bad news. I’m sure we’ve all experienced that at one time or another in our life, where someone had done that to us. That’s an example of the commitment and consistency tendency, right? If people knew off the bat that it was a 7 AM start time, only 24% of them were willing to participate, but as soon as they committed, and 56% of them committed on the front end; then after they had that commitment, and were psychologically anchored into that outcome, then when the bad news starts rolling in, they were okay and they accepted it, and they stuck with it. So, just flipping the wording, flipping that situation around, which seems so trivial, and something that you would never think about, can more than double the impact of what you’re saying or what you’re doing.

One of the other really fascinating takeaways that Cialdini talks about, and why commitment is such an insidious weapon of influence, is because commitment, in many cases, can be self-perpetuating. What he says is that commitments build their own legs. He likens it to a table analogy, and basically the table starts out with sort of a single leg, which is the commitment that you agree to, or you get someone to agree to, but then it starts building all of these other justifications around it, and people actually end up building their own subconscious justifications for that commitment that have nothing to do with what they initially committed to. The yard sign example is a perfect example that demonstrates that. These people started to think of themselves as an advocate for safe driving, or a civic minded citizen, or whatever, and all of these other justifications start being built, where the original justification doesn’t even matter and can be taken away, and people will still behave that way. That finding is found again and again in the research that you can actually literally take away the justification that people had for changing their behavior, or committing to a certain course of action, and in many cases their commitment stays just as strong, or sometimes even gets stronger once they’ve been committed down that path.

So, how do you defend against the commitment and consistency tendency? Here’s how Cialdini handles it: “I listen to my stomach these days, and I have discovered a way to handle people who try to use the consistency principle on me. I just tell them exactly what they are doing. This tactic has become the perfect counterattack for me. When my stomach tells me I would be a sucker to comply with the request, merely because doing so would be consistent with some prior commitment I was tricked into, I relay that message to the requester. I don’t try to deny the importance of consistency, I just point out the absurdity of foolish consistency. Whether in response the requester shrinks away guilty, or retreats in bewilderment, I am content. I have won and an exploiter has lost.” That shows us how important consistency and commitment tendency is, and how it can have huge results in your life, and how these little, simple commitments, something you would of never thought of or never even thought about, can actually change your self-image and your self-perception, and become these little seeds that get planted in your mind, and almost become self-perpetuating. Especially, think about the toy robot example, if it changes your identity, and changes your self-image or self-perception, it can shift the future direction of your behavior even if you completely forget about the original source of the commitment.

That’s it for today’s episode.

How To Triple the Rate of Your Success With One Simple Question

January 19, 2016 by Austin Fabel in Weapons of Influence, Influence & Communication

This week we are kicking off a new miniseries within "The Science of Success" called "Weapons of Influence". This is the first in a six-part series based on the best selling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. If you loved that book, this will be a great refresher on the core concepts. And if you haven't yet read it, some of this stuff is gonna blow your mind.

So what are the 6 weapons of influence?

Today’s episode covers the first weapon of influence - Reciprocation Bias - and you'll learn:

How reciprocation creates unequal exchanges, and in one experiment by a factor of more than 500%
Why reciprocation is powerful regardless of how much someone likes you
How giving away flowers help build a powerful religious movement
What made the “rejection and retreat” technique triple the success of an experiment
How to defend against reciprocation bias from negatively impacting your decisions

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today, you’re going to learn how adding one simple question can triple the rate of your success, how a church used flowers to exponentially multiply their fundraising campaign, how one free drink generated over a 500% return, and much more.

I’m super excited this week because we are kicking off a new miniseries within Science of Success called Weapons of Influence. This is the first in a six part series based on the bestselling book, Influence, by Robert Cialdini. If you loved that book, this will be a great refresher on the core concepts, and if you haven’t read it yet, some of this stuff is going to blow your mind.

So, what are the six weapons of influence? The first is reciprocation; the second, consistency and commitment; the third, social proof; the fourth, liking; the fifth, authority; and the sixth is scarcity. Each one of these weapons can be a powerful tool in your tool belt, and something to watch out for when others try to wield them against you. Alone, each of them can create crazy outcomes in our lives and in social situations, but together, or combined, they can result in huge impacts. Something billionaire business partner of Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, once described as ‘Lollapalooza Effects’. 

Remember in episode one when we talked about the biological limits of the human mind? If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you should absolutely go back and check it out after you listen to this one. In that episode we talked about the automatic click whirr response that gets triggered when a cognitive bias comes into play. We talked about how evolutionarily beneficial traits and behaviors can sometimes manifest themselves in ridiculous outcomes, like the example of the mother turkey taking care of a polecat, which happens to be its natural predator and enemy. These weapons of influence are exactly those kinds of cognitive biases. Now, we are really going to get into the meat of some of the most powerful cognitive biases that cause human decision making to go haywire. These weapons of influence can be used to manipulate you if you don’t know how to defend against them, and can be part of your arsenal if you learn how to harness them.

Here’s how Cialdini describes the impact of these weapons in his groundbreaking book, Influence: “Each principle has the ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic mindless compliance from people. That is a willingness to say yes without thinking first.” Don’t forget, we like to keep our discussions grounded in the science. Each of these weapons of influence are deeply rooted and verified, again and again, by experimental psychology research. In this series I will share a number of crazy, hilarious, and sometimes sad examples of that with you.

The topic today is weapon of influence number one, reciprocation. I will start with an overview of what reciprocation bias is, then we will dive into a number of wacky research studies that demonstrate this behavior in the real world, and lastly we will look at some of the practical implications of how you can use this in real life. So, what is reciprocation bias? Part of the reason these biases are so powerful is because they have been built into our minds by thousands of years of evolution, and in the vast majority of cases, were incredibly evolutionary beneficial. It’s something that has been engrained in humans since birth, and in our culture for millennia. Here’s how Cialdini describes it: “According to sociologists and anthropologists, one of the most widespread and basic norms of human culture is embodied in the rule of reciprocation. The rule requires that one person try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided. By obligating the recipient of an act to repayment in the future, the rule for reciprocation allows one individual to give something to another with confidence that it is not being lost. The sense of future obligation within the rules makes possible the development of various kinds of continuing relationships, transactions, and exchanges that are beneficial to society. Consequently, all members of the society are trained from childhood to abide by the rule or suffer serious social disapproval.” 

Here’s how Cialdini defines the reciprocation rule, and note one of the terms he uses is a bit clunky. He often cites what he calls “compliance professionals”, which is essentially someone who is trying to get you to do something. Think of a salesperson, a boss, a negotiator, someone who’s trying to get you to comply with their requests. That’s why he says, “compliance practitioners”. Cialdini uses this throughout the book as a blanket term to describe those who wield the weapons of influence. Here’s another quote from Cialdini where he lays out the definition, and some of the ground rules, of reciprocation: “One favorite and profitable tactic of certain compliance professionals is to give something before asking for a return favor. The exploitability of this tactic is due to three characteristics of the rule for reciprocation. First, the rule is extremely powerful, often overwhelming the influence of other factors that normally determine compliance with a request. Second, the rule applies even to uninvited first favors, thereby reducing our ability to decide whom we wish to owe, and putting the choice in the hands of others. Finally, the rule can spur unequal exchanges. To be rid of the uncomfortable feeling of indebtedness an individual will often agree to a request for a substantially larger favor than the one he or she received.” In a nutshell, reciprocation bias is the tendency to reciprocate when someone does something for us, which makes perfect sense when you think about it, but the power of the bias really manifests itself when you think about the fact that: one, the effect still holds even when the gift is unwanted, and even when you don’t like the person giving you the gift; and two, the reciprocation often takes the form of a substantially larger gift than the original gift.

Now we’re going to dive into some of the research and see how exactly reciprocation bias impacts people in the real world, and what psychological studies have shown some of these effects can be. One of the first experiments is something that I call a ‘Coke bottle experiment’. In this experiment there was a subject in a room, and there was also an experimenter with them- his name was Joe- and they had some sort of task that they were supposed to perform. It was kind of a red herring. There was a two minute break in the middle of the study, and Joe would leave the room, and in half of the instances he would come back with nothing and they would just continue on with the experiment. In the other half he would buy two cokes and bring one back, give one to the other person and say, “Hey, there was a drink machine and I thought I would grab you a drink too,” and just gives it to them. At the end of the study, they would have Joe then ask that person to buy some raffle tickets from him. This was in the ‘70s, so he would sell them for 25 cents, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but Joe would basically say, “Hey, by the way, I’m selling these raffle tickets. I was wondering if you would be willing to buy some.” So, one of the most interesting things was that in the scenario where people- where Joe didn’t bring back anything, where he just went along with the experiment, and then at the end asked them to buy raffle tickets, there was actually a liking scale. They, after the experiment, had people rate how much they liked Joe, and basically they would give him- they would buy a certain number of raffle tickets from him based on how much they liked him on a scale. So, they would obviously have already purchased the tickets, and then they would come and say, “Okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like Joe?” and they would go through a number of questions about him, and his behavior, and everything else. There was a pretty strong correlation between how much they liked him, and how many raffle tickets they would buy, but the most fascinating thing is that in the instances where Joe brought back the Coke and gave it to the subject of the experiment, the relationship between liking and compliance was completely wiped out. For those who owed Joe a favor because he had given them a drink, even though they never asked or it, it made no difference whether they liked him or not. They felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did. Again, this experiment took place a long time ago, so at the time a Coke cost ten cents. He was selling these raffle tickets for 25 cents. So, the average return that he had for the people that he gave the Coke to was more than 500%. That’s a pretty fascinating study, but the most interesting thing about it is the fact that even though it’s a miniscule, small gift, in the scenario where he didn’t give them anything, how many tickets they purchased was completely dependent on how much they liked Joe, but as soon as he gives them a ten cent present, the relationship is completely obliterated and all they care about is repaying that favor that he had given to them.

Another fascinating example, and again, this one takes place many years ago in the ‘70s, and part of that reason is that Influence was written originally in the ‘70s, and it’s been updated a number of times, but another example from the ‘70s is of the Hari Krishnas. This was a religious sect, that now it’s not really very popular, but back then they experienced this huge growth, and this huge boom, and it was funny because they had been struggling for a really, really long time financially. They couldn’t figure out how to raise money, and one day they happened on this idea of giving people a flower before they asked for a donation. So, they would go to high traffic areas, they would go to airports, they would go to bus stations, all that kind of stuff, and they would basically just come up and hand people a flower, or they would hand them a small book of their scriptures, or just some small gift, and they would not accept ‘no’ as an answer. They would say, “No, this is our gift for you. Please take it. Please accept it.” As soon as they implemented that strategy they went from struggling, stagnating, being kind of a washed up religious order, to massive growth. They exploded. This fundraising strategy completely revolutionized the church. 

Here’s how Cialdini describes the Hari Krishna strategy: “The unsuspecting passerby who suddenly found flowers pressed into their hands, or pinned to their jackets, were under no circumstances allowed to give them back, even if they asserted that they did not want them. “No, it is our gift to you,” said the solicitor, refusing to take it back. Only after the Krishna member had thus brought the force of the reciprocation rule to bare on the situation was the target asked to provide a contribution to the society. This benefactor before beggar strategy was wildly successful for the Hari Krishna society. Producing large scale economic gains and funding, the ownership of temples, businesses, houses, and property in the 321 centers in the United States and abroad. 

So, the Hari Krishna example is a great example that shows us how even if you don’t want the gift, somebody who you don’t like, don’t care about, can give you something and suddenly this bias gets triggered and you feel obligated to give them something back. There’s a similar example in pharmaceutical research, and this example showcases also the superpower of incentives, which we will talk about in a later podcast. That’s something… we talked about Charlie Munger before. Charlie Munger, again the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffet, once said that he has been in the top of his age cohort his entire life in understanding the power of incentives, and his entire life he has underestimated them. Anyway, this example showcases the superpower of incentives. A study in 1998 found that 100% of the scientists who had published results supporting a certain calcium drug had received prior support from the pharmaceutical company that produced them, but only 37% of those publishing critical results had received the same kind of support. So again, it’s something that incentives are incredibly powerful, and it’s something that we often think, “Yeah, of course I know incentives are powerful,” but the reality is even when you account for the fact that you know how powerful they are, they can be even more powerful than that. Even something as simple as funding certain types of research, right, and you can see this in global warming, or tobacco, or all kinds of different things. Often the people who fund a lot of this research, the scientists, even if it’s at- not at a conscious level, but at a subconscious level, often come to conclusions that support whoever happens to be paying their bills. Paying their paychecks. So, there’s an Upton Sinclair quote that it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

Another really simple example, and this is pretty crazy: We all know what a pain in the ass it is to have to fill out surveys from an insurance company, or whatever other ridiculous junk mail. Most people just throw it out, right? Like, I mean I know personally that I throw gobs of mail out every day. I just get a ton of junk in the mail. Well, in this experiment, and this took place in 1992, an insurance company actually found that when they mailed people a $50- when they offered a $50 reward for completing a survey, they didn’t have a lot of traction, but when they switched to just sending people a $5 gift check along with the surveys, they doubled the effectiveness of their strategy. So literally, instead of getting paid $50 for filling the strategy out, when people received upfront a $5 gift, the reciprocation bias kicked in and they felt some sort of obligation, you know, “Oh my gosh, they sent me five bucks. Yeah, I’ll take 30 seconds and fill out this survey,” but it was literally one tenth of what they could have been offered and it was twice as effective. It just shows you how powerful reciprocation can be.

Another example is if you ever get those things in the mail where they send you shipping labels that have your own name and address on them. I know, for example, AAA sends me those all the time, and having read Influence I ruthlessly exploit them and just take the stickers for myself, but one charity found that when they would normally send out a mailer requesting donations, they would have about an 18% success rate, but just by including those individual shipping labels they doubled their success rate to 35%. Again, it might not seem like that much, but think about the fact literally just including a few shipping labels doubles their success rate with that strategy. It’s just like the… you know, I mean reciprocation is incredibly powerful bias.

Now we’re going to get into what I think probably is one of my favorite examples of how powerful the reciprocation bias can be, and that’s what’s called the “zoo experiment”. The zoo example is one of my favorites because it’s so nakedly obvious that there’s cognitive bias at work here. This piece of research highlights something that’s called the rejection and retreat technique. Cialdini and a group of researchers conducted an experiment where they approached college students and asked them to volunteer, and take juvenile delinquents on a day trip to the zoo. Okay, in that study, that was kind of the control case, 83% of the students said ‘no’. I mean, I don’t really blame them. I probably would have said no myself. Next they changed things up just a little bit. They did the same experiment on a different set of college students, but they tweaked it just a tiny bit. They added one question before they asked the students to take the juvenile delinquents on a day trip to the zoo. Before they asked that, they asked the students, “Would you like to volunteer two hours a week, for a minimum two year commitment, to be a counselor for juvenile delinquents?” 100% of the people said ‘no’, but they then followed up with the same request, “Would you like to take juvenile delinquents just on a single day trip to the zoo?” In that instance 50% of the people said ‘yes’. That’s a tripling of the compliance rate simply by including a question that every single person said ‘no’ to at the beginning. That’s pretty wild when you think about it. They went form a 17% yes rate to a 50% yes rate without changing the question. All they did was add another question at the beginning that triggered the cognitive bias because they conceded and backed away from their position, and then the other person felt, “Okay, well they made a concession to me. I’ll make a concession to them,” and that’s why it’s called the rejection and retreat technique. Now, the rejection and retreat technique is something that everyone on some level or another is probably familiar with. That’s just kind of a piece of research that really validates that, and everybody’s heard the- when you’re dealing with negotiations, or whatever, that you should ask for more than you want, and blah, blah, blah, but it’s not just hearsay, it’s not just folk wisdom, it’s actually validated research.  

One of the even more interesting findings is that they did a very similar study, but what they really wanted to understand is: Is this so nakedly obvious that it works on the front end, but then as soon as people realize that they’d been taken advantage of, they lose the buy in and they don’t care anymore, and they’re not going to continue to kind of comply with your requests?  So, they did an experiment with blood donations. Another fascinating example of the rejection and the retreat technique is how it can create longer lasting effects, and is nearly immune to the idea that people would refuse in the future because they feel like they were taken advantage of. So, in this experiment, in the blood donation experiment, they had college students who were asked to give a pint of blood as part of the annual campus blood drive. Then they had another group of students who were asked first to give a pint of blood every six weeks for a minimum of three years, and then they backed down to: “Okay, well would you just give a pint of blood once?” So, it’s the same kind of thing with the juvenile delinquents, the same strategy. You have one control group and you have one group where you ask a ridiculous request and then follow it up with: “Okay, will you just do something a little simpler?” The results were replicated. Of course the people were more likely to comply when they first offered them the really tough question, but the fascinating thing was the students who actually went to the blood center were then asked if they would be willing to give their phone numbers so that they could be called upon again to donate blood later in the future. So, the finding was, or what they were testing for was: Okay, the people who we essentially tricked, or used these weapons of influence on, are they going to be bitter, and are they going to say, “Well, they tricked me into going here?” or whatever, and thus be less likely to give their phone number to donate in the future? What actually happened is the students who had the rejection-then-retreat used on them, 84% of the students gave their phone number and said they would be willing to donate blood again. The students who were just in the control group, who were only asked, “Hey, will you donate a pint of blood?” only 43% of those students said that they would be willing to give their phone number and be a donor in the future. So, even for future favors, even when somebody might know, or feel like, they’ve been taken advantage of, the rejection-then-retreat technique proved superior, and the reciprocation bias is so strong that it can carry through something like that weeks later.

So, now that we’ve looked at some of the research, what are the practical implications of this? How can we use this in our everyday lives? Again, as a refresher, the reciprocation bias is the tendency to reciprocate when someone does something for us. Sounds really simple, but what are the practical implications of that? What are the takeaways from the research, and how can we apply this stuff to our everyday life? The first major lesson is that reciprocation supersedes our wants and our likes. The effect still holds even when the gift is unwanted, and even if you don’t like the person giving you the gift. The Hari Krishna example, and the Coke bottle experiment, and the blood donation research all point to that conclusion, and all demonstrate that conclusion. That’s why it’s so powerful. The person doesn’t even have to like you. The person doesn’t even have to want the gift. If you give it to them, it will trigger this innate subconscious desire, need, obligation to reciprocate. Similarly, reciprocation can trigger unequal exchanges. A small initial favor can trigger the psychological response to do a much larger favor. The Coke bottle experiment’s a good example, where Joe had more than a 500% return on his gift, but there are countless examples of this in real life. 

The third lesson is that this applies to concessions in a negotiation. Think about the zoo experiment and the rejection and retreat technique. If you make a bigger ask, and then you give the concession to the other person, they feel this deep subconscious obligation to make a concession also. There is a little bit of a caveat there because subsequent research has shown that if your initial ask is too big, or too ridiculous, over a certain threshold, people will see right through it and they’ll basically… they won’t get caught in the reciprocation trap, but as the blood donation research showed, as the zoo trip showed, it can be a pretty hefty request. As long as you concede and back down, you can double or triple your compliance rate simply by adding another request in at the beginning that’s a little bit more burdensome, a little bit more onerous.
So, how do you defend yourself against reciprocation tendency? How do you stop somebody from exploiting you by using this strategy? Cialdini says that knowledge and awareness are the best offenses, and that you should steal yourself against the feeling of having to reciprocate a gift. One of the best ways he suggests combatting the reciprocation bias is by reframing in your mind, from a gift to a trick. Here’s what he says in Influence, “If gifts were used not as genuine gifts, but to make a profit from you, then you might want to use them to make a profit of your own. Simply take whatever the compliance practitioner is willing to provide, thank them politely, and show them out the door. After all, the reciprocity rule asserts that if justice is to be done, exploitation attempts should be exploited.” I talked about that briefly earlier when I gave the example of including the shipping labels in the mailer nearly doubling the effectiveness of that fundraising campaign. That’s why when you get those free shipping labels, you should steal those things and don’t worry about even replying to the rest of the mail. Just throw it out because exploitation attempts should be exploited. 

So, that’s reciprocation bias. It’s something that’s incredibly powerful. It’s something that I hope this research demonstrated to you, shapes and impacts our lives in a number of ways. Now that you’re aware of it, not only can you use it for good, and use it for your own benefit, but now you can stop people from exploiting you by using the reciprocation tendency.

How to Turn Your Life Into a Video Game & Level Up, With Author Steve Kamb

January 12, 2016 by Austin Fabel in Focus & Productivity

Improve your decisions, hack your mind, and master the psychology of persuasion with "The Science of Success". This podcast will teach you the tactics and strategies to understand how psychology rules the world around us and what you can do to use that information to make yourself smarter and achieve your goals.

We're very excited about the guest we have this week on "The Science of Success": Steve Kamb, the "Rebel Leader" and founder of NerdFitness.com. He's also the author of the new book Level Up Your Life.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How Steve's Epic Quest of Awesome changed his life
How to achieve your New Year's resolutions
Using game mechanics to create accountability
Overcoming the fear of changeHow to preserve willpower to make the best decisions
How to turn your life into a video game (using science and research!)
Why it's a good idea to floss a single tooth
How to create your own batcave (like Bruce Wayne)
The importance of the "progress principle" in forming habits

And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Alright, well we've got a special guest on the podcast today, Steve Kamb. Many people believe that Steve Kamb was created in a laboratory in the 1940s as part of a secret government project. Those people are wrong. That was Steve Rogers, who became Captain America. But Steve Kamb is in many ways a real life superhero. Steve is the rebel leader and founder of NerdFitness.com, and the author of "Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story." Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Steve:
Great intro, I'm just gonna, I'm golf-clapping over here. That was fantastic, I love it. Thanks for having me, man.

Matt:
Yeah, well we're super pumped to have you on "The Science of Success". I think your book is going to be super relevant for a lot of our listeners, and I think they're really going to love digging into some of this content.

Steve:
Thank you, I mean, I like to think it's like a self-help book for skeptical nerds that would never read self-help. You know what I mean? Like, I tried to ground this in as much behavioral psychology and the studies of human behavior. Like, grounding this in that stuff, so it's like yes it's super nerdy, yes you're creating or turning your life into a video game, but it's all backed by PubMed research and behavioral psychology stuff, because I just love that stuff and it's been so much fun for me to work through. And now to turn it into a book.

Matt:
And that's so relevant for our audience because our big focus on "Science of Success" is kind of how we can ground this stuff in science, and how we can have sort of research-backed strategies for improving yourself, improving your decision making, understanding and influencing other people, and all that kind of stuff.

Steve:
Sure, I love it. I'm in the right spot then.



Matt:
Absolutely. So I am a huge -- and you know this obviously -- but I am a huge video gamer. And in many ways to me, that's part of the reason that this book spoke to me so much. But one of the things you talk about, and kind of one of the core cruxes of "Level Up Your Life" is the idea of turning your life into an RPG. And, you know, you talk about in the book playing EverQuest, and I was a former Ultima Online player, so there may be some...

Steve:
Oh man, yeah I know.

Matt:
It might come to blows later. But tell me a little bit about that concept and how important that is.

Steve:
Yeah, well, as somebody that was raised on a Nintendo and by the time I was third, fourth, fifth grade-ish, the Super Nintendo came out, and all of these amazing old school (I mean at the time they weren’t old school but now they are), old school Japanese RPG games came out, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (which is, you know, actually Final Fantasy III), and Secret of Mana. All these amazing games that really shaped, I think, my childhood. In every one of these games is a concept of a small, weak character that is tasked with saving the world ultimately. And I love the idea, especially as somebody that lived in suburbia and was a small, scrawny, skinny, weak kid. I loved the idea of consistent, constant improvement, and leveling up of a character, and being able to explore these far off lands and do these amazing things. And as I got older and older, these games became more complex. The graphics got better, the storylines became more intricate. And there became less and less need for me to use my imagination, because everything was done for me in the game. And, unfortunately, what began as a fun, kind of fun entertainment, started to become an escape for me, and I spent far too much time playing EverQuest, and then EverQuest 2, which are kind of the precursors to World of Warcraft, but it's a persistent online universe in which you create a character that you can spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours playing as and still never see the end of the game. 

So, as I, after high school, through college, got a regular job but also kind of fell in love with this idea of getting fit and wanting to help others get fit, I wanted to do so in a way that spoke to me and my love of video games, my love of creation of the character, of stories and worlds and things of that nature. So I purchased the domain NerdFitness.com, because I'm a huge nerd and I've built computers and I love Harry Potter and I love digging into the back lore and stories. Just for example, I, yesterday, finished playing through BioShock Infinite.

Matt:
Dude, I love the BioShock games.



Steve:
Oh, they're so great. And finished going through them, and then the first thing I did as I sat down and read like four hours of message boards on the history of multiverse theory and all these crazy, crazy things that had no relevance to... but I was like "This is so fascinating to me!"

Matt:
The ending of that game is amazing.

Steve:
It's so well done. And you know there's some sort of twist coming, but even when you know it's coming, I still had no idea. I was like "Holy crap, this is, I need to go and talk to some instant message boards about this immediately." Anyway, I apologize, I'm getting sidetracked here. So I bought the domain NerdFitness.com, it's simple, I'm a nerd and I like helping people get fit. But the tagline was "Level up your life", and again, as somebody that was small and scrawny and started to get stronger and looked at my training in the gym as me going on a mission, or me completing a quest to gain strength, gain a strength point in my attributes or whatever. It just jumped out at me. I thought to myself, as I was kind of engineering the site, engineering the business, and truly engineering my life, what were the reasons why I was so addicted to the video games that I loved? And if I was addicted to those games for those reasons, could I apply those same game mechanics, the same psychology, the same psychological reasons why, to my actual life? And I broke it down into a few key components, one of which being the progress principle. It's this concept that we are, as a species, more entertained and happier when we are progressing than we are when we get the thing we're progressing towards. 

So, for example, there was a study done, I think it's the concept that instead of getting all your satisfaction from the reward at the end of the journey, it's really breaking down the idea that you are on a journey, and every time you can show progress on that journey, you're brain gets a little hit of dopamine, and you get addicted to this idea of making progress. That's why it works in the video game; you love going from level one to level two. Oh, you just got a new sword? Oh, that new sword lets you go kill this new bad guy faster, and when you kill that bad guy, it's like "Oh, that got me a new suit of armor, which allows me to go into this new cave. Which then has this new thing at the bottom of it." And next thing you know, it's like two years later, you have a full beard, and you don't know where your time went. So I thought about how I could apply the progress principle to my own life. So I actually built a questing system that add experience point values to each quest, depending on how difficult they were. 

As I crossed those things off of my list, my character -- AKA Steve -- would level up. Although, actually, my character's name is Rebel One. I thought that was a cooler, nerdier name than just Steve. So, Rebel One is kind of like my alter ego. So, by day I'm writing articles and sitting at a desk, and whatever. But in the afternoons, evenings, I might be planning my next trip, working on the violin, getting closer to deadlifting 405 pounds or completing a certain gymnastic movement. But it's all done with this idea of progress and this whole progress principle, because it's not as instant as it happens in a video game. If you're trying to lose weight, maybe you're trying to write a book. If you are studying, doing a research paper or something like... If you can find a way to break that down into bite sized missions or quests that you can complete and show yourself that there's a progress bar to be filled up or an experience bar to fill up. Maybe even creating some sort of reward system that every time you cross a threshold or you cross a milestone, that character can, your character can level up. You can earn a new item that helps you further along in your quest. 

I just fell in love with the idea of life as a Role Playing Game, and as somebody that spent, at this point, thousands of hours buried in games, and imagining myself as that character, I wanted to start living vicariously through myself, and get hooked on leveling up myself as a character. So, I broke my quest system into travel goals, financial goals, volunteering goals, business, social goals, whatever they may be. And broke them down into small enough goals and habits and missions and quests so that they were things that I could consistently make progress on and show it to myself. Prove to myself that I was, in fact, progressing and get addicted to that idea of moving forward.

Matt:
So, tell me about... You talk about the term that you sort of created your own "epic quest of awesome". Tell me what some of the pieces of that quest and how you created that.

Steve:
Sure, everybody's got a bucket list, and everybody wakes up on New Year's Eve, I'm sorry on New Year's Day, hungover and says "This year, things are going to be different, and I'm going to run, I'm going to exercise more, and I'm going to eat better, and I'm going to finally write my book, and I'm going to do this and that." Whatever the studies say, it's like three weeks later, ninety percent of people have abandoned their goals. They haven't gotten anything done. Or people get more excited about adding more and more things to their bucket list, that they never actually cross anything off of it. So I wanted to reframe things and I decided to rename my bucket quest my "Epic Quest of Awesome". Why? I don't know. It was like the two most ridiculously superlative words I could pick out was awesome and epic, and throw them together. It's funny, my friend Benny, who is from Ireland, let me know at one point that his two least favorite words that Americans use was "epic" and "awesome". He's like "Everything's epic! Everything's awesome!" I was like "You are not going to like the quest that I just put together then." He was like "What are you talking about?" I was like "Welllll, don't worry about it. It's fine." 

So I called it my epic quest of awesome, and as I said a little bit earlier, I divided my life into goals and missions that challenge me, things that pushed me outside of my comfort zone, things that improved my health, my physical strength, my endurance. Fun missions. For example, while writing this book, I learned to play the violin because I thought that was a challenging mission that self-doubt had already set in before I even picked up the violin, so I was like "This is a perfect case study for this book. Why don't I use game mechanics and the structuring of my environment to make learning the violin almost like a foregone conclusion?" So I have music quests, I have -- and I can talk a little bit more about the music stuff later, that's a big ass, big part of my life too. You know, I turned life into the game, I segmented it into quests, lines, and story missions, and tried to take a lot of the same, take a lot of the things that you used to, I used to escape into, and instead apply to see if I could have a fun way of reenacting those experiences in real life. 

So, for example, I love James Bond. I think what Daniel Craig has done with the character is phenomenal. The original book, Ian Fleming's series, I think is really great. So I thought to myself, instead of just watching another James Bond movie, why don't you live out a weekend like James Bond? So I thought what that would look like, and planned it out and structured it out. So I went and stayed in a really cheap hostel in Nice, France. I found somebody there that spoke French, and brought her with me to a costume shop that also happened to rent tuxedos. I then used hotel points to stay at the Fairmont Monte Carlo and had set up an automatic savings account to set aside a little bit of money each week, so I had enough money to gamble with at the famous Monte Carlo casino. So here I am, sitting in a tux, drinking cocktails, gambling at the Monte Carlo, laughing my ass off, and cracking corny jokes like James Bond would, when in reality I was a kid that was traveling around the world with a backpack. There was more money in the table than I had probably spent in the previous week, and it was fun, it was kind of fun for me to see how I could create these amazing, epic experiences without breaking the bank to show other people like "Hey, I'm a regular person like you. Here's exactly how I learned to do this." Or "Hey, if I'm learning to play the violin, or a language, here's a system you can put in place using your favorite games and movies to set yourself up to succeed in those instances as well."

Matt:
Yeah, I mean I love that example in the book. I think that's a perfect illustration, especially of an epically awesome thing to do.

Steve:
It was so much fun. I made money in the weekend. I think I won like two hundred bucks or something playing Blackjack. The tux rental was like fifty bucks, and I used hotel points for the hotel. So overall, this amazing weekend that I got plenty of emails from people saying like "Oh, must be nice to be rich." And I'm like "I didn't really, I had a specific mission in mind, I had a goal structure, a goal system in place. I had a progress structure in place. A leveling system, etcetera." I considered like James Bond was like a boss battle. I was building up to that moment, and whether I won or lost, it wasn't going to financially cripple me with the money that I gambled, because it had been slowly, automatically set aside, so that it was all a part of the experience and the stories that I was building. In my mind, whenever possible, I try to spend my money on experiences more than possessions, just because they're something that you will have forever, and things that you will be able to tell stories to your children, and grandchildren and great grandkids about for years and years and years.



Matt:
So, you touched on this a little bit, but tell me more about the use of game mechanics and structuring your environment to lock in, or put yourself on a path to actually be able to achieve some of these goals.

Steve:
Sure. There's two things in particular that I found were really helpful for me in starting to cross things off my list. The thing that I found most important was understanding that we are products of our environment. I didn't want to believe it, but after understanding and watching myself, and then doing as much research as I could on the subject and interacting with other people. Asking ourselves, "why is it that we know we should work out, but we can't get ourselves to do it?" We know that we shouldn't watch twelve episodes of a TV show on Netflix, and yet we can't get ourselves to stop. What is it with our environments that are setting us up to fail, and how can we rewire or reengineer the things around us so that we don't have to use willpower, we don't have to rely on motivation? 

What I've discovered, and in my experience have found to be absolutely true, I look at willpower as if it is a life bar in a video game. Every time you're forced to make a decision or spend any willpower on a new habit, that willpower bar starts to deplete and when that willpower bar is full depleted, the habit falls apart and you kind of have to start all over again. What most people do on January 1st, when they're trying to change their life, like "Oh, I'm going to start flossing, and running every morning, and eating better, and I'm going to write my book, and I'm going to learn to play an instrument." I honestly have no problem with all sorts of goals, however I do have a problem with the way people attack them. So for somebody that makes all these goals and has no structure in place, it's the equivalent of attacking ten different bad guys all at the same time. Sure enough, when you attack ten bad guys at the same time, you're going to get your ass kicked and you're going to die. Your willpower bar gets depleted when you have to make ten really difficult decisions to get yourself to start a new habit all at the same time. 

On top of that, let's say if you say "I'm going to write a book." You sit down, "Okay, I have to write this entire book soon." That's the equivalent of attacking a bad guy that's way too high of a level. Again, you get your ass kicked. What needs to happen is you need to attack each of these problems in a systematized way, so that you don't deplete your willpower bar, or you set yourself up so you don't even need to use willpower in the first place. Let's say you're trying to get fit and you want to eventually run a marathon. Well, what I would recommend people do is increase the number of steps between you and the habit you're trying to break, and decrease the number of steps between you and the habit you're trying to build. So sleep in your running clothes. Put your alarm clock across the room next to a glass of water, so when you wake up the next morning, you have to get out of bed because the alarm clock's across the room. You get up, you go over, you turn off, you're already dressed, you step into your running shoes, you quickly chug your glass of water and your phone is already set, which is in the other room so that way you're not lying in bed checking it. Your phone in the other room is already set to your workout playlist and you grab it and you tell yourself you only have to go out the door and run for five minutes. That's it. You are building a teeny tiny small habit that does not require a tremendous amount of willpower. You're structuring your environment around you to tell you success. And you've done it in a way so that the default activity for you once you've gotten out of bed, you're already in your clothes; the default behavior is to actually do the thing you're trying to build this new habit. I'll give you a few more examples. 

So, let's say I was trying to write the book "Level Up Your Life", and writing a book was so overwhelming to me that I just continually put it off because I told myself I don't have time to write this, and I'll write it when I'm more motivated, and I came to realize the idea of motivation is a terrible way to go about doing things you're interested in. I found a great answer that I talk about in the book, but somebody talks about they want to get motivated to write, or they want to get motivated to learn an instrument. The response to them was like "Screw motivation, cultivate discipline." I thought that was so profound and so helpful to me as somebody that was waiting to get motivated enough to write my book. Instead, what I did was I woke up and the first thing I did every morning was make a cup of coffee, then sat down at my computer, immediately turned on a program called Self Control at the time, now I use a program called Freedom. It blocks every time-wasting website on my computer so that even if I wanted to check them out, I can't, so I have to use zero willpower to not check them, because I can't even access them. I then have a playlist that I listen to to get me into the right mood, and then I had a daily goal, where every day I had to write a certain number of words. As long as I wrote those words, it didn't matter if the content was good or not, but I had to write a certain number of words. And every day that I did that was considered a check, a mission complete on this quest of writing a book. Because I had blocked out these websites, because I had canceled my cable, because I had a good playlist set up, I had structured my entire environment around the idea of "Steve is now a book writer, and every morning from around 6:30AM until 10AM, that is what he's going to do. He's going to write a book, he will not be distracted, his phone will be in the other room, all chat programs will be turned off." The environment was built in a way that I could pull those things off. 

I like to call this "building your Batcave". In the book, I refer to it as this concept that Bruce Wayne has his Batcave full of his tools and gadgets that allow him to defend the city of Gotham. So, for us, as regular real human beings, we are structuring our Batcave to help us succeed in whatever quest or mission we set forth for ourself. Another very basic example, let's say you're trying to eat better. Telling yourself "No, don't eat the ice cream in the fridge or the freezer" is a losing battle. It's all you're going to think about. I'm sure now everybody's thinking about ice cream now that I just mentioned it.

Matt:
I want some ice cream right now.

Steve:
Right? Everybody wants ice cream. I want some ice cream now too because I just said it. Fortunately, I don't keep ice cream in my apartment, because I know if I did, all I would do is eat it. The same thing goes for Sour Patch Kids and Goldfish crackers. You could give me one of those family sized tubs of Goldfish crackers and I could eat every single one of them in one sitting, and then be like "Okay, what else, what else can I eat at this point?" So it's almost like I have to enact a restraining order against those things. They cannot come within a certain number of yards of my existence, because if they're there, I know they exist and I can't focus on anything else other than those particular things. So rather than relying on willpower, I just don't keep them in my apartment. 

I couldn't get myself to stop watching TV or stop playing certain video games, so I got rid of them and I canceled my cable and unplugged my PlayStation when I had to get to these things. I just added as many steps between me and the challenging part as possible because I knew I couldn't... I'm weak minded in that I'm a human in that the things that bring us pleasures are often times the things -- or short term pleasure anyway -- are often the things that are keeping the things we actually want to do with our lives.

Matt:
So I think that's super relevant and you also had a great example in the book, just flossing one tooth, which I think a buddy of yours had suggested. 

Steve:
Yeah, James Clear. He was like "I'm just going to floss one tooth. That's it."

Matt:
I think that's genius. Because as soon as you floss one tooth, you're like "Alright, well I need to keep going."

Steve:
One, yeah, I'm not going to stop at one like an idiot. I think I call it "The Braveheart Technique", but William Wallace, Mel Gibson's character, his buddy, they're covered in war paint, and they have their kilts on, and they're ready to go to battle. They come back over, and the guy goes "Well, we didn't get dressed up for nothing." Okay, if you don't want to work out, that's fine. Just put on your workout clothes and walk into the gym and do a pushup. If you do that, you have succeeded. A hundred times out of a hundred, you're going to get in there and do the one pushup and be like "Well, crap, I'm already here. I already flossed the one tooth. I might as well just do the rest of it." But had you initially set out to say "I have to floss every tooth." You're like, that's not going to happen. But just do one. Just do the one thing. Very much like you can get hooked on negative things, this you can build addictive, healthy habits as well that structure your life in a way that you're consistently improving and making progress and finding a way to properly balance that with gratitude and things that remind you that hey, you're alive, and life's pretty good too.




Matt:
So, kind of a related concept that you talk about a little bit is people who have a fear of change, right? And sort of struggle with that. What are some of the strategies that you recommend for overcoming that?

Steve:
Sure. Fear... man. I'm guessing there are quite a few people that are listening to this can absolutely relate, but I can think myself into or out of any situation from talking to somebody, to going to something, to doing something versus not doing something. I will overanalyze the hell out of that thing until it is so terrifying in my head that I'm paralyzed at the thought of actually following through on it. So I have an entire chapter on fear busting and how to break through and how to overcome a lot of these, when we break it down, irrational fears that we have about something. It might be a fear of rejection, a fear of change, a fear of the unknown. So I encourage people to dig in and I draw from Bruce Wayne and Batman. Bruce Wayne falls down a well and, going off of the Christopher Nolan version of the movies, falls down a well and encounters this swarm of bats and it terrifies him, and he's afraid of bats for so long until he thinks about it. And as he is is becoming the Caped Crusader, as he's becoming Batman, he's building his suit and getting his life together, and he's thinking "Okay, well maybe these bats aren't out to get me. They're a species very much like I am. They're doing their thing, I'm doing mine." Once he kind of broke it down, he actually ended up using the bat as his symbol to strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. So he took this irrational or unknown fear that he had, he broke it down into its most base components, and when he did that, it became far less scary to him, so much so that he actually embraced and enacted and used that fear for himself. 

For anybody that is, let's say you're afraid of going up and talking to somebody, or you're afraid of publishing your first blog post and what somebody might say, or you're afraid of looking foolish at the gym if you try a new class, or you're afraid of something. What I encourage people to do is, and this is a tip I learned from Tim Ferriss, but define what that fear is, and really sit down and think about it. It's like "Okay, what is the worst thing that can happen in this situation? And what is it that I'm so afraid of? And if that worst possible thing were to happen, how would I fix it?" So okay, if I go up and talk to this person, and they say "go away" or "get out of here, creep" or whatever, okay. Then you go back to living your life as if you hadn't talked to them, and now you know that that person clearly was not somebody that you should have talked to, that you should be talking to or concerning yourself with. If you're worried about looking foolish in your first dance class or speaking a language and messing up. What's the worst that can happen? Somebody corrects you, somebody chuckles, you laugh at yourself and then you get up if you fell over. You laugh at yourself if you pronounce something incorrectly, and then you pronounce it correctly and you move on with your life. I found so many times that we're so afraid to get started with something, that if we just took a few minutes to talk to the worst possible scenario, write it down, and then put a plan in place. "If this were to happen, this is what I would do." It makes it so much less scary, and makes it far easier for us to actually carry, follow forward, and try the thing out and see what happens. 

I found a lot of the time that if I look at things as if I am a scientist conducting a hypothesis, then it removes a lot of the personal problems that I have where it's like "Oh, if this fails then it's a reflection on who I am as a person." Instead, it's like "Okay, that hypothesis didn't work, approaching this person in this way was incorrect, or opening my keynote speech with a joke about this did not go as well as I would have hoped. Okay, hypothesis tested, experiment conducted, I now know how to adapt for future things and I can move on." I think that's a big component of fear. I think another thing that I've loved to do when it comes to me being afraid of something is not giving myself a chance to back out of it. It might mean signing up for something before I can talk myself into saying no. It might be using or working with a friend or a colleague or something on something that scares me, so that I'm not attacking this giant fearful problem alone. 

Last but not least, I just love, there was a concept from the movie "We Bought A Zoo". It's this concept of using twenty seconds of courage. I think of it kind of like star power from Super Mario Brothers. You can be afraid before and you can be terrified after, but if there's something you know you need to do, .or there's something you want to sign up for, somebody you want to talk to, something that you cannot get yourself started on, very much like only flossing one tooth, tell yourself you only need twenty seconds of courage. More often than not, I have found those twenty seconds of courage is enough to get me to take that first step, to walk out onto a stage. 

I remember I took Swing Dance lessons, and I sat in my car for fifteen minutes before going in because I was so afraid of walking into this class alone, I had never done it before. I had to get myself mentally psyched up sitting in my car by myself in a parking lot, to walk in to take a Swing Dance class because I knew it would be good for me and I'd have fun, but I was just so afraid of looking foolish that I needed those twenty seconds to get me in the door. Once I was there, I didn't get dressed up for nothing, I might as well just start dancing. More often than not, any time I've followed through in that. 

There are some great stories throughout the book too of people that have overcome fears by implementing twenty seconds of courage or using a lot of these strategies as well. I know, just like we know we need to exercise more or eat better, there are so many instances where we are afraid of uncomfortable conversation, or afraid of looking foolish, and it's keeping us from doing the things that are going to help us move the most forward. And attacking fear like it's a hypothesis that you're attempting to question has really helped me from an analytical standpoint actually follow through on those things and start having more uncomfortable conversations and getting more comfortable with putting myself in uncomfortable situations.

Matt:
I love the idea of thinking about it like an experiment. That's actually something that we've talked about before on the podcast. We talked about a book called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. I don't know if you've ever read that.

Steve:
I think I have? Maybe?

Matt:
But it's essentially kind of the idea of the difference between the fixed mindset as she calls it and the growth mindset.

Steve:
Oh yes, absolutely.

Matt:
And the fixed mindset is all about proving yourself, and the growth mindset is all about improving yourself. There's a bunch of other distinctions, and we drilled down in that episode in particular, but I think that dovetails perfectly with the concept you're describing.

Steve:
Absolutely. Well done, sir, high five.

Matt:
Internet high fives.

Steve:
Internet high five. I just high fived my computer.

Matt:
Okay, yes, I just did the same. So, as part of that, one of the things you talk about that's really important is the idea of accountability. How can we create that and how can we make ourselves more accountable?

Steve:
Sure. At our very... Not too in front of you, but at our very base level we try to move away from pain and move toward pleasure and happiness. When we're trying to get ourselves to do the things that we need to do, unfortunately we're up against so much resistance because it's so much easier for us to take the short term pleasure path. Like "Oh, I'm going to run a marathon" or "I'm going to start writing a blog post every day, but man, starting that habit's difficult, and the couch is right there, and the video games are right there, so instead of writing a blog post, I'm just going to play video games." At the moment, on a day to day basis, that works out great for you as a person. You're like "Oh man, instead of having to struggle through a blog post, I get to enjoy playing video games and have fun and whatever." So what I had to do until I could get myself to the point of truly enjoying the activities that I knew were helping me move forward -- for example, writing the book, exercising, playing violin and things of that nature -- I had to apply more video game mechanics, and that is the idea of rewards and accountability. So I had increase the pleasure and happiness associated with completing the healthy task, or the thing I wanted to do, and I had to increase the pain, or accountability, associated with not doing the task. 

So let's use the blog post for example. So I, as Nerd Fitness was growing, struggled to get myself to consistently write blog posts on time. So what I did was I actually gave five hundred dollars to one of my employees, and I said "For every day that a blog post is late, I want you to donate fifty bucks to the Westboro Baptist Church" or something. Or it was a political cause that I wasn't thrilled with. Because there was no way I wanted my money to go to a cause that I truly despised, I was like "I'll just have to write the stupid blog post" and sure enough, once I got started, "Oh I'm actually enjoying this and having fun with this" and so on and so forth. 

So introducing accountability and having somebody else help keep you accountable, especially in that first month of trying to build a new habit or move closer to something that is challenging to you, adding accountability up front is so important. In addition to that, I love the idea of building a reward system in. It's built into every video game out there, but the example I love the most is The Legend of Zelda. In every dungeon you enter, there is a big treasure chest that has a new weapon that makes your character stronger and allows you to explore a new location and move advance further in the game. 

So compare this with what most people do, "Oh I went for a run for four days this week, that means I can eat an entire cake on Friday and feel good about it because I quote unquote 'earned this' ." Or  "Oh, I did this one healthy thing and therefore I get to do this negative, unhealthy thing because it's my reward for being healthy." I instead like to build a reward system with things that reward me back. So if you are going for a run, you want to get better at running. If you run four days a week for a month straight, then you get to buy a new pair of running shoes. And when you buy a new pair of running shoes, you're then further incentivized to want to run even further, run more often, etcetera. If you are trying to lose weight and you get to a certain goal weight, then you can buy new healthy clothes, clothes that fit you, or you buy one shirt that is slightly smaller than the rest of them, again, which is further incentivizing you and pushing you and motivating you to continue down this path of a healthy lifestyle. I love the idea of building rewards and accountability into the things that you're trying to do. However, what I've found after a few months is that more often than not this habit that you used to have to rely on accountability and rewards to get done becomes a part of who you are and you're actually more driven by the enjoyment you get out of the activity itself. This is talked about quite a bit in the book "Drive".

Matt:
It's a great book.

Steve:
"Drive" talks about more from an economic standpoint, the idea of just rewarding people with money and punishing them with taking things away. If you were to incentivize them or just set them up in a way that they're working on things that are challenging to them that make them feel alive, that remind them why they're doing the things that they're doing, they're going to be more likely to do their best work. I've found through Nerd Fitness and community members, so many times people are like "Man, I've built this reward system, and I started leveling up, but I actually like exercising now, and I never thought I would say that, but I actually look forward to how I feel after I exercise." I'm absolutely at that point now. The feelings that I get from exercise, the feeling I got from finishing a great article or guest post, the feeling I get from practicing and feeling how the violin feels in my hands and these things, they all started with this reward system in place and structuring my environment so that I almost had to, there was no other option for me but to practice, but to succeed, but to exercise, but to read more. But as I'm doing these things more and more often, they become more and more a part of who I am, I get more and more excited about them. It sets you up in a way that's completely different from just waiting on extrinsic reward systems and instead becomes something that's intrinsic and excites you in an interior way. Your brain, your soul, what you get excited about, I've found that happens far more often than not, which is pretty cool.

Matt:
So, one of the things that kind of underlies your epic quest of awesome, and also one of the big themes in the book is the idea of the hero's journey. Tell me a little bit about that and how people can apply that to their lives.

Steve:
Sure. The hero's journey is a concept that every great story in history, from the bible, King Arthur, all the way up through to Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and pretty much every video game in between. Every great story in history follows a very similar story arc, and the story arc is the idea of a person, man or woman, or humble origins and normal beginnings, kind of feels like a fish out of water. There is some sort of call to action, either something takes place or they meet somebody or they do something, and they are then drawn into this extraordinary world, and in the extraordinary world, they find allies, they encounter enemies, they have to defeat a bad guy, they learn a lot about themselves, they find buried treasure, they rescue the prince, they rescue the princess, they save the world, and they return home a changed person. 

So, for example, Star Wars. Let's say, Star Wars. Luke Skywalker's journey -- I know George Lucas was a huge fan of the concept of the hero's journey, I think, and if he wasn't, then clearly he did his research on what makes a great story. Luke is that character; he was a guy on a farm, and after he lost his aunt and uncle, goes into this extraordinary world (AKA up in space) and gets into this amazing space opera scene and really, really cool environment. The reason I'm talking about Star Wars now is the next movie comes out in a few days and I can't focus on anything other than Star Wars at the moment. So every great story in history, from Star Wars all the way up to, all the way back to the bible, King Arthur, etcetera, they all follow this path. 

So I thought to myself, what if I'm a hero on my own journey as well? What would that look like, and how would it structure the decisions I make, and how would it mentally shift how I attack a certain problem? So if somebody is four hundred pounds, broke, living in their parents' basement and doesn't have a job, one way to look at that is life is over and everything sucks, and life is unfair and blah blah blah yada yada yada. Or you can look at it like "Okay, if I'm on a hero's journey, then I'm clearly at the beginning point of this journey, and a better future awaits me, because if I'm going to go on this path, something's going to happen. I need to take action. When I'm taking action, I need to identify a mentor, find allies, I need to complete quests and missions and things like that. I need to have an end goal that I'm working towards in place." 

When you start to put these things down on paper and think through them, it shifts how you look at problems. They're not things that have gone wrong; instead, they're obstacles that you need to overcome, a lesson that you need to learn, a plot twist that you need to attack. I realize that that sounds so hokey, but I don't know. As somebody that grew up loving these stories, it made so much sense to me. Once I shared this idea with other people and had them start thinking about it as well, it shifted how they attacked certain problems too. A thing I love about these stories is that they give us hope, and I think that hope is very important. It's the central theme in Shawshank Redemption, which is my favorite movie. But what you don't get, and what they don't tell you with the quotes in that movie is that hope without action is nothing. You're not getting very far is all you're doing is hoping. 

I think hope for a better future, I think expecting more of yourself is fantastic, but I also think you need to put a structure and a system in place that takes you further away from where you've been, and closer to where you want to go. That's where those game mechanics that I talked about earlier kick in. I felt like I went on a hero's journey when I traveled around the world in 2011. I felt like I went on another hero's journey when I wrote this book, and I'm excited to see every hero's journey is cyclical. We come home, and when you return home from your journey, you're a changed person and then you become a mentor to somebody else, or you get started on a bigger, better journey. There's a farther away mountain or a bigger dragon to slay. I'm excited. 

The way I see it, this whole book is actually structured and follows the path of the hero's journey. In my mind, the reader is the hero, the book is the call to action, and I get to be the mentor. I get to be Yoda, I get to be Morpheus, I get to be Dumbledore. That's so much fun for me. Years ago when I was getting started on my path, I found a book in a bookstore that changed my life; that was my call to action, and it was Tim Ferriss' "Four Hour Work Week". I'm hopeful that this book can be that call to action for other people too, where they're kind of drifting and heading through life, and they know they need to make some changes, they're not sure how, and they stumble across this book, they get it from a friend and there's a paradigm shift. They change how they attack every day, and they put a system in place that sets them up to win. Once they do so, they complete their hero's journey. They then pass it on to somebody else and hope the message spreads. We have a worldwide community of really fit, adventurous nerds that are living out the heroes' journeys and mentoring other people to do the same thing.

Matt:
I love that vision. That sounds amazing.

Steve:
Right? How much fun would that be? Plus, when the zombies start attacking, I think we're going to need that army of super-fit, adventurous nerds to keep us away from all the zombies.

Matt:
I have a fully built zombie survival plan.

Steve:
I love it. Absolutely love it. I think we used to think, number one, how to survive a zombie apocalypse. I put a whole plan in place on Nerd Fitness. If you were actually trapped in The Walking Dead, what would you do and how would you do it? Here's a step by step workout plan, here's how you should attack your diet, blah blah blah yada yada yada. You can never be too careful.

Matt:
Very true. So one of the things that you talk about in the book that I thought was a great analogy was if you're playing something like World of Warcraft, and you're looking for a group, you never want to join the group that is five levels too low and they're going to get their butts kicked when they go into the dungeon. You want to join the group that's totally badass, and that's going to crush everything and carry you along and make you better. So explain that a little bit, why that's important and how people can apply that to themselves.

Steve:
Sure. It's funny because it's something that so obvious in a video game, and so not obvious in real life.

Matt:
So true.

Steve:
Right? In a game, it's like "Oh, of course I want to play on the best team. I don't want to be on the losing team. If I partner up with these total kickass characters, we can go fight way bigger stuff, and we can go explore way farther in the game than I've ever been before, and they're going to make me better." And then in real life, often times we surround ourselves with people that are negative, that are very much not of the idea that they want to grow, that they are looking to improve themselves. They're the type of people that read a great story and say "Oh, must be nice" or "What an idiot" or "Why would somebody want to do that? I'm perfectly whatever." I've found a lot in my community at Nerd Fitness, that more often than not, we have people that are the one person in their group of friends that is interested in getting fit. They come home from a workout, like "Man, I just set a new deadlift record," or "I ran a mile the fastest I've ever run," or "I just rock-climbed, I hit a new personal best on the difficulty level of the wall that I was climbing." Their friends are like "Whatever man, we just need you for this raid," or "We need you for this battle, this guild war that we're about to partake in." They're not interested. 

I honestly believe this; I think we are the average of the people that we associate the most with. When we surround ourselves with negative people, and if you work in an office, more often than not the people that you spend a lot of your time with at that office, if they're not of the same mentality as you and they're not interested in getting fit, if they're not interested in running more often, or if they're not interested in the things that you're interested in, you're going to be less likely to want to do those things. That sounds so obvious, but nobody does it. We spend our time with the people that we think we should hang out with, or people that we have hanged out with that have long overstayed their welcome and it's just easier for us to just keep hanging out with them. Because we're an average of those people, it makes it such an uphill battle for us to live this life of growth and happiness and adventure and success and improvement, unless we're surrounded by other people doing those things. 

I don't mean to say "You need to fire all of your friends tomorrow, and then go out and find new ones solely for the purpose that they're going to make you better," but I think it is important to evaluate the relationships that you do have, and see if they are improving your life or if they're not. If they're not, I'd try to minimize time with those people, and if they are, I'd try to maximize time with those people. Whether it's emails back and forth on a regular basis, encouraging and pushing each other to keep each other accountable on a certain project or goal of mission. It's tough. It's tough, but it requires a conversation, personally with yourself, to ask yourself what's important to you, and what your goals are. If the people that are currently in your group are aiding or hurting you on your mission to pull those things off. So, for anybody that has an unsupportive system at home, and an unsupportive system at the office, then I highly recommend they have some sort of online support group of other growth like-minded individuals that are interested in leveling up their lives in the same way. 

I think that's probably been the most important part of what has made Nerd Fitness successful, and why I'm so proud of it: the community aspect of it. These are people from all walks of life that have succeeded in every different way possible and failed in every way possible. When you post on the message boards, you get in the Facebook groups, attend a live event, you're surrounded by these supportive, engaging, helpful people that just want to see you succeed. It's such a drastic departure from what everybody else usually runs into, and that's the people that try to drag other people back down because that's way easier than building themselves up. 

So, I find life as a multi-player game is so important, and it's something that we don't look at very often. Unfortunately, a lot of times, it's our own family members or a relationship that has gone on far too long. In the book, I say "Hey, I'm not telling you to fire your family, and I'm not telling you to get out of your relationship, but you got to be happy too, and you got to be surrounded by people that support you. If you're not getting that, then you need to have that conversation with them. Get them on your side. Tell them you're doing it as an experiment, and you need their help in supporting you. If it's a relationship that's run its course, you might need to call it quits and find somebody that does line up with the things that you're interested in. 

So it's a challenge, but man, life is truly multi-player. If you're not careful, that can be the thing that's sabotaging us the most if we're not aware of it.

Matt:
So, I think that's incredibly important, and I think the video game analogy is so powerful because in real life, people just don't do it, they don't see it so many times. But as soon as you think about it in the context of looking for a group in a video game, it's stupidly obvious.

Steve:
The idea of mastermind groups, I've found them to be incredibly helpful. I had a group of friends where every month, we'd have an online challenge. Like, "This month, you have to create your own cocktail, and next month you have to record a song, and the month after that..." It was so much fun trying to learn a new skill each month and see how other people did and whatever. It's tough to find, but when you can find a group of people that are pushing you in that way, it just makes every other aspect of life so much easier.

Matt:
So, Steve, for people like me who have read and enjoyed "Level Up Your Life", what further books or resources would you recommend checking out?

Steve:
Hmm, great question. From a business perspective, I can't say enough about "The Four Hour Work Week" from Tim Ferriss. It's a very practical book on if you were to build an online business, how would you do it? That was the book that got me started.

Matt:
That's the book that got me started too, so it's one of my favorite books of all time.

Steve:
Yeah, it's a book that I've gifted to more people than anybody. That, and I love Richard Branson's book "Losing My Virginity". His book changed my life as well. It made me shift my focus from "Oh, I just want to travel and play the guitar and whatever," to "I want to build something. I want to build something as powerful as we can make it." Because he's been able to build hundreds of companies and put it all into this idea as Virgin as a company, but he also has a lot of fun on the side, and he's done a lot of good for the planet, and he just seems like a good dude that has the planet and people's best interests at heart. He's done it all while also building a for-profit business; a lot of for-profit businesses. Plus, he owns an island in the Caribbean. If he can do it... It's a good aspirational book, I think, as well. It reads like an adventure novel, even though it's about his entrepreneurial journey. So, I love those two books specifically from a business perspective. 

I mean, I'm sure everybody if they haven't read it, books like "The Power of Habit" and as you mentioned earlier "Drive", what was the other? There are some other great books in that realm. But yeah, I would say those two probably in particular, "Power of Habit" and "Drive". I just loved the concepts in them and showing people how our brains are actually wired, and how they're working, and how to get us to do the things we always said we wanted to do but can't get ourselves to actually do. Digging into the psychology and physiology almost behind why those things are happening is just fascinating to me, and I think they're really helpful for anybody trying to make positive changes in their lives.

Matt:
So where can people find you and "Level Up Your Life" online?

Steve:
"Level Up Your Life" the book is available at Amazon or it's in bookstores Barnes and Noble. It comes out January 12th. I'm not sure when this will be going up. And then you can also learn way more about it at LevelUpYourLife.com. You can actually create a character there as well with experience points and missions to complete and actually level up your avatar. I spend most of my time hanging out at NerdFitness.com, where I'm publishing two articles a week. There's a message board community and we have live in-person events, things like that. So NerdFitness.com and LevelUpYourLife.com.

Matt:
Well, Steve, thank you so much for being on "The Science of Success". I know people are going to love this interview, I think it's great, and I think a lot of the topics you touched on are really going to resonate, about creating powerful habits, and leveraging game mechanics to transform your life. And I think everybody should absolutely check our Steve's new book "Level Up Your Life". You're really going to enjoy it.

Steve:
Thanks man, I was going to say, don't get me wrong, I still love video games, I still play them as often as I can, but that life has become the adventurous part. I do my best to stay nerdy and play the things that make me happy, but I'm also doing everything I can to level up myself personally and set a great example for everybody else. Appreciate the opportunity for having me on here. If I can answer anybody's questions, just hit me up on Twitter @SteveKamb or shoot us an email at Nerd Fitness and I'd love to get back to you.

The Neuroscience Behind Being Productive, With Researcher and Author Josh Davis

January 05, 2016 by Austin Fabel in Focus & Productivity

On this week's episode of "The Science of Success", we speak with Columbia Ph.D. Josh Davis, who is currently the director of research for the NeuroLeadership Institute, a NeuroCoach and Master Practitioner of NLP. Josh is also the author of the recent international bestseller Two Awesome Hours, in which he shares science-based strategies to get your most important work done.

In today's episode you will learn:

Why working all the time means you actually get LESS done.
How to conquer overwhelm (using scientific findings, not advice)
How to snap out of auto-pilot and make effective use of your time
How to leverage negative emotion to be more productive
A surprising finding about how music impacts your work flow
And much more.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Science of Success. I’m very excited about the guest we have today. Josh Davis, Columbia PhD, who’s currently the director of research for the Neuroleadership Institute, a Neuro-coach, and a master practitioner of NLP. Josh is the author if the recent book, Two Awesome Hours, where he shares science-based strategies to get your most important work done. With that, let’s welcome Josh to the show. 

Josh:	Thanks so much for having me here, it’s really nice to be on the show.

Matt:	And we’re super excited to have you. Do you want to kind of tell readers or give them just a little bit of a kind of introduction to what Two Awesome Hours is about and what your story, your background?

Josh:	Yeah I’d love to. Where this came from was that I was realizing something that we were all realizing, but it just was feeling compelled to see what I could do about it. I was working all the time, my wife was working all the time, my friends were working all the time. And good people working hard, trying to get a lot of stuff done, really contributing to their jobs and yet, feeling bad at the end of the day. And feeling like we hadn’t done enough. And the sort of constant sense of overwhelmed. There’s no way to catch up. And when I saw that, I guess I really came to a point where I just thinking that’s not right, that’s not how to live a life. That’s not what I want for myself and for others. I want to create more o fa culture if I can where we have some of that balance. Where, when we put in that kind of hard work we can say “yeah, I accomplished something” and leave it alone, and not feel that sense of there’s this constant overwhelm. And of course it’s only continuing, it’s only getting worse as we’re so accessible. We’re going to be wearing our technology within the year, and maybe longer. But we’re - it’ll be implanted, who knows where it’s going. But we’re just going to be more and more accessible, and with that we have increased social pressures and social obligations to get back to people, because most of us are caring, thoughtful people and do want to help one another out and get back quickly. So there’s every reason to think that it’ll increase. So, what I wanted to find out was is there some way we can start to get back some of this work-life balance, some of this self-compassion, and the key that kind of launched the whole book idea was sort of identifying this idea that typically what we do when we get overwhelmed is we just think “alright I have to work every minute, I need to stay on task as much as possible, I have to work every hour, there’s just so much work, how am I going - how else am I going to do it?” It’s logical, but it’s actually based on a model of how a computer works, not of how a human being works. A computer, you get the same output every time you run it. So you should just run it as often as you can. You know, always keep it on and you'll get more done. But for a human being, a biologically based system, you’re not going to get nearly the same output every time. But you can quite unlike a computer, you can do a remarkable amount of unexpected things. You can be extremely effective for a very brief period of time - 1, 2, 3 hours. Now, I might be able to figure out how to map out a chapter of my book you know, you might be able to figure out just the right marketing strategy for a new podcast, solve that problem of how you’re going to have just the right team for the product line that’s going forward. The big, important stuff, the stuff that’s going to carry you for the rest of the week. Then we can have, I don’t know about you, I can have 2-3 days where I’m kind of worthless, I’m not kidding. So, then, what I started wondering was - can we set up the conditions for those brief periods of being highly effective. If that’s what happens naturally, then there must be something that leads to it. And what I started to learn as I dug into the psychology and the neuroscience research, because that’s my background, was that there are things that we can do to set it up, and those things that we can do to set it up are often the very same things that we integrate in our work-life balance. That we can really leverage this idea of being highly effective for short periods of time. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to work the rest of the time, it means we’ve recognized what really matters, set up the conditions to be highly effective for that, and then do the unimportant work at the other time, when we’re not so effective. And that’s the core, that’s kind of the core message of the book. And then it’s specific strategies based on the science about how we set up those conditions.

Matt:	And I love the distinction between - or I guess using the word “effectiveness”. That’s something I’m really passionate about as kind of the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, which I’m sure you’re familiar with that distinction.

Josh:	Yeah, I think it’s a critical distinction. Efficiency is about doing as much as we can in a short time. And so, in some sense, I suppose that’s what, when we’re highly effective we’re getting a lot done in a short period of time. But the base - the bigger idea, the idea the undercurrent when we’re talking about efficiency, is that we’re just trying to optimize the schedule, the calendar. Pack things in. And it doesn’t take into account how well the system is operating. How effective we are. But that is a huge variable for a human being. It’s such a big variable in fact that we probably, this is my hunch, I don’t yet have data to back this up. We probably actually get less out of ourselves when we try to work around the clock. It’s not just diminishing returns, but we probably actually get less useful work done, is my guess. When we just try to keep working all the time. 

Matt:	I think I heard about a study, and I guess I’d have to go and do some research but I feel like I remember hearing something that people who work more than 40-hours a week, they’re actually less productive. 

Josh:	That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. It would follow quite naturally based on what I’ve been learning and writing about in the book.

Matt:	So, one of the things that you mentioned before, and I love he comparisons of humans versus computers, because one of the things we talked about in an earlier podcast is the idea of the biological limits of the human mind, and sort of the hard constraints that evolution and biology have created for the way that we think, and the way that our mind works. 

Josh:	Cool.

Matt:	What do you tell to the busy executive, or the friend of yours. I have people like this in my life who say everything is important, and I’ve read 4-Hour Work Week, and I’ve read Two Awesome Hours, and I tell people, I’m like “Hey, you gotta refocus, you’ve gotta trim down what you’re doing, you’ve gotta prioritize and-“  you know, they have this kind of view that everything is a priority, and they just - this huge sense of overwhelm. What would you say, or how would you help people who maybe they’ve kind of understood this but they have some colleagues, or friends, or employees who are struggling with this distinction or kind of struggling to make a leap to really understanding this? 

Josh:	Yeah, there’s a couple things that I think can be helpful. One is that, one thing that I’ve had that you know, I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy is that when I share with people scientific findings, then it’s very different than just hearing advice, because while advice - I might be giving the exact same advice, and a couple times in the book you’ll see things that you’ve already heard. I might be giving the exact same advice at times as someone else, but when you hear advice there’s always the reasonable thing to wonder, which is “Did it just work for you?” or some context where it doesn’t fit. Do you have to have the right personality? You know, is there something else that I don’t know about it? But when you have the research so you can understand when and why something might work, then it’s very different, then it’s more of an experience of “hey, here’s how the brain works, do you want to work with that or not?” and so it’s much easier for someone to feel like it’s worthwhile to give it a chance. Much easier for someone to believe there’s something in it for them. And that little shift can make a huge difference. So that’s one thing that can definitely go a long way. 
	
	A second piece I think can be quite useful is to help people start with just one of the strategies, which will kind of create the space for all of the others. Everything on the schedule is there for a reason. It is important to someone, and it has some level of importance. It’s not like it’s just anything if we just got rid of it, it would have no consequences. So I think it’s worthwhile acknowledging that. However, there are over a handful of things that are on the agenda that are really going to matter for advancing your career, helping the company succeed, making you feel like you’re accomplishing something worthwhile. And one of the things that I’ll encourage people to do is to take advantage of what researches will call psychological distance. When we get some distance in time, or in space, or we imagine it pertains to someone else, or it isn’t that likely. That’s what we call psychological distance. When you have psychological distance, it’s much easier to recognize, just more automatically, your brain goes there. It’s much easier to recognize the big picture, the abstract, the desirable aspects of something. So, when you’ve got a weekend day, for example. Great to just have you know, lot of people if you manage to get away from work, probably don’t wanna think about work too much. But I would recommend just ten minutes of asking the question, when you are away from work, maybe relatively early in the day on a weekend day, you’ve got some good mental energy, what actually matters? And when I ask people that question when they’ve got some psychological distance, it’s usually not that challenging of a question. If you ask me for example, I should be writing papers. I should be writing books. And I should be presenting. These are - it’s a short list of things that are really going to matter, that are going to move things forward in my career with companies that I work for with that are going to matter a lot to me. And for any job, there’s - we can identify those things a little more easily with a little more distance. The trick, then, is how do we actually remember to focus on those things when we need to? And that’s strategy one in the book: recognize your decision points. They don’t come that often in a day. Most of the time we’re on auto pilot. It’s not that you're not conscious, but you're not consciously monitoring and choosing what to do. Right now, we’re in interview mode. You and I are pretty much focused on what we’re going to say to each other. We’re not in… we’re not thinking about all of the other things in our day, and what are options are for tasks to do. But, as soon as the interview ends, we’ve got a decision point. Unless you have something scheduled and you have no options, we’ve got a decision point. It’s a cross-roads. What do I do? And it’s at that moment we become highly aware. Self-aware. Aware of how uncomfortable we are that we’re not doing anything productive, aware of time passing. It only lasts for a couple of minutes, but it feels like an eternity, and it can be uncomfortable, and we can have the urge to just grab at whatever’s in front of us. Because of course there’s some importance to anything. But that’s the moment to recognize. Right before a task, right after a task, or right after you’ve been interrupted. That one’s a hard one to learn because we usually hate interruptions. But right after you’ve been interrupted. You created a crossroads, you’ve got to decide. Much more aware than you are when you’re on autopilot. You can’t just choose to snap out of auto pilot, but when you do get one of these decision points, you’ve gotta take it. Because that’s the moment in the day when you can actually decide what task to work on. When you’re capable of remembering what’s important as opposed to what’s urgent.

Matt:	I think that’s a critical - I think that’s a really important point, which is that: having the ability to monitor your own thoughts, and having a moment of kind of awareness of, hey, this is a decision point. This is a time when I can change direction. This is a time when I can step out of this pattern and refocus on what’s really important. And one of the tools that’s helped me personally be able to do that more frequently is meditation. And I know you talk about that in the book. Is that something that you use, or are there other tools or strategies that people may be able to implement to kind of recognize decision points more frequently.

Josh:	You’re exactly right, it’s the moment of being able to catch yourself. Those moments, they don’t come around all that often during the day. One of the things that, for example, mindfulness based meditation has been shown to be helpful with is to help people catch those moments. Or create a moment of actually checking in with yourself and saying “wait a second, am I doing the right thing?” because you can be more aware of how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking in that moment. So there’s every reason to think that that kind of a practice would help. I also don’t think that it’s necessary to have that kind of a practice to learn to take advantage of these moments. That there are other things that we can do if you’re someone who isn’t - doesn’t do a lot of meditation of that sort. There’s some great, simple planning ahead that we can do. If you plan ahead and put in what’s called an implementation intention - often described as an “If Then” plan - you can be more likely to actually capture the decision point when it comes. So, for example, I can think about my calendar. And I don’t know exactly what’s coming next week, some new things will be scheduled I’m sure, and some things will be cancelled. However, I do know that there’s going to be somedays when I arrive at the office. There’s going to be some days when I have phone calls and then I hang up the phone. There’s going to be some days when I have meetings with a group of people. There’s going to be some day when I’m more likely to be interrupted, and other days when it’s less likely to be interrupted. I can plan ahead and say, when a meeting ends, I’m likely to be at one of those crossroads. I’m going to plan for that. If a meeting ends, rather than pulling out my phone and looking at the list to see, oh yeah, what were all the things I’m supposed to do, what’s my name again? That moment, disorientation. Instead, I’m going to plan ahead and visualize myself actually taking a moment to, until my head is clear enough that I can remember what actually matters and why I do the job. What’s in it for me here, what’s the point of this work. At that point, it doesn’t need to take more than a minute. Could take two, maybe three minutes. When we indulge in these things, it’s not going to be a huge amount of the time of our day, but it can make a huge difference in choosing the right thing to do. Then I’m going to pull out my calendar and look at the list of things, it’s going to be much easier for me to sort having done that thinking. Because time doesn’t get wasted when we’re taking those moments of actually deciding. Time gets wasted when we choose the wrong task. When you choose the wrong task and get going on it, you can waste an hour, hour and a half no time. That’s where you end up with that feeling of the whole afternoon, “Where did it go?”

Matt:	Yeah, I think that’s a critically important distinction, which is that time isn’t wasted when you have a moment of decision. Time is wasted when you make the wrong decision or when you just on auto-pilot go and do something that’s not - it might be an efficient use of your time but it’s not an effective use of your time.

Josh:	Exactly.

Matt:	So, changing gears a little bit. One of the things in your book you mentioned Ben Franklin as an example of somebody who was tremendously effective. But at the same time, really cherished his downtime and lived a very full and rich life. Why did you choose him as an example and tell me a little of how that kind of plays into the idea of what the message of Two Awesome Hours. 

Josh:	Ben Franklin. I was so happy to come across that example because - who’s known as being the example of productivity like Ben Franklin? Around the world he’s known as well. To be honest, I want to influence people around the world. And so, some character that’s known around the world as a paradigm example of productivity. And when you look at his autobiography, he’s gone to great lengths actually to spell out his approaches. You find, you do find all of the things that he did to work on his career as a printer, which is how he made his fortune. But you also find all of this information about this schedule that he really tried to keep to on a regular basis that included a two hour lunch. He would give himself time to read books, and take care of his affairs. He had music and conversation and fun in the evening. He had all kinds of hobbies that, one of his hobbies, was a part of a book group that eventually led to everyone sharing their books and now we’ve got the great library. You know? These weren’t things that he was doing as part of his printing empire. He was doing things on the side, inventor, stove, and his scientific work with electricity. These were things that he did as hobbies, I would say. These were things that he did out of fun. He also spent a lot of time flirting, and being joking around. So this is a guy who you’re looking at this and it’s so tempting to say “Well, I have to choose. I have to choose. Do I want to be the guy who’s working all the time around the clock to get all my work done. Or do I want to be the guy who actually has some work-life balance?” But what Ben Franklin helps to show is that it’s a false choice. It’s a mistake in belief to actually see it as a choice, because those things that we can do to take care of ourselves, actually make us more effective when we’re working.

Matt:	I completely agree with that. Actually another example that I personally really like is Warren Buffet. I think he’s quoted as saying that he basically spends almost all of his time just sitting in his office reading.

Josh:	Is that right?

Matt:	Yeah. Which, if you look at how tremendously successful he’s been, he spends - and Charlie Munger, his business partner as well, they spend a vast majority of their time essentially reading and just kind of cultivating their minds. But I love the word false choice, because I think that’s a perfect description of how people kind of fall into this trap of - I need to cram every minute into every hour, and I have to answer the extra e-mail and be super productive, when the reality is as you’ve shown and the research shows - often it’s taking that down time and really taking the time to recharge and kind of pull your conscious mind away from some of the work when you really end up producing the most and doing the best work. 

Josh:	And this is on the short-term basis and a longer term basis, so just a few minutes of downtime when you find your mind drifting for example. There’s fantastic research about what happens in those minutes when our minds are drifting, as well as the longer-term downtime. What happens when you actually take a break, and have a half hour without just taking in lots of information, or get some exercise, or get a chance to have a full-night’s sleep. So the short and long term of it, both have been shown to be quite effective.

Matt:	That kind of segues. You mention in the book, fighting distractions, and you have some pretty counter-intuitive advice to sort of combat when your mind wanders and drifts. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Josh:	Yeah, so this is probably the most counter-intuitive thing in the book. You never hear a report card for a kid that says “Johnny’s really great in class, but he needs to daydream more”, right? It’s so antithetical to what we are encouraged in our lives. Daydreaming, mind wandering, it’s a bad thing, it’s something to scold ourselves for. And, correct me if I’m wrong, let me know if this has ever happened to you, that you’ve been working hard on something and after 15 or 20 minutes, your mind starts drifting. And what do you do? You yell at yourself. You try to beat yourself up to stay on task. What’s wrong with you? Stay focused. That kind of approach. I’ve done that too, I tried that approach for decades. Most people I know have tried that for many, many years. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we tried that experiment, and it failed. Despite yelling at us every time, we still do it. It’s because our attention systems are working quite well. When our minds drift after 15-20 minutes, that’s because our attention systems are doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re not meant to keep us focused, they’re meant to pick up on what’s changing. So they’re meant to pick up on what potential could be threatening, or exciting, or new, or interesting, or worthwhile. That’s what they’re for. If we didn’t have the ability to detect changing things in our environment, we’d just be sitting ducks. So, that’s what we have these systems for. So after a little while, our minds wander, they drift. we should expect that. If we just try to yell at ourselves, clearly that hasn’t worked. But an interesting thing happens if we try some of the alternatives. So basically, I think the two other alternatives are these.

	One is that you go and do something worthwhile or fun. Like you check your e-mail or you see who liked your post on Facebook, or something like that. You read the news, check up on the sports listings. There’s many different ways we might do that. All of those, though, involve tracking a lot of new information. And there’s lots of little exciting things that can grab our attention, positive or negative, but that’ll just keep us in a loop. So easy to get sucks in on auto-pilot and get lost for half hour or more.

Matt:	Easily, yeah. I think everybody’s had the experience of - you click one article and 30 minutes later you’re like “What have I been doing?”

Josh:	Exactly. But that’s not the only option we have. Compared to that option - it makes a little bit of sense to just yell at yourself to try to do anything to try to stay on task even if it’s not actually working. But there’s another option which is actually just to have your mind wander for a few minutes. What happens when our minds wander? Research has shown 3-4 different kinds of effects. One of which is that we integrate the neural circuitry that has to do with executive functions - staying focused on a goal. And the neural circuitry that has to do with thinking about ourselves and thinking about our social interactions. Usually it’s one or the other, neural network that’s more active. But when we’re mind wandering, meaning when our minds are just drifting not thinking about whatever it was we were doing before, then there’s an integration between these networks; they’re active at the same times. So we can find the ways that our goals and our social lives can be linked up together. Which is important, because it’s a single human being doing both. There’s also something called creative incubation. If you’ve been working on a creative puzzle, creative challenge: how am I going to work out this new brand issue? But also it could be something in a management space like “how am I going to choose the right team for a product?” in that case, you’re working on something creative. Then when your mind wanders, and you come back to the challenge. People have been shown to come up with more creative ideas and ideas that are more creative. So both rated more creative, and also more of them. There’s also —

Matt:	That’s fascinating, because that phenomenon. Creative incubation, I’ve never heard the term but I’m intimately familiar with the idea, which is essentially - you’re working on a problem and you step away or you get distracted, or you go have lunch. And you come back to it and suddenly you kind of immediately solve it. Your subconscious has essentially solved the problem for you when you stepped away from it consciously, or when you refocus on something else.

Josh:	Exactly, there’s background processing happening. There’s still things happening in your non-conscious mind. There’s a lot of neural activity going on. Associated with recognizing patterns and connecting the things together, that we can block - we can get in the way of that when we’re tracking new information. So, to most effectively mind wander, though you want to do is do something that will distract you from what you were thinking about, but that doesn’t require you to track new information because that will block the mind wandering. So that’s also been shown in research. We can learn how to effectively mind wander. How do be good at mind wandering.  So, some things that will do that well, are for example staring out the window and just watching the people go by. Or looking at some art on the wall. It's thing that holds some interest, but don’t require you to track information. And this is my favorite part of it. There’s a built-in end point. It gets boring. So after a few minutes, you’re going to drift back. So if your mind wants to wander, the thing to do is to let it wander. Facilitate that even by going and staring out the window. Taking that moment. After a few minutes, you’re likely to drift back, and when you do you’re going to be more effective at the work you’re doing, and you’re going to be back far quicker than any other method that you’ve got. So you'll be back to work quicker, and you’ll be more effective when you do. If you let your mind wander. So that’s why it’s so counter intuitive. Because really in that moment what we really need to do is have a little self-compassion and recognize: my mind is wandering for a reason, I’m going to let it and just wait until I’m back. Because that turns out to be the fastest way to get back in a really useful way. There’s a couple other things we can go into about what mind wandering enables, but those two examples may be enough for now.

Matt:	Yeah I think - let’s - I want to cover a few other topics as well but I think that’s an incredible important idea and I’m definitely going to do some more digging on the creative incubation topic, I’m glad now that I have kind of the buzzword for that phenomenon. 

Josh:	And it doesn’t make people more creative in general, it makes people more creative about what they were trying to solve right before the mind wandering.

Matt:	Fascinating. One of the other topics that I was interested in talking about - you mentioned a number of times in the book “working memory” and how important that is. I was curious, one if you could talk a little bit about why working memory is so important. And two, what are some ways that people can sort of train or improve their working memory? 

Josh:	So, working memory is a term for what we are able to hold consciously in mind at any one time. So those things, it’s memory in the sense that we’re actually retaining information, but it’s a very short term kind of thing. It’s what we’re working with in the moment. So, a lot of research on that pertains to productivity will have, as a dependent measure, how it effects working memory. Sometimes the dependent will be concentration, sometimes it’ll be attention, sometimes it’ll be emotional consequences, effects on anxiety. Sometimes it’s a general perceived sense of it being able to feel refreshed and be present, and feel focused. Working memory is definitely part of that. It’s an important part of what researchers will call the executive functions. The functions that we really rely on are uniquely human parts of our brains for that have a lot to do with the information that we’re consciously aware of in the moment. Now, there’s clearly as we were just talking about, mind wandering, lots of important stuff that happens in the background, not conscious. But your working memory, the more you’re able to hold in mind and kind of work within the moment - well, the more flexible you can be in the way that you solve problems. It definitely can be helpful. There are debates about whether or not a person can really change their working memory capacity, but what we can do is make it easier for us, for ourselves to really rely on to use our working memory. So if I’m highly distracted by being overly anxious by something. That’s going to make it hard. That’s going to make it harder for me to hold in mind those things that I need to hold in mine. Something that will really help me become less anxious is a little bit of exercise. One of the more reliable things we have for it. Also, it’s been shown that certain environmental factors like bright lights, especially lights that are more on the cool end of the spectrum, have some of the blue in them. Make it easier for people to do some of these executive functions, like making use of their working memory. Another thing that’s quite helpful for that and this one also similar to the anxiety example I was giving has a lot to do with sort of competing input - is sound. When there’s silence, it’s much easier to do tasks that require working memory. When there’s a little bit of noise in the background, sometimes that’s been shown to be helpful with very creative kinds of tasks, probably very - probably doesn’t really apply to writing. I’d like to see research that specifically looks at that just because that’s so verbal, so that should interfere with sound. But we have some creative tasks when it primes the concept of being free from constraints, then a little bit of noise has been shown to help. But for the most part, tasks that are going to require executive functions and rely on working memory for example, are going to be a lot harder for us to do when there’s noise in the background. And that’s noise of any kind, but the absolute hardest thing to work around is speech. 

Matt:	And that was one of the most surprising findings for me when I read the book, was the idea - I love kind of putting on some background music. It’s sad, but you can’t argue with the research that even a little bit of background music actually negatively impacts your productivity. 

Josh:	Yeah, it is sad. I felt the same way and also I love coffee shops. But the truth is - the research would suggest, and as I look at it, I guess my experience does seem to follow that too. I am less productive there with all that background noise. One thing I will say though is that we don’t need to be at our best all the time. And, we can’t be at our best all the time. So, when you’ve got that work that’s really important - you’ve decided this is a project I need to nail. I’ve got to pitch to the CEO. I really want to nail this. When you’re working on that, that would be an ideal time to give yourself a quiet space with good lighting and to maybe come to it after a little exercise, or at least not come to it right after doing something else that really depleted you. Then you’re likely to be highly effective. You don’t need to be at your absolute best for everything. There’s some things you can do where you're just doing an initial draft of some thoughts, and you know you’re going to clean it up the next day. Or you’re going through some paperwork, some reimbursements, or something you need to file that doesn’t really need your attention - you’ve done it a hundred times. Sure, put on some music, you will work more slowly, and you’re not going to pay as much attention to detail, but that won’t matter in that case. You might enjoy it a little bit more. So it doesn’t mean we have to never work with music on in the background, but just realize that for those periods, for those two awesome hours, then we want silence.

Matt:	So one of the kind of related question that I had about working memory and you may not have an answer to this because this is a little bit outside the scope of the book, but I’m curious. Do brain games, or brain training or anything like that, do those things work and do you think those things can help people improve working memory?

Josh:	Here’s what I’ve heard. I know that there’s been research independent of the companies, obviously when the companies are doing the research then they’re motivated to find things that will support them, which doesn’t mean it’s bad research. It’s still good research. It’s just you also want to have research from independent sources. So, some things I’ve seen. First of all, the training, it does seem to make people better at the specific thing that they’re working on. And we’re talking very specific. So, if someone’s trying to learn to control their responses on a Tetris-like game, a game where you need to quickly move a piece so it doesn’t fall into the wrong spot on the screen. Then that is - can definitely help them to improve the skill of visually moving pieces around and making sure they don’t fall into the wrong spot. Whether that’s going to then generalize though, is the piece that is not yet showing up. And it may. But at least one piece of research that I’ve seen was showing that self-control in one domain, training that, didn’t improve self-control in a different domain. Even though we know there’s a lot of overlap in the brain structures that are involved in self-control, let’s say for controlling your emotions and controlling what you eat. None the less, they must be different enough that the kind of brain training that can happen in these computer training things didn’t seem to carry over. Now that’s just one domain, that’s self-control, whether that would be the same for working memory and attention and various other things like that, remains to be seen. So, it’s an empirical question. A question for research, and I’m sure we’re going to see research on that over the next five years.

Matt:	Speaking of emotions. You have a pretty interesting take on how to handle and potentially use negative emotions to your advantage. Tell me a little bit more about that. 

Josh:	Oh, yeah. So, emotions are something that I think many people think of as something that just happens to them. That we’re a victim of our emotions, it’s like “Oh I wish I wasn’t feeling sad today”, or “I’m happy, I’m feeling confident, feeling really good today”, that it’s just something that happens to us. But, in fact, our emotions are adaptive. They are things that we use. They have utility. They don’t just exist in a vacuum. Our emotions are important parts of what motivates us. And different emotions motivates us in different ways. So anger is unique among the negative emotions and that’s the only negative emotion that motivates us to move towards something. So, anger is especially useful in a context where we need to move towards something that is unpleasant. If we’re moving towards something pleasant, say a pretty girl looks at you from across the room, well, yeah, you want to go and approach her, there’s no downside, presuming that you’re single and etc. but if you want to approach something that’s unpleasant, that maybe you need to raise prices and your clientele, psychotherapist needs to raise prices periodically. And my fear that in doing so, that’s going to drive some people away because they’ll feel like there was a verbal contract, an agreement, about what the cost of the services were. Every couple of years, anybody needs to do this, and so having a little bit of anger around, that might actually be helpful in motivating yourself to take that on. Saying, you know what, getting a little angry about the injustice of it. “I deserve this, I give so much.” That actually can be motivating, can help the person. It’s not the only way to motivate yourself, but recognizing that every emotion is there for a reason. It has value, it’s adaptive in certain consequences. Can actually help us look at our emotions differently, and rather than just trying to get rid of them, instead be aware of what your emotion is when you come to a decision point. “Hey I’m a little angry right now! I’m going to go ahead and take on that price increase idea that I was dealing with.” 
	
	Or sadness is an emotion where in fact we tend to pay more attention to the detail. We tend to be more likely to actually think about somebody’s arguments rather than just thinking about whether it’s an attractive person giving the argument. So, when you need to be really kind of prudent, a little sadness can be useful. Might be helpful to get yourself into a mood where you’re remembering something a little sad. Not the only way to do it, but it actually can be helpful in that context. Anxiety can help us focus. Now it’ll help us focus only on what we’re anxious about, but it can help us focus. Little bit of anxiety is also very energizing. Lot of energy, focused energy on particularly something that you want to avoid going wrong. And that can be just the right thing at certain times. So these are not necessarily bad things, and when you know that about anxiety, then perhaps you find yourself with a little anxiety, just taking a moment and saying to yourself, “Hey thanks! Thanks, self, thanks biological self. For helping to get me energized for this. You wouldn’t be anxious unless there was something to be energized about.” Maybe it feels a little negative, but that’s readiness. And when we don’t recognize that, and we try to just get rid of the anxiety, then we can get anxious about feeling anxious. And then it feels much more unpleasant. So with a negative emotion, if we think about the utility of it, and on the positive side, positive emotions - when you’re feeling good, you’re more likely to collaborate effectively. Because you’re more likely to see, you’re more likely to anticipate the collaboration going well. When you’re feeling good, you’re more likely to come to creative solutions. You’re more likely to just let the small things go, look at the big picture. Does this seem like a generally likable person? And not be so critical of the specific arguments they might be making. There are times when that’s exactly what you want. So, emotions are a great thing to check in on when you’re having a decision point. But there’s also - if you don’t want to get that granular with your emotions, you can just think in general, am I strongly emotional right now? Therefore, is it going to be hard for me to concentrate. Maybe this is not the time for me to take on preparing for that CEO pitch. Maybe I should wait an hour. Or, did I just do something that made me strongly emotional? Having a really tough conversation, or getting some really tough feedback. Maybe now is the time to go do something like get a little exercise to reset for the rest of the day. So we can really take into account our emotions at these decision points.

Matt:	I think that’s a fantastic idea and it’s such a useful tool to be able to harness those emotions instead of just being upset about them or not coping with them.

Josh:	Yeah, we can use them, we don’t have to just wish them away. 

Matt:	So, one of the other topics that you touch on in great detail in the book is the idea of mental fatigue, which I think, correct me if I’m wrong, is similar or the same as the concept of decision fatigue? Tell me a little bit about that and how that impacts our decision making process.

Josh:	I would consider decision fatigue a subset of mental fatigue. That essentially, we wear out, and in particular, we wear out our ability to control ourselves. And decision making is a part of that. We come, we made too many decisions. Each time you’re making decisions you’re essentially controlling yourself. You’re trying to - you know, not make all the other decisions in favor of just one. So, I’ve got to decide not to eat the Danish in the morning. I’ve got to decide not to have the cookie at lunch. I’ve got to decide not to have the cake when somebody’s got a birthday party at work, then finally at the end of the day just worn out with all of this trying to keep myself from doing that, and I have a  bunch of ice cream. We’re wearing that out as we go. Where the decision fatigue really comes in - we’re making decisions all the time, and it doesn’t matter how big or small they are, we’re still wearing out the same resource. When I say wearing out, it’s not that you couldn’t keep going if you were sufficiently motivated, you could keep going - like to think of it like running. If you just ran a half hour, you could keep going if you were sufficiently motivated if someone was chasing you. But you’re probably not all that interested in doing it at that point. Similar thing happens with our mental fatigue or decision fatigue. After we’ve been doing it for a while, we just don’t want to keep doing it. And there are consequences to this because we can’t get through the day without making a lot of decisions. Oftentimes, though, this is the piece that I think is really helpful for people to capture. Which is that, just because something’s important, doesn’t mean that we’re making more decisions. You can wear out your decision making abilities by making a lot of unimportant decisions, or by making decisions about things that are unimportant. So, for example, I like to pick on e-mail because it’s such a common experience. A lot of e-mails are not that important. Some, certainly are important. But a lot of e-mails are not that important. But still, you’ve gotta make decisions about whether this is the right time to send it, whether we’ve included the right people, whether we’ve said something in an offensive way. So many little decisions for each one. So, at the end of an hour, hour and a half of checking e-mail. You can pretty reliably expect that you’ve got some real decision fatigue. And it’s going to be a lot harder to actually then do some really effective work. You’re less likely to be good at doing effective work at that point, than if you had a half hour break between e-mail and effective work. Or if you just did the e-mail after the effective work. Because you won’t be fatiguing yourself. There’s consequences in this in legal arenas, medical arenas. When I say legal arenas, judges for example, by the end of the day to get to the afternoon, they’ve got decision fatigue. They’ve been making decisions all day long. So the kinds of decisions they hand down, they tend to resort to whatever their default is. If it’s a more conservative judge, the more conservative decisions, whatever their default is, they’re just sort of fatigues essentially. And they’re not necessarily aware. They’re not necessarily aware of making a different decision, but they are making different decisions. It’s just too hard to actually deliberate at that point.

Matt:	I think I’ve heard, and it may have been in the book of a study where they looked at judges kind of before each of their meal periods. I think they were more likely to sentence people to longer sentences right before they ate. Or I guess right before they got a break. It’s a fascinating study, but it’s pretty shocking when you think that even the judicial system is impacted by something like that.

Josh:	The biological consequences on decision making are what essentially what we’re talking about. What does it mean to have a human being making these decisions? It mean we need to optimize the human decision making machine. We need to try to find ways to get judges to be in a really good mental space when they’re making those decisions. And human beings are still the best at making complex, morally based decisions. We haven’t created a computer that can do that better than a human. So, what we can start to do though, is really focus on how do you do get a human being to be able to really give their best to the decisions that they’re making? And part of it is going to involve having a shift in the way that they organize their days. That was research that was not in my book, so you must have found it elsewhere, but it definitely fits.

Matt:	The most important take-away for me there is it’s not the importance of the decision that causes mental fatigue. You can make a bunch of totally irrelevant decisions and you’re still going to enter a state of mental fatigue regardless of how important the quality of those decisions were. 

Josh:	That’s right, you can be making decisions about what to wear, and when to schedule something on your calendar, what flight you want to take to go across the country. Those are decisions that are not going to have a major effect on your life, but it’s still fatigues. It still wears out that decision making ability. 

Matt:	So, changing directions a little bit. You’re a master practitioner of NLP. Tell me how does NLP play into Two Awesome Hours.

Josh:	That’s a different arena. The ways that it probably influences me when I was writing is that NLP, for those people who don’t know, is essentially a branch of psychotherapy that some people have adapted for other things as well. But in the late seventies, early eighties, there were some linguists who studied some very successful psychotherapists and looked at the language patterns they used. Then went around teaching those to psychotherapists, and teaching as well what those original therapists were paying attention to in the language of their clients. Eventually they also expanded it to non-verbal communication. So those patterns that they were detecting were very successful. They were in the realms of hypnotherapy, of family therapy and gestalt therapy primarily. So, it’s a collection of language patterns and non-verbal communication patterns that are associated with some very successful psychotherapists. Over time, people have adapted that to be relevant to marketing, and coaching, and various other things. So, for me, what NLP is quite helpful with is helping me to recognize in myself and in others, the ways that we’re actually thinking about the work that we do. So, if I hear someone talking about how they just have to get to a certain project by a certain time. That kind of feeling of overwhelm. I know it’s a very different experience for them than if they’re saying, well I get to do this project, or I want to do this project. I helped me to really tune into some of the challenges that were facing as well as some of the things that people are doing that are successful. Those served as hypothesis about what might be useful. How we might be able to set up the conditions for these brief periods of effectiveness. So that when I did go to the research, that could guide me towards things to start to look for. Then I might find the hypothesis sometimes come from there, it would sometimes come from other places, and then I’d go to the search and if the research didn’t back it up, then I would use that to color what I could say and try to bring that to the book. And if the research didn’t back that up, then I would leave it. Because it wasn’t a fruitful way to go. That’s kind of how the pieces fit together for me.

Matt:	Awesome, and that was a great description for NLP, thank you very much. That was probably helpful for the audience. That relates a little bit to one of the topics you talk about is the idea of priming, and obviously with NLP it’s about language and the non-verbals that prime you, but you talk about physical spaces and how they can prime us. I thought that was fascinating.

Josh:	Right, there’s three categories that I really focused on in the book that I chose because I wanted to just talk about things that anyone would have some ability to influence. There’s so many of us work in work spaces that we have no control over. Maybe it’s an open plan office, we have no say over the color of the walls or the lighting or anything like that, that’s coming from overhead. The sound in the space can be tough. I wanted to focus specifically on some of the things we do have control over within that that we could influence. This is also relevant for of course anyone who does have complete control over their environment or who works from home and uses part of shared space for their work and partly for something else. 

	The categories are these, and one of these we talked about before, which is sound. Which is noise. That understanding the importance of it for concentration, I think can help go a long way in terms of people making decisions about when they really want to carve out that time. I think it’s useful to come back to this idea for a moment, that we don’t need to be on and at our best all day long, and we can’t be. But what we can do is think about the work that really matters, then think about how can I set up a couple hours, maybe just one hour, maybe three hours. Nothing magic about two, it’s just that it’s achievable for anyone. How can I set up a brief period of time to really get to that work? One of the things that will matter is silence that will make a big difference. What we can do is, because it really makes a difference, is it actually is worth if you can doing it in the morning before you go into work and going in a little bit later. Reserving a conference room if you can in your workspace if you have an ability to shut a door and do it. Or actually getting noise cancelling headphones so you can put them on for that time period. And you could have music at other times, but during that time you’d have it silent. So this is speech, white noise, music, any of those things they all have been shown to be worse. There’s only a couple of exceptions. Some research for example with kids that have a  lot of trouble paying attention seem to perform a little bit better at some tasks when there is some background white noise, that just sort of nondescript sounds like a fan. But for most people, they’re having an easier time paying attention without noise, and the hardest one to tune out is speech. So if there’s no option but to have either speech or white noise, then yeah, better with white noise. But even better is silence. For those periods when it really matters, you’ll work more effectively, you’ll work more quickly, it’ll be easier to stay on task. 
	
	The second one is lighting. Now, you may not be able to influence the overhead lighting or whether you sit next to a window. One thing that has been shown is bright lights make it easier for people to stay focused and that light on the blue end on the spectrum. So apparently we have photo receptors in our eyes that are not part of vision. They were only discovered within the last 15 years. They had been hypothesized before that, but we finally know about them now, they’ve been identified. They don’t have to do with vision, what they have to do is resetting the circadian clock. The part of the brain that runs those 24-hour cycles. Those roughly daily cycles about when we’re hungry, when we’re alert, when we’re sleepy. Light at the blue end of the spectrum, the best example of that would be clear blue sky. Light at the blue end of the spectrum activates these receptors and helps to reset the circadian clock. So when we have access to that kind of light, cool light, they’re - you can look at when you go to the hardware store it’ll say whether it’s cool light or whether it’s warm light. It’s not for everything - we want warm light is nice when you’re having people over for dinner or you’re just relaxing. But when you want to focus, cool light has been shown to be more effective. And even more effective at things like the kind of mental rotation work that engineers or designers have to do, they seem to be more effective at it with that light. So really it does make a difference. You can have a lamp at your desk that adds some additional light just for brightness, or you get one of those bulbs that’s at the cool ends of the spectrum. Don’t have to have it on all the time, but when you really need to focus, that’s been shown to help. As with sound, dim lighting also can be helpful for creativity. One of the exceptions is creativity and what matters is whether the environment primes the idea of being free from constraints, and that might happen with dim lighting, it might happen with having a little noise in the background, it might happen by being by a window, or being out in nature. But if that idea is primed, people tend to be more creative. So that’s sort of a caveat, an exception. But for the most part with the work we’re trying to do, it’s helpful to have the bright light. 

	In the third piece with the environment has to do with the space you’re sitting at or standing at. There’s a couple of things that matter here. One of them is clutter. And for some people you can think, well you know I can get my work done well enough with all the clutter, I just don't have the time to get that out, I’ve got to get down to work. Somebody once did a study about what we leave on our desk when we leave stuff out. For the most part, it’s reminders, it’s things that are meant to be reminders of something, and if you take a moment and kind of just think about what we would be reminding ourselves of, well it’s the things we didn’t get to, because they were hard. Or because it was unpleasant, or because we didn’t know how to do it. So because of that, they’re probably going to continue to sit there for a couple of days, maybe more. And then what gets added to it is the negative association, this embarrassment, I haven’t gotten back to someone, the social obligation. It’s all the stuff that our attention systems are so well attuned to. Very important to us, things that pertain to social obligations, things that have weight, have some that are threatening in some way because we don’t know how to do them but they’re still pending, right? They are exactly what you don’t want to expose your attention system to when you’re sitting down to really do some work that you’ve already chosen what’s worth spending your time on. You can work at a cluttered desk when you’re doing the unimportant stuff, but when you’re sitting down to have a really good period, it’s worth it just to stack those things up and move it out of sight. What that also does, and this is the final thing I’ll say on it. It creates the opportunity to move more freely at your desk, to spread out, to have big expansive movements. To reach for that cup of water on the far-end of the desk or your phone at the other end of the desk. When we have bigger, more expansive movement, that activates, primes, the idea of power. Especially in western cultures. Bigger expansive movements. And that can put a person in an optimistic space, in a more comfortable taking risks - that kind of a space. There’s even some research to suggest that that can influence our hormone levels and put us in a more resilient hormonal space. So the consequence of that - there’s also then you can think about your workspace in terms of movement in the sense of how easy is it to get up and walk away? To step back for a minute and clear your head. Or to switch from a sitting down to standing desk, not everybody has that capacity but the ability to stand up and walk away, that’s going to create greater opportunities for mind wandering and for making use of your decision points. So those are some of the ways that I think - some of the ways that the environment can prime our thinking and therefore get us into a space to be really effective that I think anyone has some influence over.

Matt:	I think it’s really funny, there’s a quote, you’ve probably heard it. I think it’s Einstein that said it, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what’s the sign of an empty desk?” Something like that. Which people use of course to kind of defend their messiness. But of course you can’t really argue with what the research says at the end of the day. 

Josh:	Right, yeah. I mean, yes it is a very full mind. A mind full of things that you have to keep track of when you’re trying to work on something. I think so, I think you have a very full mind when you’ve got lots of things, and we want to actually clear that out for the sake of the work. Just temporarily.

Matt:	For people like me who’ve read Two Awesome Hours, what further books or resources would you suggest checking out.

Josh:	There are a few authors who endorse my book on the back cover who I strongly recommend their work, you’ll see Heidi Grant Halverson, she’s written a number of books, her most recent one is No One Understands You, which is a dive into the science and practice of recognizing - not just how to communicate well, but also what it is we do that we’re not aware of about the ways we communicate and the messages we give off without even meaning to and how to correct that. David Rock is also one of the people who endorsed my book, Your Brain at Work, if you like what you’ve read here you’d probably love that. And also Peter Bregman, the author of both Eighteen Minutes and Four Seconds, really similar lines of thinking. For people who like to - you mention the book, The Art of Learning. In that space, there’s a work I’d also recommend by Art Markman, at the University of Austin Texas and has authored a couple of books that have essentially teaching people how to think. How to learn so they’re more likely to have smart solutions to new things that come their way. There’s a lot of great stuff out there right now. There’s also a book coming but it’s not out yet, keep an eye out for a book by Jamel Zaki, I don’t have the title to be able to give you just yet. Those are some of the things that I would recommend. Also, you can see my stuff, I write periodically blog posts that you’ll see on the Harvard Business Review or Huffington Post site today. If you want to take a look at what’s in Two Awesome Hours there’s also an excerpt available for it on the website for it, twoawesomehours.com 

Matt:	So where can people find you and the book online?

Josh:	The easiest way to do it is twoawesomehours.com, you’ll find links there to contact me, you’ll find links there excerpts there, links to the various bookstores, ways to find it, amazon.com directly of course too. Barnes N Noble, all the other main sources of ways to get it. Link too from there, and you can contact me there, contact my publicist there, I’d love to hear from you. So please stop by and visit the website or if you already know you want it, then of course you can get it right away. It also should be available in many bookstores in your area.

Matt:	Josh, thank you so much for being on the science of success, I know people are going to love this interview. I think everyone should absolutely check out Josh’s new book Too Awesome Hours, science based strategies to harness your best time and get your most productive work done. I think everyone will really enjoy that book.

Josh:	Thank you so much, it’s been great talking with you.

Limiting Beliefs

December 15, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence

On this week's episode of "The Science of Success", Matt explores the subconscious' role in our ability to be successful. Looking at powerful core beliefs--beliefs that could be holding you back from your true potential--he walks us through ways of re-drawing everything we think we know about ourselves.

Thank you so much for listening!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

This is some incredibly powerful stuff and I want you to pay close attention. I want to start with the idea of a pyramid of behavior. There’s really four levels. The first level is results. One level below that are actions. One level below that are thoughts. And one level deeper below that are beliefs. So beliefs are at the base of the pyramid. What this means is that your beliefs impact your thoughts, and your thoughts lead to your actions, and your actions create the results that you see in the world. So, most people focus the majority of their energy on changing their actions, on the very top level of the pyramid. I’m sure we’ve all had an experience - I know that I have, of reading something - this new strategy, this new productivity hack, whatever it might be - and you go about implementing it into your life. Then a few months down the road it kinda slips and you stop doing it and sooner or later you’ve sort of given it up, right? Then you’re just back to doing what you normally do. The reason that that happens is because you’re focusing on making the changes in your life at the action level of the pyramid. But the actions come from the thoughts, and the thoughts come from the beliefs that you have about the world. And these beliefs are subconscious stories that we tell ourselves. This is what our subconscious really thinks and feels and believe about the world. And so when you focus all of your energy on changing your actions, you’re fighting the tide. You’re not really making long term changes. You’re only changing things at the surface. The highest leverage and biggest impact place that you can make changes in your life is at the belief level. 

Remember when we talked about the biological limits of the mind? The subconscious drives the majority of our behavior. And it puts us on auto-pilot in many instances in our lives and we don’t even realize it. But when you make a decision in many cases, your subconscious has already made that decision for you, and you’re consciously finding a reason or a justification for why you’re making that decision. But here’s where it gets really interesting - your subconscious doesn’t care if you’re happy. Your subconscious doesn’t care if you’re fulfilled. It doesn’t care if you live a purposeful, meaningful life. The only thing your subconscious mind cares about, and this was programmed into it by millions of years of evolution. Remember we talked about that. The only thing your subconscious mind cares about is survival. And not just physical survival, not just keeping your body alive, but the subconscious mind wants to keep your identity alive. And so, the subconscious mind locks you into behavioral patterns again and again and again that are sometimes destructive, that are sometimes behavioral patterns you do not want to be in, and the behavioral patterns at a conscious level you desperately want to change. We’ve all experiences or somebody with struggling with something, struggling with a life change, you make some new year’s resolution says that “this time is going to be the time I’m really going to do it; I’m going to make a change.” And of course, a month or two later, they break down, they had that chocolate cake for dessert, they eat an unhealthy lunch, whatever it might be, and suddenly they just give up and they – “I’ll never be able to do that, I’ll never be able to eat healthy, I’m never going to be able to lose weight I’ll never be able to start a business.” Whatever it might be, they give up on their dreams. Even though they don't want to do that, the subconscious is extremely powerful, it overwhelms change at the action level, because change at the action level are not permanent and don’t matter. 

Your subconscious doesn’t care about you being happy. The only thing your subconscious cares about is keeping you alive and keeping your identity alive. Now let’s look at the way that that manifests itself. The subconscious will lock you into a behavior cycle because the subconscious uses a very simple method for determining what is an effective survival tactic. It doesn’t look at the long run health implications of eating a cheeseburger every day for lunch for twenty years. All it says is, “Did I eat unhealthy in the past? Yes. Did it keep me alive? Am I alive right now? Yes. Alright keep doing that.” That’s the whole cycle of thought and action that your subconscious programs in. So whatever your identity is today, however that’s evolved, the people in your life, the stories in your life, the actions you’ve taken, your subconscious runs a test and says “is this keeping me alive?” again, it’s not looking. It doesn’t have the ability to forecast out using actual tables whether the decisions you’re making are best for your health or happiness in the long term, all it’s thinking about “is this keeping me alive today? Yes? Alright keep doing that.” And that’s why you see people get locked into behavior patterns, even things like smoking where they keep doing the same destructive thing over and over and over again. The subconscious sees change as dangerous, and again this has been programmed into our mind. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Change is dangerous in many cases in a hunter-gatherer society. And these decisions are much different than they are today where we have much longer term implication where we have some of our systematic decisions we have to make. 

But what this means is that change is resisted by the subconscious because it’s dangerous and because it’s unknown. Even if you know consciously that this change is incredibly beneficial for you- that you need to make it, that your health requires that you make it, that your business requires that you make it, whatever it might be - your subconscious doesn’t care. Remember, your subconscious doesn’t care about you being happy, it doesn’t care about you being successful. What it does care about is not doing things that it things are unknown and things it thinks are dangerous. And changes to your identity are perceived by the subconscious as extremely dangerous. The subconscious will do whatever it has to, to keep that identity alive. And the way the subconscious makes these decisions, the filter the subconscious uses are your beliefs about the world. And that’s what we talked about when we talked about perceiving reality. But I’m going to dig into that a little bit more deeply. I’m going to share with you a few examples of limiting beliefs.

Let’s start with the idea of the fear of sales. That’s something that many people struggle with, many people are afraid of, especially entrepreneurs, people starting their business. And we’ll also talk about the fear of success. Here are some of the ways the fear of sales or even the fear of failure can manifest themselves in limiting beliefs. And we’ll talk about how to uncover and really listen to yourself telling these stories. But here’s some things you might say to yourself even in the back of your head, you might not even notice it but it’s underpinning a lot of your actions. If you have a fear of failure or a fear of sales and this is just an example. There are limiting beliefs pervading your life in many, many different areas, and I’ll share with you a number of limiting beliefs that I had in a few minutes.

One, I might get rejected. Two, I might look sales-y, Who wants to be that cheesy, slimy salesman, right? People might not like me. Fear of financial failure. Fear to start the sales call, and fear to close. I don’t want to jeopardize my relationship, I don’t want to be that rude guy who goes in for the sales close, right? These are all little beliefs, little feelings, little stories we tell ourselves - I’m not going to be the sales-y guy so I’m not going to make the sales call, I’m not going to be the pussy guy that goes in for the close. Again, I’m not a sales trainer, I’m not here to talk to you about sales, these are just examples of limiting beliefs of stories you tell yourself that cause you to self-sabotage.

Here’s some examples of fears of success. We have these beliefs, these stories about what is okay, what buckets are acceptable for us to live our lives in. How much money it’s okay for us to make. And if we get outside of those buckets, our subconscious will cause us to self-sabotage so that we stay within the buckets that we feel like are okay. Because your subconscious doesn’t care about how much money you make, your subconscious doesn’t care about how successful you are. All it cares about is repeating whatever cycle has kept you alive today. So here’s some examples of the fear of success. I’m already overwhelmed and I don’t want to work more. I’m afraid I won’t be able to deliver on the promises I make. I’m afraid of a loss of freedom. I’m afraid of not being able to trust people. These are all stories, these are all limiting beliefs that people have who are afraid of success. And some of these ring incredibly true for me, and I’ve spent countless hours working on them. The loss of freedom in particular is something that I am terrified of and is something that has caused me to self-sabotage in many instances and something I’ve constantly battled against.

I wanted to share with you a couple real life examples of limiting beliefs that I have suffered with, myself personally. This is actually… I put this together this morning. This is actually a new project that I’m launching, and I’m not going to get into too much detail about the project but it’s something I’ve been procrastinating on, not going to lie. And procrastination is usually a very good indicator that you haven’t identified and rooted out the limiting beliefs that you have about that particular topic or project, and I went through the exercise this morning and I realized that there’s a number of limiting beliefs that I have about that project, and that’s why I’ve been procrastinating. I should have made progress on this two weeks ago and I’ve done absolutely nothing. Here are the limiting beliefs that have stopped me from doing that. 1. I’m afraid people won’t buy it. 2. I’m afraid that I can’t execute it and that I don’t have the ability to pull it off. 3. I’m afraid that my business partners won’t see the strategy the same way that I do, and it’ll cause tension between us. 4. I’m afraid that I don’t have enough time to do it, does that one sound familiar? Does that one sound just like one of the fears of success? And lastly, I’m scared to put myself out there with this project. So those are all real beliefs about a project that I’m working on right now that I know that I have. And I’m going to work through the framework that we’ll talk about in a minute to break down and destroy these limiting beliefs, but just those beliefs lurking in my subconscious has cost me at least two weeks, maybe more, on a project that I know has the potential to revolutionize one of my businesses. That’s how powerful limiting beliefs are. That’s how damaging limiting beliefs are. 

Here’s another example of real world limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that I’ve had to work through, but the first time I ever went through the limiting belief framework, I identified a core belief about myself that I’m an introvert. And the number of sub-beliefs and what you’ll do when you go through this framework the first time, usually you’ll uncover a series of beliefs that are what I would call surface level beliefs. They’re beliefs that are kind of bubbling to the top. But the more you drill down, you’ll find that there are some really, really core beliefs about the world and about yourself that inform a lot more other beliefs. So, here the root belief here is that I’m an introvert. But here’s a bunch of limiting beliefs that manifested from that belief. I’m too shy. I can’t relate to anyone. I hate small talk. I’m awkward around people. I don’t like sharing myself with people. I feel trapped in conversations with people and just want to leave. I don’t speak up for myself in a business context. And I don’t want to talk to my customers in a business context. And so, think about that. Those are all extremely damaging beliefs. And those are all beliefs that I identified about myself about this core belief that I was an introvert. And it’s something that I’ve been able to reposition and change and we’ll talk about how to do that in a second but it’s something that I’ve been able to break down and the first time I went through this framework, I went to a cocktail party the night after I had done that with my wife, an she was shocked at all the strangers that I was chatting up and the people I was talking to and all the stuff that i was doing, but it was because I’d broken down these beliefs, and I’d uncovered what was really at the core of all this stuff like I’m not good at small talk and all these other things. These are just examples, again, I’m just trying to show you with some of my personal examples, how limiting beliefs impact your life in so many ways. And if you really dig in any particular area of your life, you’re going to find limiting beliefs there. And you’re going to find beliefs that have been holding you back, sometimes for years. And limiting beliefs that if you’d overturned them, you could have seen massive success in whatever you’re trying to achieve.

Some of the deepest limiting beliefs. There’s two really, really core limiting beliefs that rule people’s lives, and I’ve struggled with both of these, I’m not going to lie. But these are related to fear. And one of the deepest and you’ll probably uncover one of these two, maybe both of these beliefs, when you really dig into the framework, but one of these beliefs is that I am not enough. And that usually stems from early childhood, but it’s an incredibly powerful belief. People who believe that they’re not enough, so everything is about trying to be enough, trying to become - instead of just being. The other one is that the world is dangerous. This one for me was earth-shattering and it pervaded my life and my need to control things around me for the vast majority of my life, 25+ years. That was a belief that I did not write down when I was going through my initial inventory of the most damaging limiting beliefs in my life, and I uncovered it after a series of beliefs that I realized that that was the root of all of those beliefs. And when I went through the four question framework to break that belief down, I broke down into tears and I was bawling crying because it was such a core, powerful belief rooted in my subconscious. This is really intense stuff but it’s incredibly important, emotional work to do and you will see a dramatic change in your life when you break down these beliefs.

So how do you break down limiting beliefs? There’s a three step process. The first is to become aware of your limiting beliefs. The second is to challenge the truth behind those beliefs - and there’s a tried and true framework for doing that. Then the third is to implant and normalize and pattern new beliefs and a new identity into your subconscious. 

So how do you become aware of your limiting beliefs? I gave you some examples and if any of those ring true to you or sound like something you would use to describe yourself, you’re probably struggling with some of the beliefs that I just shared with you. But there’s a couple different ways to cultivate the ability to be aware of your beliefs. One of the most powerful ways to do that, which we’re going to have a podcast on soon, is on meditation. Meditation is an incredible tool for really becoming aware of your thoughts and becoming aware of what is going on in your mind and catching yourself when you have these thoughts that you can then peg and say, “Hey wait a second. That was a limiting belief. I’m sitting here working on a project and this thought just flashed into my mind - ‘I can’t do it, I can’t execute on that, I’m not the right guy for that.’” Whatever it might be. The meditation trains your mind to capture and see your thoughts with sort of an impartiality that lets you then write them down and address them later.

So meditation is a start. The second way to do that is to look at negative fears and emotions you have around what you want to do. Write those down. You know, I love to use something like Evernote and I just keep a running list of limiting beliefs that come up. That I know, hey, that was a limiting belief, boom, and the thing about it is the more you do it, the more you cultivate the ability to see those thoughts flashing across your mind. You have to catch them and write them down, then put them through the framework. But it really requires a brutal self-honesty and cultivated reflection to be able to do that, which is what we talked about on the podcast about accepting reality. You have to accept reality as it is. You can’t wish away your limiting beliefs. They’re there and ignoring them is only going to cause self-sabotage. 

So, how do you challenge the truth behind a limiting belief? There’s a four-question framework that you can run these beliefs through that will obliterate your limiting beliefs It’s an incredibly powerful framework - it is simple, but super effective. And the four questions were developed by Byron Katie in her book The Work, incredible book. Definitely recommend checking that out if you really want to do some deep, self-digging and really put in the heavy emotional work necessary to truly understand some of the stuff. 

But the four questions, the first question is: Is it true? Is this belief true? And just ask yourself that on a surface level. Do you think it’s true? And many times you’ll say “Yes, I think it’s true, yes - I don’t want to be sales-y, yes I don’t think I have what it takes to execute this project. Or sometimes you know even at a surface level, that’s just not true, you know? It’s not really true that I don’t like talking to people - whatever it might be. But the first question is just simply, is it true?

The second question is: Can I absolutely know that it’s true? This is a much different question than the first one. The first question is only about your surface level perception. This is much, much deeper. On the fundamental level: can you know that this is true? What is truth? Can you unquestionably know for absolute certainty that this is the truth? I think that’s a much tougher question to answer, I at least personally feel that there’s very few things that I really know are absolutely true about almost anything. But this is really a deeper, more metaphysical question about, you know, what is the nature of this truth? Is it really true? Has anybody ever in history proven this wrong? Done something different? Have I ever proven this wrong in the past? Has there ever been an example that’s been different than what I believe? And if that’s the case then you cannot absolutely know that it’s true. 

And by the way, one of the things that I should mention about this - I think the most effective way to go through this process is to take out a word document, pen and paper, whatever works for you, and write out your answers. Just write, you know what I mean? I wrote when I was going through some of the really, really powerful beliefs in my life. I wrote a page or more on every one of these answers to these questions. But here’s where the questions start getting really powerful. 

The third question is: How do I react when I think that thought? And you have to really feel into this, feel the emotions that it makes you feel. How do you feel? How do you react when you think that you can’t be successful? That you’re not good with money? That you’ll never lose weight? How does that make you feel? Really dig in, feel the thoughts. Feel what it feels like. Feel the anger, frustration. The rage, whatever it might be. Feel it. Really - let it well up and live in it, write about it. 

The last question is the most powerful question. Who would I be without that thought? This question is beautifully phrased. Who would I be without that thought? It’s not saying that you can get rid of that thought - it’s just a thought exercise. Who would I be without that thought? It’s almost like a weight is lifted off of you. Who would I be without that thought? You would be a better person, you would be more successful, you’d be crushing it, you’d be killing it, you’d be achieving everything you want, you’d be Elon Musk, whatever it is you want to be. As soon as that belief is gone, you can be that person. And that question enables your subconscious to visualize a reality where that belief is no longer true.

So I really want you to spend a lot of time on the last two questions especially. Really dig in, really feel the emotions about what it feels like. And then after you’ve gone through that framework, take the belief that you had, whether it’s the world is dangerous, or I’m not good with money, or I’m afraid to lose my freedom. Whatever the belief might mean. Take that belief and I want you to create a new belief. Not a negative belief - it can’t be the world is not dangerous. Because the mind doesn’t really respond at a subconscious level. The negative doesn’t really mean anything, it’s the world is dangerous and it creates these disassociations. You need to create a new belief like the world is full of love and joy. Or, the more successful I am the more freedom I will have. Has to be a positive belief. Create a new belief, and then that’s where we move into part three. That’s how you plant that new belief into your subconscious. And you do that through a process known as identity patterning. So there’s a couple steps that are necessary to identity pattern. Once you have that new belief, let’s just use the example of: the more successful I am the more freedom I will have. Take that belief, center yourself, and really get present in the moment. Pu your hand over your heart, really center yourself. Really feel it. And then state the belief out loud. The more successful I am, the more freedom I have. Whatever the belief is for you. And then imagine it in your mind, as richly and as powerfully as you can. It’s like the fourth question- imagine the world, your life, who you would be, how it would be without that belief. And feel those emotions. The more emotions you feel, the more gratitude, joy, excitement, happiness that you feel - the more powerful it’s going to be at a subconscious level. You really have to ground those emotions in. Feel it. Really soak it in.

Something else you can do. You can use imagery, you can use photos, you can use music to bind and speak that particular belief, that particular language, to your subconscious. But this process, it’s called identity patterning. It’s not just a one-time thing. You want to do it every day, you want to do it maybe twice a day for a week or two after you’ve really uncovered this belief and you really want to anchor it in. It sounds kind of weird, it sounds kind of goofy, oh put your hand on your heart and all this stuff. The reality is that is speaking to your subconscious at an emotional level. It’s giving your subconscious a new choice. So that when your subconscious faces the same situation, it doesn’t have to choose the choice of “I’m going to self-sabotage this time”. Instead it has this new emotional reality that it has felt, that it knows is possible, and so you can then make a proactive choice and the fear, the anxiety, the struggle, melts away. I really think you should try this out, even if it’s only with a single limiting belief. This will change your life dramatically. This is some really important, extremely powerful, really relevant information and if you execute this, if you try this even with a single belief, I think you’re going to see a lot of change in your life.

Fixed Versus Growth Mindsets

December 08, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence

On this week's episode of "The Science of Success", host Matt Bodnar discusses the difference between the fixed and growth mindsets. Which do you have? Have you even ever heard of it? If you haven't, listen in: It could make all the difference between whether or not you're successful at what you're doing.

Thank you so much for listening!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today, we’re going to talk about the concept of mindset. Specifically, we’re going to talk about the distinction between what’s called the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset and the growth mindset are known by some other terms a little more technical—one is the static or the entity view of intelligence, and the other is the dynamic or the incremental view of intelligence—but we’re just going to use the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset to make it a little bit easier to understand and a little bit more simple. And, honestly, you don’t really need the fancy technical terms to really understand what’s fundamentally kind of a simple yet powerful concept. And this concept was really popularized by the author and psychologist Carol Dweck, which she has a fantastic book. I highly recommend everybody to check it out. It’s called Mindset. And she goes into great detail about this, but the fascinating thing about the distinction between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset, which I’ll tell you all about each of those in a second… But the fascinating thing is that the difference in people’s mindset is detectable as early as age four. And they’ve actually done studies with children before kindergarten and they’ve seen that people start to exhibit traits in certain mindsets at such an early age. And, of course, the distinction continues to manifest itself throughout people’s lives the older that they get.

So, what is the fixed mindset? We’ll start there. The fixed mindset is a belief that people’s basic qualities—such as their intelligence, or their talent, their character, their abilities—are fixed traits. They’re unchangeable. It’s the belief that you have a natural level of talent; you have a natural level of ability that cannot be changed no matter what you do. And so people in the fixed mindset spend the majority of their time trying to document and prove and show everyone else how talented they are. They want to show everybody how smart they are. They want to show everybody how successful they are. Because if you have a fixed, static quantity of something… Let’s just use intelligence as an example. And you can actually have a different mindset for different areas of your life, which you’ll probably find once you understand this distinction. But the fixed mindset is just this belief that you and your abilities are fundamentally static. And that has a bunch of manifestations in the way that you behave, the way you interact in the world, the way you deal with challenges, and many other things. Let’s contrast that to the growth mindset. In the growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities—their intelligence, their talent, their skills, their character—can be developed through hard work, through process, through training, through dedication and focus.

In the growth mindset, where you are today, your current abilities, are just the starting point. So, this seems like a relatively trivial distinction. Okay, so what? So, what if I have a belief that people have fixed abilities or people have malleable abilities? Why does it really matter? Well, before we dig into that, I want to ask you…or I want to read to you four statements, and these are from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. But just take note yourself. See if you agree or disagree with each of these statements. The first statement: “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.” Statement number two: “You can learn new things, but you can’t really change much how intelligent you are.” Statement number three: “No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.” Statement number four: “You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.” And here’s a bonus question as well: Would you rather have lots of success and validation, or lots of challenges? Is success to you about learning and improving, or is success to you about proving that you’re smart, that you’re better than people? Now, clearly statements number one and two were fixed mindset statements, and statements three and four are more growth mindset statements. There’s nothing wrong with being in either mindset. In fact, I was a fixed mindset about many, many areas of my life, including success, sports, athletics, all kinds of different things, and the reality is that limited me and that held me back in many, many ways, which I’ll tell you about in just a second. But there’s nothing wrong with being a fixed mindset because you can always change your mindset, and we’ll talk about how and why to change your mindset towards the end of the podcast. But take stock and really ask yourself. And, again, you maybe…you may have a different view, a different framework or a different belief for different areas in your life. But ask yourself: In the areas that are most important to you, would you rather have success and validation, or would you rather have challenges and opportunities to grow?

So, what are some of the implications of each of these mindsets? The fixed mindset—the belief that my traits, my abilities, my intelligence are unchangeable—leads to a number of behaviors which are often destructive or counterproductive. The first is how people with a fixed mindset approach challenges. In the fixed mindset, challenges are scary. You don’t want to face challenges. And, believe me, I know because this describes me to a tee in so many areas of my life, it was unbelievable. But challenges were always something that would put you on trial. They would show who you really are, and if you failed, you were a failure, and that leads to a deep avoidance of challenges. People on the fixed mindset are scared of challenge because challenge could show them to be a failure, or show them to be not gifted or not good at whatever they want to do, or whatever they have constructed a story that they’re good at. And you can see this behavior manifest itself when people sometimes will intentionally handicap themselves or won’t give it their all, and they hold on to this excuse that, oh, well, I was just playing around; I didn’t give it my all, because it’s a psychological defense, protecting their identity from the fact that if they failed at this challenge, because they believe their abilities are set in stone, their intelligence and talent is fixed, that one failure means they are a failure. It’s a state of being. It’s not a particular outcome.

So, challenges are scary things and they don’t want to be challenged. And the crazy thing about this is that children in the first grade have been given a math test. And they give them a test. You know, everybody… They have two control groups. Everybody gets just a simple math test, right? It’s essentially that kind of grade level. And then they offered the students a choice: They can either take a similar math test, or they can take a much more difficult math test. And this is really when you can start see people breaking out into the fixed versus the growth mindset. Because in the fixed mindset, remember, you have a static view of your mathematical abilities or your intelligence or your smarts, and so people will shy away from the scary, hard test. They want to get another A. They want to thrive and feel successful and feel like they’re smart, because success in the fixed mindset is when things feel effortless and easy, and so they opt for the easier test because they want to be the student that has two As on both of their quizzes so that they can brag about how smart they are. The students with the growth mindset opt for the more challenging quiz because they want to challenge themselves. They want to see new opportunities. They want to learn and they want to push themselves out of their comfort zone and into a place where they may not know the answers, but they know that that’s going to make them better. That’s going to improve them. That’s going to increase their skills and increase their abilities, because they’re not worried about where their abilities are today; they’re worried about improving and getting better.

And that’s a very small example but, if you think about it, you can apply that across people’s lives. People constantly opt for the easy, safe, risk-free, failure-free path because they don’t want to fail, because failure means being labeled a failure. It means your identity is that of a failure, and that’s one of the most dangerous parts of having a fixed mindset. And so that manifests itself in the way that people with a fixed mindset deal with obstacles. Obstacles are a definition. It means I have failed. I have hit a roadblock. Now I have to give up, because if I was good at this naturally, I wouldn’t have any obstacles; because success, to me, is something that’s easy and something that’s effortless, so as soon as I hit an obstacle, I’m going to give up. I’m just going to do something else that I’m gifted at and not something that’s hard. And, again, that describes my behavior in so many areas of my life until I discovered this distinction and really discovered the book Mindset. But it’s a really unfortunate method of behavior for somebody that wants to be successful, that wants to achieve their goals, and so it’s a very dangerous mode of thought.

Similarly, the fixed mindset—the belief that my abilities are set in stone—leads people to view effort very, very differently. Somebody once told me an example of a lacrosse player who told his coach, “I’m not a practice player; I’m a game player,” because people with a fixed mindset don’t want to practice. They don’t need to practice because they’re so gifted that practice is unnecessary. And so people with a fixed mindset see effort as worthless. They see effort as for the lesser people who have to work hard, when they’re naturally gifted and talented. But, of course, we know that even the most…the greatest, most successful athletes—people like Michael Jordan—worked tirelessly, practiced endlessly. The idea that effort is fruitless or for the people who are not as well-endowed as them is a terrible way of thinking, but that’s the world of the fixed mindset. Because if you have to exert effort, you’re not naturally gifted. Similarly—and this one, to me, is maybe the most important—people with a fixed mindset really can’t handle criticism. They can’t deal with negative feedback. And it makes sense. In a world where your abilities are completely static, criticism means it’s literally a degradation of who you are. It’s a degradation of your identity, especially if it’s something important to you. The more important it is, the more likely you are to ignore the criticism, the more likely you are to subconsciously reject the criticism because you cannot accept that redefinition of your identity as someone who is good at x or someone who is successful at y. And so people with a fixed mindset shut down when they hear criticism.

And this is the crazy thing. They actually did a study at Columbia where they measured brain waves, and they found that people with a fixed mindset, when they were receiving feedback, their brain showed increased activity and excitement when they got the results of what they had done. But as soon as criticism and feedback were offered, their brain activity showed complete disinterest. It’s pretty amazing if you think about it. Again, it makes sense and it’s validated by psychological research. People with a fixed mindset do not want to hear criticism. They cannot handle the criticism because their belief is that their identity is static, and so they cannot accept that redefinition of their identity. And one of the last ways this manifests itself negatively: The fixed mindset cannot handle or cannot cope with the success of other people. They view others as a threat. They view other people—and this is a critical distinction—as judges. They feel like they’re being judged. They feel a burning need to prove something, to prove themselves to people. Other people are these threats, these judges, these people that are casting judgment down on them, and it really sabotages a lot of opportunities for them. And as a result, all of these different things cause people with a fixed mindset to plateau. It causes them not to be successful, causes them to self-sabotage. It negatively impacts their ability to achieve what they want.

Let’s contrast that to the growth mindset. Again, the growth mindset — the idea or the belief that intelligence, talent, skill, or ability can be developed; that what you are today is only a starting point. Now, let’s go back through that same list and see how the growth mindset thinks about it. People with the growth mindset embrace challenge. It goes back to the kids taking the math test. They know that taking the more challenging test, while you may get a lower grade, you’re going to be objectively smarter. If you learn, if you try, if you take test with the more difficult problems, you’re improving yourself; you’re challenging yourself. Challenges don’t label you in a negative fashion. All challenges do are enable you and empower you to become better and to improve, and they know that no matter what—any task that you embark on—you’re going to have challenges, and the only way to get better is to embrace and to face those challenges head on. Similarly, the growth mindset approaches obstacles as something that they need to persist and that they need to conquer, and they know, no matter what course you’re going on, you’re going to encounter dozens and dozens of obstacles, and giving up is absolutely the worst thing you can do. And an obstacle isn’t a bad thing in the growth mindset. It doesn’t mean that you’re not successful. All it means is, just like everybody else who’s trying to learn, who’s trying to improve, you’ve encountered an obstacle. Guess what: Everybody encounters obstacles. We’ve talked about that on the podcast before and we’ve talked about how to overcome obstacles, too.

But the growth mindset really enables you to view obstacles as nothing more than a learning process. It’s not about your identity. There’s nothing at stake. Your core definition of yourself isn’t at risk, and so there’s no fear. There’s no need to clam up and give up. Instead, you just persist and you know that, of course, if I’m a beginner, if I’m a novice and I know that hard work and effort and training and practice are necessary to get better, of course I’m going to have obstacles; of course I need to seek out challenges. And that’s how the growth mindset feels about effort. Instead of viewing it as something for the weaker people or something that naturals don’t need, they know effort is the path to mastery, and that’s proven. If you look at Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink—the 10,000 hour rule—effort is the true path to mastery, and people with a growth mindset don’t view effort in a negative light. They know that effort is what you need to exert. They know that training, that practice is how you get better, and there’s no stigma around that. There’s no fear. There’s no ego attached to: [Gasps] If I practice, that means I’m not as good, that means people won’t perceive me as a natural, people won’t perceive me as being talented. That all melts away and they simply approach practice as a necessary step on the path to mastery.

Similarly, criticism. The growth mindset — criticism is a blessing because criticism is what empowers you. It’s what gives you that critical feedback that you need so much to get better. And you’re completely transparent, completely open to criticism because it doesn’t…there’s nothing wrong with being criticized. Criticism only makes you stronger. Feedback only makes you stronger. If you don’t completely believe that, you really, really need to rethink your relationship to criticism and feedback. People who hide from feedback, who hide from criticism, are most definitely locked in the fixed mindset, and they’re doing it because their identity is tied up in the fact that they cannot accept that criticism. But if you let go of the belief that your identity today is a permanent, unchangeable definition of who you are, and you realize that through work and improvement and criticism and feedback about what you’re doing so that you can get better, you can achieve what you want, suddenly criticism…the fear of criticism washes away and you openly seek it out. And if you look at successful businesspeople, successful entrepreneurs, in most cases, they want to be criticized. They need criticism because they know that that’s the only way that they will get better.

Lastly, the success of others. The growth mindset — you view other people as allies on the journey, allies on the path. There are no… There’s no jealousy; there’s no judging; there’s no looking at other people as threats, because other people can help you and you can help them and you can improve. Again, it stems fundamentally from what is your identity? What defines your identity? Is your identity something static? Is it something fixed, that’s unchangeable? Because if it is, that’s a very scary place to be — a place where every little activity, every conversation, everything is about proving “I’m smart. I’m successful. Oh, I have to look good. I have to be good right here.” But in the growth mindset, there’s no fear, there’s no anxiety about that because you know that what I am today can change, and the way to change it is through work and it’s through effort and it’s through practice and it’s through seeking out feedback.

So, here’s an awesome quote from Carol Dweck from the book Mindset: “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it even—or especially—when it’s not going well is the hallmark of the growth mindset.”

So, I wanted to share a real-world example with you. In the journal Child Development, Carol Dweck and some of her associates published a study called Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across Adolescent Transition. It’s a pretty wordy title but, of course, most scientific studies have wordy titles. But the research was pretty fascinating. They looked at a New York City junior high school and they found that the mindset of the students… And, again, they can use psychological testing to validate the various…whether people fall into a fixed or growth mindset. They found that the mindset of the students predicted how they would perform in math class. And over a two-year period, students with a fixed mindset had a downward academic trend, while students with a growth mindset had positive upward performance trend in their math skills. So, this is not something… This is not mumbo jumbo. This is backed by scientific research. It’s an incredibly powerful, validated concept.

And if you want to think about the fixed versus the growth mindset… You know, it can be even an organizational mindset. Or if you’re an executive in a company—you know, the CEO, the executives’ suite—those people’s mindsets fundamentally impact the direction of the company. One of the greatest business meltdowns of the 20th century—the Enron collapse—is a textbook manifestation of the fixed mindset. And it’s funny because once you truly kind of understand the distinction between the fixed and the growth mindset, once you really have internalized that difference, it’s as plain as day when you meet somebody, when you spend a little bit of time with them, what mindset they’re in. You can see immediately if somebody is hiding from criticism, if they’re concerned about constantly proving and showing to you how great they are and smart they are, versus if they’re concerned about learning and improving.

Back to Enron. Enron was obsessed with talent—they worshiped talent—and they were obsessed with proving how great they were, showing how smart they were. If you remember the documentary, which is awesome—on Netflix—about the collapse of Enron… It’s called The Smartest Guys In The Room, right? Enron was obsessed with their image. They were obsessed with their fixed perception in the world so much so that the internal pressures eventually snowballed into an epic collapse. Contrast that to the growth mindset and how that impacts businesses. Carol Dweck references the classic business text Good to Great in showing how the most successful business leaders epitomized the growth mindset. Here’s a quote: “These were not larger-than-life, charismatic types who oozed ego and self-proclaimed talent. They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers, that is, to look failures in the face—even their own—while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.” So, this not only impacts your personal performance, but this can impact your business. This impacts your life. The difference between the fixed and the growth mindset is all pervasive.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself… You may be concerned: What if I have a fixed mindset and I can’t change it? And I’ve heard that from people. People have told me that all the time, actually. Funny thing is: People who think that, who think they can’t change their mindset, have a fix mindset about mindsets. And I know that sounds kind of redundant, but there is a fascinating field of research called neuroplasticity, which shows just how much the brain can change itself. There’s a PhD psychiatrist named Norman Doidge—D-O-I-D-G-E—and he’s studied the brain deeply. In his book The Brain that Changes Itself, Doidge talks about the science behind neuroplasticity and how brains are constantly evolving, changing, and remapping themselves.

Your brain is not a static entity. It’s not a fixed thing. It can change and it does change, and the way that you think and the thought process that you have remap and change your brain. The science of neuroplasticity proves that you can change your mindset. You can switch from being in the growth mindset…from being in the fixed mindset to being in the growth mindset. You can change the way that you perceive reality, that you perceive yourself, that you perceive your fixed abilities or your ability to learn and grow. And, really, at its core, fundamentally, it’s a shift from proving to improving. I think those two words, that’s the simplest way to think about it. Instead of worrying constantly about validating who you are today, focus on learning, focus on improving, because in a world of learning, it’s not scary anymore. There’s no fear of challenges or obstacles. There’s no fear about criticism. In a world where you’re optimizing and focusing on learning and improving yourself, you know that you’re going to have setbacks and you know that you’re going to ask dumb questions and that you’re sometimes going to look stupid, but you realize that the process to learning, which everyone goes through, is filled with those roadblocks and challenges. But if you’re focused only on proving yourself, on demonstrating how great you are, and you’re scared of feedback, you’re scared of what you might look like or what people might think of you, you’re sabotaging yourself. You’re holding yourself back.

The difference between the fixed and growth mindset is a critical distinction to understand. And, again, the book Mindset by Carol Dweck is an incredible read. Highly recommend checking it out if you really want to drill down on this. She also has a TED talk where she talks about this that I would recommend digging into if it’s something that you want to learn more about. But, to me, this is one of the most fundamental shifts that I’ve made in my life, and really understanding this. And, again, this is something… This is not mumbo jumbo. This is not hearsay. This is validated and backed by tremendous amounts of psychological research and studies. This is something that’s been validated, tested, shown, and proven in the research, all the way up to the fact that you can change your brain and you can change your mindset with the science of neuroplasticity.

So, I want you to really think about this. I want you to internalize this. If you go back to the questions at the beginning of this podcast, if you are in a fixed mindset; if you’re stuck in a fixed mindset even at certain areas in your life; if it’s an area that’s important to you and you want to change and you want to improve, it’s fundamentally essential that you transition into a growth mindset and that you start thinking about the world differently.

Personalizing External Events

November 30, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence

It's hard not to look at things that happen in your life and think, "That's not fair." It's even harder not to look at them and think, "That's great!" or "That's terrible!" But that's human tendency.

On this week's episode of "The Science of Success", host Matt Bodnar discusses the act of personalizing events in our lives, and letting ego have a say in how we should feel about things. He also explains why it's important NOT to do this--and what to do instead.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

We’re going to open today with a story of Amelia Earheart. This is an excerpt from the book The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holliday which I highly recommend. I’ve about it a little on the podcast, but we’re going to talk about it more later. 

Amelia Earhart wanted to be a great aviator, but it was the 1920s. People still thought that women were frail, and weak, and didn’t have the stuff. Women’s suffrage was not even a decade old. She couldn’t make her living as a pilot, so she took a job as a social worker. Then, one day her phone rang. The man on the line had a pretty offensive offer, along the lines of: “We have someone willing to fund the first female Trans-Atlantic flight. Our first choice has already backed out. You won’t get to actually fly the plan. And we’re going to send two men along as chaperones. And guess what? We’ll pay them a lot of money, and you won’t get anything. Oh, and you very well might die while doing it.” You know what she said to that offer? She said yes. Less than five years later, she was the first woman to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic, and became, rightly, one of the most respected people in the world. 

This episode in many ways are going to serve as a bridge between the conversation we had before about the reality of perception, and the podcast about dealing with setbacks. I wanted to open with that story, I think it’s a really powerful story about acceptance. Really, what this episode is about is about acceptance, accepting things not because they’re right or because they’re fair, but because it’s the best thing you can do at the time. I want to share one more quick quote from Ryan Holiday.

“There is no good or bad without us. There is only perception. There is the event itself, and the story we tell ourselves about what it means. Through our perception of events, we are responsible for the creation as well as the destruction of every one of our obstacles. “

And so there’s a couple key points to really understanding why Amelia Earhart’s story is so important, and why acceptance is so important. The first is that events are external to us. Events are not good or bad. Events simply are. They’re simply things that happen. They don’t have anything to do with us. They’re not happening because of something we did, in many instances. They’re not happening because we’re being punished for something. They just are. They just happened to have taken place. It’s our perception of events that creates meaning. We assign a meaning to something that’s completely external to us. We say, “This happened and it’s good. This happened, and it’s bad.” But those events don’t actually have any meaning outside of us assigning us and saying “this is good because it helps me, or it hurts me, or I like that, or I don’t like that.” The reality is these events are so completely unassociated with us until we insert ourselves and we say that it’s good or we say that it’s bad. That’s a process called personalization. What that really is is the ego inserting itself into a situation and saying “This isn’t really external, this is about me. It’s about me because it’s — it’s fair, or it’s right, or it’s just. Or it’s unfair, or it’s not right, or it’s not just.” And there’s an amazing quote, and I would recommend this book actually as well especially if you’re in the financial world. What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Jim Paul. This is an excerpt from that book where he talks about the process of personalization, and what happens when you assign your ego, and when you tie your ego to events that are outside of your control. And by the way, this book, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, is a story of how Jim Paul built a million dollar fortune and then lost all of it, largely because he personalized external events. So this is one of the most important passages in the book, and I’ll share it with you now. 

“If you say “I’m right”, or “I’m not wrong”, you have implicated your ego. Which invariable you will try to protect. Taking either successes or failures personally means by definition that your ego has become involved and you are in jeopardy of incurring losses due to psychological factors. Edison didn’t take the failures or losses personally and he succeeded brilliantly. If, unlike Edison, you take the failures personally. Or like Henry Ford, you take the successes personally, you are setting yourself up for disaster. Having tied your self-worth to the vicissitudes of factors beyond your control, you will be primarily concerned with protecting your ego, rather than trying to determine the appropriate course of action.”

That’s an incredible and powerful statement. It goes back to the story about Amelia Earhart. When she accepted that offer, that offensive, insulting, rude offer - that demeaning offer, was her ego involved in that decision? I think it definitely wasn’t. She knew that despite the fact that that offer was insulting, rude, sexist, whatever it might have bene. She said, “You know what? This is my chance. This is the opportunity that I’ve been waiting for. This is the time that I can say yes, and I can seize this chance, and I can take the first step. I can get the same toe-hold in the journey that I want to take.” She let go of her ego, she let go of the personalization of “what’s this going to say about me? These people are telling me that I’m inferior, that I can’t do it by myself, that I need babysitters, that I’m not going to get paid.” All of these things. If she had let her ego rule that decision, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation because none of us would know who Amelia Earhart was. This is an incredibly powerful thing that you can apply to your every day life. 

When external events take place, you absolutely have to take your ego out of your perception of reality. And I think where people really get tied up in this is when they get caught up in why things are the way that they are. The most damaging perceptions that people have, the most damaging personalizations of external events are when people say things like “Why is this happening to me?” “This isn’t fair.” “This is unjust.” “This is bullshit.” “I shouldn’t have to deal with this.” “I shouldn’t have to go through this.” “It’s unfair that I’m the one who this always happens to.” Those are watchwords, those are trigger phrases. If you ever hear yourself saying anything like that, you need to be incredibly vigilant because you are personalizing an external event, and you are putting yourself in serious jeopardy of being able to achieve what you want to achieve, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish. 

The key, the answer, the way to approach this in a much more thoughtful way - the way to approach this is like a Buddhist Monk. Is like a stoic. You need to approach it with an acceptance. Let go of your ego, let go of trying to assign meaning to what happens externally to you. And accept what happens. Accept the external event. Whether it’s good, whether it’s bad, whether it’s fair, whether it’s right, whether it’s just. It doesn’t matter, it already happened. You getting caught up in why it happened, why it happened to you, why it has to be this way, is not going to change what has already happened. All it’s going to do is cause you a bunch of emotional anguish. It’s going to waste a bunch of your time, it’s going to waste a bunch of your energy, and you’re going to end up frustrated and angry. This goes back to the conversation we had about dealing with set-backs. It’s the same thing. If you’re dealing with a set-back, and you personalized it, you’re going to feel a lot of frustration, you’re going to feel a lot of anger, you’re going to be really mad. This is unfair, why is this happening to me? You have to pull the ego out of that. It doesn’t matter why it’s happening. It doesn’t matter why it’s happening to you. It doesn’t matter why it’s fair. Did Amelia Earhart care if it was fair, or if it was just, or if it was an insulting offer? No. She took it, because she knew that was the next step. She knew that that was the thing that was going to leapfrog her into the history books forever. 

So, in your everyday life, when things happen, don’t personalize them. Don’t say “Why is this happening to me?” The sooner you can cultivate the ability to accept things as they are, not as you want them to be, doesn’t matter if you’re right, doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, all that matters is the way things really are. The way things have happened. What is really taking place? The sooner you can recognize how things are, and not get caught up, not bring your ego into the perception of how you think they should be. The sooner you can take the right action, the sooner you can take meaningful steps to really getting what you want. To really going where you want to go. And that’s critically important.

The Reality of Perception

November 24, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence

On this week's episode of "The Science of Success", host Matt Bodnar explores how we perceive the world and how this affects our ability to navigate everyday life. Are you positive and upbeat? Or do you complain about everything? If you're not happy with the current way you view the world, or how the world "treats" you, there are ways of changing both. Find out how on "The Reality of Perception".

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

What if you were driving somewhere really important? Say to a key business meeting, or an exciting date, or to pick up your kids from school, and you get cut off from somebody in the rudest possible way? What are you going to think of that guy? “Hey asshole, what’s your problem? Why are you cutting me off?” Now, what if I told you that person’s wife had just been in a near-fatal car accident, and they were rushing to their side to spend the last hours of their life with them at the hospital. Did your stomach just drop? Did your perception of the event just change? You see, before you didn’t have all of the information. Whether you believe it or not, your perception creates the world around you. That’s why so many self-fulfilling prophecies are real. It’s a cliché quote, but Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” But I’m not here to talk to you about mumbo jumbo pseudo-science. Why don’t we look at the research and see what it says.

Scientific studies have shown, as well as I’m sure your personal experience has also, that we suffer from a serious amount of information overload. And if you go back to episode one of the podcast, we talked about the biological limits of the mind and how your mind has evolved over the course of human history to deal with this information overload. And a number of psychological studies, textbooks, whatever you may want to look at, have talked about the idea or the concept in psychology. The attention is a spotlight, and whatever you focus your attention on, that gets all the attention, but everything outside of the spotlight is forgotten, or lost, or not really recorded in your mind. And if you look at it in another way, there’s an infinite amount of data available to you at any given moment. Right now, there’s an infinite amount of information that you could be collecting. There’s so much going on and your mind literally cannot handle and process all of it. Within a single second, there’s so much information that your brain would explode if you tried to process all of it. But what our brains do because of the way they’ve evolved, because of the massive amounts of information overload, which by the way, is getting worse and worse and worse. Our brains cut down infinity into a number of finite data points that it then stores, and the rest of that data ceases to exist. And the psychologist and performance coach, Peter Shallard, talks about an idea from Mathematics; that if you subtract a tangible number from infinity, that number has no relationship to infinity. It cannot describe infinity in any meaningful way. And that’s a principle of Mathematics. But now when you think about that, in the context of your perception of reality, your perception, by definition, is a subtraction of finite data points from an infinite amount of data. In many ways, what you really perceive in everyday life is not an accurate description of what’s really happening.

I want to show you one thing that’s really a powerful way to explain this. If you need to pause a podcast to do this, I think it’s fine. But I want you to go to YouTube.com and I want you to search the phrase “Selective attention test”. And we’ll put a link to that down below as well. But I want you to search that. Pause the podcast, the video’s about a minute long, and I want you to watch it. Watch it now, because I’m about to spoiler what happens in the video. 

But this video, the selective attention test, now that you’ve seen it, many of you may know it as “The Gorilla Experiment”. And basically what this video shows is that your mind can easily be tricked into missing something that is completely obvious. You’re told in that experiment to count the number of times that the white team passes the basketball back and forth. While you’re doing that, you do not notice at all - or may not notice, some people do, but most people don’t notice somebody in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, pounds their chest, stares right at the camera, and then walks off the frame. And people who don’t see that for the first time are completely blown away. It’s a really powerful way to experience personally how your perception can lie to you, and how you can see something with your own two eyes that’s not something that actually happened. Because that data was deleted out of your brain, it was deleted because your focus beam of attention was on the basketball players in the white t-shirts, it wasn’t on the people in the black t-shirts, or the person in the black gorilla suit that walks out, pounds their chest, then walks off stage. 

So there’s a couple of ways that information is lost, or transformed, or distorted that are measurable and validated in psychological research that show how often our perception of reality is not what really happened or is an incomplete representation of reality. The first, the most obvious, is kind of the deletion of data, that’s the concept we just talked about. The idea that your focus or attention ignores, or limits out information because it has to. Because evolutionary we’ve been designed to filter out everything our brains tell us isn’t relevant and only focus on the really important, really relevant things. The selective attention test is a perfect example of that. Because you’re told what’s relevant in this test is that you watch the players in the white shirt pass the basketball around. Your attention completely ignores the people who are in black t-shirts. So you miss the gorilla.

The second thing that your mind does, is that is distorts reality via cognitive biases. There is a laundry list of cognitive biases and we’re going to dig into a lot of them in future episodes of the podcast. But there are so many cognitive biases. Things that kind of shift your perception or you see an event in a certain way. A very, very limited micro-example of a cognitive bias is the example at the top of this podcast, the idea of - until you really perceive everything about that situation, your cognitive bias of “this person cutting me off is rude” is kind of something that is an example, something rooted in your mind that you perceived somebody cutting you off as a rude behavior. So, your perception of that shaped your reality about that situation. But there’s tons of cognitive biases and I’m excited to tell you all about lots of them, but for the purpose of this I can’t get into too much information about them. But your beliefs and cognitive biases about them shape your perception of reality. What you believe about the world shapes the way that you perceive events. 

The third way that your brain distorts information, is that your mind generalizes things. You classify people, things, experiences, into certain buckets based on your expectations. We talked about that a little bit when we went into the biological limits of the mind. But your mind will generalize things. You’ll put these classifications when you see someone wearing a certain set or clothes, or behaving a certain way, you’ll automatically make a bunch of assumptions about that person, or about that event or whatever it might be. And that’s an incredibly useful skill, and most of the time it’s super powerful. Occasionally, you will create a memory. You will perceive a reality that isn’t true - it isn’t necessarily the way things really are. It’s only the way your mind with it’s generalization has classified this given event, or person.

And the last, and possibly most insidious way this happens - is that your memories are not real. They’re not fixed. They’re reconstructed by your mind every time that you remember something. This is a quote from Oliver Sacks. He’s a renowned neurological anthropologist. He has a really cool TED Talk about visual hallucinations. But he wrote a book called Hallucination where he talks about many different things. One of which is how memory and remembering are not necessarily factual, or fixed things. I’ll read you this little excerpt.

“Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience. It is thus hardly ever really exact.”

So if you think about that. There’s these four processes, and there’s more processes than that but these are the main ones that are shaping your perception, shaping your reality. That take this infinite world, the infinite reality right? The infinite universe unfolding before you, and your mind, your perception of that world, is really nothing more than a rough sketch of what is actually happened. It doesn’t contain all the information. In many ways, it doesn’t actually represent what truly happened. It doesn’t necessarily represent how someone really felt about you, or what that event really meant. The really fascinating thing, though, is this imperfect sketch that doesn’t really represent reality, that is constructed by a biologically limited brain, is something that can be changed. Your perception of reality can be changed. All you have to do is change the sketch. You can change the sketch in a couple different ways. 

The first is by deleting different things from your focus beam of attention. Which means focusing on different things. When you think about that, I’m sure you know somebody in your life who is always kind of upbeat and happy, and whenever something bad happens, or good happens, they’re upbeat about it. “Things will get better, things will get back to normal”, whatever it might be. And then you probably know somebody else who’s always angry, or always frustrated. It doesn’t really matter what happens, they always find a reason to complain, they always find something that’s wrong with XYZ. And that’s because those two people that might experience the same event and have completely different perceptions of what happens. And that’s because those people, at a subconscious level, are deleting and focusing on different things. They’re focusing on different bits and pieces. So their perception of that event is completely different, even though the event itself, which is external to both of them, was identical.

The next thing you can do to change your sketch, is to distort different things. By that I mean, change your cognitive biases. Change your beliefs. And the third thin you can do is to generalize different things. This is very similar to the second one in the sense that if you change the patterns, and change the filters that you recognize in reality, by definition, you’re changing the mechanism that you perceive and record. Your perception of reality. So, changing your perception changes reality in a real way. And when you dig down at it, what is the criteria that really impacts the perception process? Your beliefs about the world shape your reality. Your perception of reality. The way that your memories are encoded into your brain. Are shaped by what you believe. By the things that have impacted you in your childhood, when you were growing up, what the examples that you’ve seen in your life. All of these things, all of these beliefs that exist not at the conscious level, but at the subconscious level, shape an impact your perception of the world in a very real, very physical, very scientifically validated way. Because your beliefs are the filter. The past, the reality that you’ve constructed in your mind. The sketch, that rough pencil sketch that you have of the vast infinite reality in front of you, is not always perfect. It’s not alway accurate. It’s shaded by your biases, by what you focus on. By what you think is important at the time. By what your life has told you is important at a very visceral and deep subconscious level.

Sometimes there’s a belief nettled at the core of your subconscious that has shaped your perception of reality. Has skewed it in a certain way for your entire life, that has shifted your ability to achieve what you want. That has impacted your ability either negatively or positively to get what you want to get. To be successful. To help the cause that you’re helping, whatever it might be. In a very real way, the limited beliefs that you hold in your mind in your subconscious that have been shaped throughout your life impact the filter, impact the sketch that you have created about the world and impact the story that you tell yourself about what is real, about what your experiences mean. About what happens to you every day in your life. We’re going to talk a lot more about limiting beliefs and how you can uncover some of the limiting beliefs within your life in future episodes of the podcast. 

I want to leave you with a thought. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Inception”, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, goes into his wife’s dream and opens this safe where she holds this totem, takes the top, and spins it. You can do the same thing in your life. You can take an idea that you’ve held dear. Something you’ve believed to be true. Something about your past that you’re certain of. If it’s not an idea that empowers you, that helps you, that pushes you forward, you can plant a new idea in your mind. The reality that you perceive, the reality that you think you live in today, has been constructed by your beliefs - has been sketched out by your biases and your perceptions of reality. And you can plant a new belief in your mind. That’s something that I want to tell you more about. But I’m going to tell you about it in the future podcasts.

Moving Through Setbacks

November 17, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence

On this episode of "The Science of Success", Matt delves into the debilitating affect of setbacks. You've got a goal. You're working towards it, then BOOM: Something gets in your way. What do you do? Do you give up and try something else? Or do you brush yourself off and keep moving forward?

How you answer this question will make all the difference.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I wanted to start out by introducing you to somebody, and I’ll tell you who he is at the end of this, but I want you to guess. At the age of nine his mother died. At the age of 22 his first business failed. The age of 23 he ran for state legislator and lost. The age of 23 he also lost his job, and he was denied entry into law school. At the age of 24 he borrowed some money from a friend to begin a business, and by the end of the year he went bankrupt, and spent the next 17 years of his life paying back that debt. At age 25 he ran for state legislature and finally won. At age 26 he was engaged to be married when his fiancé died. At age 27 he had a total nervous breakdown and was in bed for six months. Between the ages of 29 and 34 he lost three more electoral bids. Age 37, he ran for Congress for a second time and won. He finally went to Washington and he did a great job while he was there, but when he ran for reelection two years later, he lost. At age 40 he sought the job of land officer in his home state, and he was rejected. At age 54 he ran for Senate of the United States and lost. At age 47 he sought the vice presidential nomination at the party national convention, and got less than 100 votes. At age 49 he ran for the Senate and lost again. And, at age 51 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. 

So, I think that’s a pretty powerful story if you think about all of those failures, and all of those setbacks, and the fact that somebody who’s one of the most impactful historical figures in the history of our country has a laundry list of epic, heartbreaking failures again, and again, and again. The death of a loved one, the failure of his business, personal bankruptcy, crushing defeats in election after election after election, and yet this guy picked himself up again, and again, and again, and became the President of the United States, but not only that, he became one of the most respected; one of the most high-impact people in the history of our country.

I tell you the story of Abe Lincoln because I think that too many people, and honestly I feel like in many ways the portrayal of success in popular media is part of the problem that continues to make this worse, but I feel like too many people think that success and accomplishment are sort of effortless and easy, and that the people who really achieve huge impactful things never have any setbacks, and never have any challenges. I think that that victim-esque mindset of, you know, “Oh, why can’t I be successful? What- how come every time I try something I fail and it doesn’t work?” I think that mindset is incredibly damaging and poisonous and dangerous, and that is part of the problem about why people don’t know how to handle setbacks. So, I’m gonna go back to the question I pose at the very start of the podcast: What do a Roman emperor and an NBA superstar have in common? I’m gonna tell you the story of Marcus Aurelius. 

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He was widely considered one of the best, most successful, Roman emperors of all time. He was also depicted in the movie Gladiator. He was the guy who, unfortunately, gets killed right at the beginning of the movie, but in real life Marcus Aurelius was incredibly well respected. He governed over, you know, one of the largest empires of… of all time, and he had a personal, sort of, diary journal, whatever you wanna call it, where he would write to himself, and he never knew that anybody would ever see this journal. It was a journal he kept for himself, and he kind of wrote his thoughts about setbacks and challenges, and what was going on in his life, and how he should approach the operating system of life. Marcus Aurelius was a stoic. Now, the modern day perception of stoicism is a little bit skewed, and what people think when they hear “stoic” or “stoicism”; they have a lot of associations with that that aren’t necessarily accurate when you think about the description, or really the methodology, of sort of the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism. There’s an incredible book about stoicism written by a modern-day author, Ryan Holiday, called The Obstacle is the Way. If you’re interested in really actually learning about and understanding stoicism I highly recommend checking out The Obstacle is the Way. It breaks down and kind of delves into, really, the core tenants of stoicism.

Another book that’s an incredible read is actually the journal that I was just mentioning that Marcus Aurelius wrote, is the book Meditations. Meditations is a personal journal by Marcus Aurelius where he talks about how he applied the philosophy of stoicism to dealing with the challenges of governing one of the greatest empires of all time. 

I asked you before: What do a Roman emperor and a Buddhist have in common? Well, you’d be surprised to learn that stoicism has many philosophical characteristics that are remarkably similar to modern day Buddhism, and I wanted to share with you a quote by Marcus Aurelius, from the book Meditations, that kind of encapsulates the idea of how stoics deal with setbacks and challenges: “Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions and dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way,” and I think it’s incredibly powerful that this wisdom, from somebody 2,000 years ago, is still so pertinent and so relevant to understanding today, and living our lives today, and trying to achieve things and to be successful in modern day society. It’s really interesting, 2,000 years later a guy named Michael Jordan said something very similar: “If you’re trying to achieve there will be roadblocks. I’ve had them, everybody’s had them, but obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” It’s pretty fascinating that both Marcus Aurelius and Michael Jordan are sharing this lesson with us, right? But, the reality is this is a timeless lesson. It’s not something that’s going to change. This isn’t the latest productivity fad. This is something that is sort of a kernel truth of human experience, and human existence. This is how to really, at a fundamentally deep level, understand and cope and deal with setbacks, which is an incredibly important skill. No matter what you’re trying to achieve, no matter what goal you want to get, you have to be able to cope, and deal, and overturn setbacks.

There are three phases that people go through in their evolution of how they deal with setbacks. Phase one is giving up, and this ties in many ways into the concept of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, which is an incredibly powerful framework for thinking about your life, that was pioneered by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, and I’ll go into that in much more detail in a later episode, but in the framework of giving up so many people- we talked about this at the top when we were talking about Abe Lincoln- but so many people, when they encounter some sort of challenge, or hurdle, or roadblock, or whatever it might be, they just throw their hands up and they say, “Well, it didn’t work out,” you know, “Uh, that wasn’t for me. I’m not meant to do X. I’m not supposed to do Y,” right? People just give up, and honestly I know that’s true because probably the first… you know, twenty-odd years of my life, that was how I lived my life. When I encountered some sort of challenge, when something didn’t go the way I wanted it to go, I would just throw up my hands and I would go do something else. That’s a terrible way to live your life. If you’re trying to achieve something, if you’re trying to build a business, if you’re trying to build a team, if you’re trying to solve some of the world’s problems; whatever it is that’s important to you, whatever you’re focused on, giving up is absolutely not the right approach to dealing with setbacks on that path.

The second phase that people go through is the phase of anger and frustration. Anger and frustration fundamentally stems from a refusal to accept reality as it is rather than as you want it to be. That’s also another topic that I’m gonna go much deeper on in a future episode. That’s something that’s incredibly powerful, and actually rooted in many ways, both in stoicism and in ancient Buddhist philosophy, which is amazing to see sort of two completely different thought doctrines that have such similar core penance, but this is also a really disempowering way to think about setbacks, and this was probably the next third of my life I spent focused on. Every time I would hit a setback I would immediately get frustrated, I would immediately get angry, and I would immediately sort of refuse to accept reality as it was, rather than as I wanted it to be, and that takes a form of many thought constructs such as saying things like, “Why is this happening to me? This isn’t fair. I shouldn’t have to deal with this. This is ridiculous.” All of these phrases, and all of these thought patterns. These are incredibly destructive thought patterns to have, but the reality is, not only is it really just not fun, and it sucks having to be really angry and frustrated, but when people are going down a path, when they’re trying to achieve their goal and they hit this roadblock of anger and frustration; one, that takes up a tremendous amount of time and emotional energy dealing with it, and the second thing is a good chunk of the time that results back in bucket number one, which is just giving up. 

Now, occasionally you’ll kind of work through this anger and frustration, and eventually get to a place of accepting the situation as it is, and you’ll actually move forward. The challenge there is that it takes a lot of time and energy to work through all that stuff, and you might of lost weeks or months of time in that process, but the even more dangerous thing is that now you’re back on the path and you’ll hit another setback, and then you have to go through the entire cycle again of anger and frustration and potentially giving up, and all of these other challenges, but ultimately truly successful people, and this the place that Marcus Aurelius and Michael Jordan are both coming from when they talk about dealing with setbacks, is sort of the third phase of this evolution, which is the acceptance of the inevitability of setbacks. This is whenever you go down a path, you know from the very beginning not only will there be setbacks, but you are prepared for them mentally, and you are not going to get upset, you’re not going to get angry, and you’re going to kind of accept them as soon as they present themselves. Figure out a way to work through them and overcome them. This is an incredibly powerful shift in the way that you perceive obstacles because now when you go down a path, and you set out at the very beginning and you say, “I know that I’m gonna have setbacks. I know that I’m gonna have obstacles. I know there’s gonna be challenges. I’m not gonna get frustrated. I’m not gonna get angry, and most importantly I’m not gonna give up.” It’s a much more powerful place to be in when you’re not fighting the world; you’re not fighting reality, right? You’re flowing like water around any obstacle and you’re getting to where you want to be. There may be even a level beyond that that I’m not aware of yet, but that’s kind of, to me, sort of the third iteration of how people deal with setbacks, and how they ultimately reach this sort of Buddhist slash stoic acceptance of the fact that no matter what path you set out on, you will be beset with setbacks, and you have to be ready and willing to accept that. Accept those setbacks and figure out a way, without frustration and anger, to move beyond them and to achieve whatever results you ultimately want to achieve.

There’s a couple different stories that sort of highlight the acceptance of inevitability of setbacks and how to use those to your advantage. One of them is a story; we talked about him in the last podcast, Josh Waitzkin. I’m a huge fan of his, and again, I highly recommend checking out his book, The Art of Learning. For those of you who didn’t hear episode two, he is an eight-time national chess champion, and a two-time world champion tai chi push hands fighter, as well as preeminent expert in Brazilian jujitsu. 

There’s actually a story where Josh was competing in the U.S. national championship for tai chi push hands, and seven weeks before the national championship competition he broke his right arm in another tournament. Now, for most competitors breaking your arm in a martial arts competition seven weeks before the national championship is pretty much game over. You’re not gonna be able to compete. You’re not gonna be able to recover from the injury in time, and you’re not gonna be able to train effectively after you’ve recovered from the injury to even have a chance at competing in the competition. This is where Josh flipped this obstacle on its head and completely transformed the way that he approached this. He writes in his book- I’ll share a brief excerpt with you: “When aiming for the top your path requires an engaged, searching mind. You have to make obstacles spur you to creative new angles in the learning process. Let setbacks deepen your resolve. You should always come off an injury, or a loss, better than when you went down.”

So, how did he do it? How did he deal with this obstacle, seven weeks before the national championship, that should have completely knocked him out of competing? He made the determination that he was going to train every single day leading up to the national championship without using his right arm at all. So, Josh trained for seven weeks, he got his cast off four days before the national championship competition, and had been training for seven weeks completely without the use of his right hand. He described it as almost so easy that it was like cheating to be able to compete in the national championship with full use of his right hand because he’d been training for the last seven weeks only using his left hand. He ended up going on to win that national championship competition. That’s an incredibly powerful way to think about dealing with a setback. Something that most people would take as a killing blow to your national championship bid. A broken arm weeks before the tournament he uses as a lever to propel himself into an even more incredibly powerful competitor, and becomes even better, becomes even stronger, and takes his game to a completely different level, and ends up winning the tournament as a result of an injury that would of knocked out almost anybody else that was competing. That’s a really, really powerful way to think about how a setback can actually be something that can empower you to become even better, even more successful, and to get where you want to go. He talks about, within The Art of Learning, he talks about a very similar process to the evolution that we talked about, or the three phases of dealing with setbacks, and he says he uses the lens of his chess career to describe how he learned to put his emotions in a place that they fueled peak performance. As I mentioned in the previous podcast, he actually quit chess for a number of years, and took a break from the game, because his mindset wasn’t right, and his mental angle wasn’t right on the game. He spent all of that time really cultivating, and learning, and understanding at a psychological level what was going on in his mind that was limiting his performance, and ultimately came away with an understanding of a three part framework for thinking about how to deal with setbacks, or dealing with tough emotions at the levels of peak- and we’re talking national world champion level competition. 

The first was learning to roll with distractions. Learning to accept distractions. Learning to accept your emotions as what they are instead of fighting them. Sounds very similar to the stoic and Buddhist philosophies that we talked about earlier. 

The second was learning to use your emotions to your advantage, and actually leveraging them as fuel to become an even better competitor, and to put you in a peak state that you would not have otherwise been in.

The third phase is learning to create and replicate that peak state in a way that you can do it at will, you can do it on demand. He tells another story about: He was in a different competition, and he was actually in the tournament. In the semifinal round he broke his hand. His competitor hit him so hard that it shattered his hand. He described the injury as almost jarring him into a place where time slowed down almost to a halt, and he said his competitors punches were coming at him as if they were clouds. You can actually go on YouTube and watch the footage of this fight, and in real time this guy’s pummeling him, you know, his fists are more like bullets than clouds, and he said that breaking his hand enabled him to see the match in a slow motion that was not attainable had he not had that shock to his system. He actually ended up winning that match despite breaking his hand in the middle of the fight, but later he kind of came around and learned and really started studying the idea of: “How do I put myself in a place where I can slow down time at will instead of having to have my hand be broken?” That’s sort of the art of mastering, and really learning and understanding how to first accept setbacks and then ultimately use them to your advantage. We’ll talk more about that process in a future podcast, and we’ll really drill down into some of this stuff.

I wanted to tell you one more quick story about Erwin Rommel and the Allied command in World War II, in the battle for North Africa. As you may know, Erwin Rommel was sort of a German commander who was notorious. His name was The Desert Fox, and he was feared, and he would destroy anybody that went to battle with him. Despite the fact that, to the outside observer, the British and American forces were hitting setback after setback, and were getting demolished by Rommel and The Desert Fox in the African theater, this was actually part of a broader plan, put together by Churchill and the Allies, to anticipate the fact that there would be setbacks, there would be a learning curve, in combatting the Germans, and really understanding the Germans, and their tactics and their strategies. So, what looks like one of the biggest challenges for the Allies in World War II, one of the biggest setbacks of the entire campaign, was actually something that they used as part of their process to become more powerful, to become better strategists, to achieve their goals of ultimately taking back Europe and defeating Hitler. 

So, those are a couple of examples to really contextualize for you how you can take something that seems like a setback and use it to your advantage, and how you can take the knowledge that you will have setbacks and use that as a powerful tool to plan and to prepare yourself, and to ready yourself psychologically to deal with whatever may come.

Embracing Discomfort

November 10, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence

On this week's "The Science of Success", Matt explores one of the most crucial elements to leading a successful life: moving through discomfort. It's human tendency to want to avoid things that make us feel awkward, and most of us do. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing.

Matt discusses two tricks that can help you move through discomfort and, if practiced enough, ultimately embrace it.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

	I want to start out today by having you visualize something that you really want, something that’s super important to you. I want you to take a second, pause the podcast if you need to and really think about something that…a goal in your life, something that’s super important.

	All right, good, you’ve had a second to do that, to pause and reflect on something that’s really, really important to you, something that you visualize this thing and really feel it. Now I want to share two quotes with you. The first is from Jack Canfield, the author of Chicken Soup for the Soul: “Everything you want is on the other side of fear”. The next one is from Tim Ferriss, the human guinea pig blogger. I’m a huge fan of Tim. If you haven't checked out some of his stuff, he’s awesome but, he has a quote: “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations they’re willing to have”.

	So, today we’re gonna talk a little bit about discomfort and how to deal with discomfort and to cultivate discomfort in your life. And I wanted to start with a story of Josh Waitzkin. You may not know who Josh Waitzkin is but, he is an eight-time national chess champion and he’s a two-time world champion Tai Chi push hands fighter, and he’s one of the foremost Brazilian jujitsu experts in the United States, and Josh has a fascinated story. He was actually a child chess prodigy and he was the subject to the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, and he had some sort of meteoric rise in the chess world starting at a very early age, and Josh’s experience in chess taught him a number of things. He actually wrote an incredible book which I highly recommend checking out called The Art of Learning, that's all about all of the lessons about sort of performed psychology and his journey from a chess prodigy to then transitioning into martial arts and other things. But, what’s really fascinating about Josh’s sort of success and his meteoric rise even as a child chess prodigy was that he actually had a total breakdown and ended up quitting chess for a number of years, and  that was in many ways was because he was psychologically frail, he was brittle, he hadn’t cultivated mental toughness, mental resilience, he hadn’t built and developed that really critical mental  strength. And so, I’m gonna actually just give you an excerpt from Josh’s book were he talks about cultivating mental resilience and how important that is to him. “My whole life I’ve worked on this issue. Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world class performer. It should be nurtured continuously. Left to my own devices I am always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable. When uncomfortable my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it, when injured, which happens frequently in the life of a martial artist, I try to avoid painkillers and to change the sensation of pain into a feeling that is not necessarily negative. My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.”

	This type of internal work takes place in the little moments of our lives. I mentioned how my style over the board was to create chessic mayhem and then to sort my way through the chaos more effectively than my opponents. This was a muscle I built up by training myself to be at peace with the unclear and tumultuous. And, most of the training was an everyday life and I think that’s a really, really critical take away from that piece of text, most of the training was an everyday life.
In fact, there’s all kinds of different ways that you can cultivate and embrace discomfort in your daily life and it’s an incredibly important skill to constantly… instead of sort of fleeing from uncomfortable situations, to lean in and embrace and kind of face and really become at peace with things that make you uncomfortable.

 	And cultivating discomfort is kind of like building muscles. It’s one of the tools that you can use to develop mental resilience, to develop mental toughness and to become psychologically impregnable. And the first step to cultivating discomfort is to be aware when you’re uncomfortable, right? You have to be present of your discomfort. Most people when they encounter something uncomfortable they almost at a subconscious level, they sort of move away from it, they push away from it, they go in the different direction, they don't want to have to deal with whatever this thing that’s really uncomfortable is, and so you have to be able to intercept that message. You have to be present enough to your own thinking and your own thought patterns to be able to say, “Hey, I just felt uncomfortable. I just felt discomfort,” and then, “Should I continue to act in this path of moving away from the discomfort or is this is an opportunity potentially to lean into this discomfort to really embrace it or to force myself into a situation that I know is going to be really uncomfortable?” And the way to cultivate that mental presence... There’s a lot of different ways to do it, one of the most effective is with meditation, which is something we're not gonna talk about today. But something that we can delve into and give you a really practical and simple and easy toolkit to use if you wanna start meditating without having all of this sort of confusion about what is meditation and all this woo woo stuff, there's really simple ways to get started that are rooted in science but that's a discussion for a future podcast.

So, being really present to your discomfort is the first key piece of cultivating it. The second step is, once you're aware of this discomfort you're have to catch yourself, and you have to push into it and you have to embrace it and the reason that being present is so critical, as Josh said, is not…you know, there's not this... There are sometimes water ship moments, but what really builds up the ability to embrace discomfort is having all these little experiences in your life where you gotta catch yourself and say, "Mm, that’s really uncomfortable", and instead of running away from it you push into it head on and you really kind of accept it.

And I'll tell you… I'll give you two specific kinda tools, or examples, or ways that you can lean in it discomfort. One of them is a really simple test. It’s from a guy named Noah Kagan. Some of you are may be familiar with Noah. He's an entrepreneur internet market genius. I highly recommend checking out some of his stuff. But, he has a test that's called the coffee test, and it’s really simple and it sounds really easy and I guarantee you, if you go try to do it, it is terrifying. And all you have to do is go into your local coffee shop or any coffee shop and whatever you order ask them for ten percent off. 

Don't give them a reason, don't justify it just go on and say “Yeah, I'd like a large coffee and can I take ten percent off on that?" And you're probably thinking right now, "Oh, that doesn't sound so hard." But, as soon as you step up into the counter it’s a completely different sensation of fear, and discomfort, and "Ugh, I don’t wanna do it." And most of the time you back down and it takes two or three tries to really try, to really cultivate that. But, that's a very micro example of a way to kind of simply and easily in your own life, cultivate discomfort and kind of implement the ability to actively go out and seek things that are uncomfortable. 

The second way to do that is through a process called social skydiving. You may have heard of that term but if haven’t basically what social skydiving is, is just walking up to a conversation specifically, usually with a group of people that you don't know at all. And the more intimidating the conversation looks, the less it looks like you should barge in, the better it is. And you just barge into the conversation not in a rude way at all, but in a way where you just kind of join the conversation and, immediately insert yourself into it and start talking to people engaging them, you know, introducing yourself all this kind of stuff.

And the key to social skydiving is that when you're entering into this situation, you don't know what you're going to say, you don't know what they're talking about, you just throw yourself into this situation where most people are sort of mortified of walking up into a circle of strangers that are all talking about something, bursting into the circle and just injecting yourself into the conversation. And it’s really hard to do it but, the more you do it, the more you sort of cultivate and build this muscle and it’s something you could do anytime. You could walk on right now and go social skydiving on somebody's conversation and continue to build and cultivate that muscle of being able to tolerate and kind of handle and…you know, what ultimately you become sort of immune, or resilient to uncomfortable situations.

So, those are two very practical ways that you can cultivate this discomfort, and I challenge you to implement or try at least one of those within the next week. And I bet you're probably not going to do it, but I think you really, really should. And it sounds really easy but when you're actually gonna do it is going to be really hard, but pushing into and really leaning into that discomfort you'll start to cultivate an immunity to it where you can social skydive in all kinds of situations and actually like… I'm an introvert and so, it was something that was sort of terrifying to me to do for the first time. But, having done it many times I can tell you now that Is almost a fine activity Is almost enjoyable. 

And that's kind of a segue into the next keys of understanding discomfort that I think is a critical thing to understand, and this is the idea of what I call the sphere of discomfort, and this goes back to Jack Canfield's quote about everything you want is on the other side of fear. So, everybody sort of lives in a comfort zone, right? Is sort of a bubble that surrounds you and it’s everything you are comfortable with, everything you are comfortable doing, everything you're comfortable talking about, all of this things and whenever. And this is usually a subconscious process, which is why sort of being present and aware is so important. But whenever you bump up against certain walls of your comfort zone, you subconsciously and kind of intuitively turn away, you turn back, you leave from that discomfort, and so what happens is most people live their lives in sort of this little bubble where anything that's uncomfortable to them they never do it, right? They never want to do it. And a really simple way to think about that would be of somebody who's afraid of flying, right? And everybody knows somebody probably. Think about all the things they're kind of limiting out of their experience in their life by being afraid to get on an airplane.

If they would become comfortable with that, pushing to that discomfort they’re literally opening up the world for themselves to experience. And so, what happens is similar to sort of social skydiving or the coffee test, every time you get to the edge of your comfort zone if you just push into that discomfort if you just kind of step into it and really go headfirst, the first time you do something that's really uncomfortable it’s scary, right? The second or third time it’s still nerve-wracking but you know that you've done it once before and it gets a little bit easier.

The hundredth time that you do something it’s almost...you know, it starting to get fun and easy and it's almost enjoyable because you've done it some many times. The thousandth time that you do something its boring, right? You know there's people who fly every week for work and, to them, flying is nothing, it’s not scary at all. So, you see these patterns again and, again and again with all kinds of experiences in people's lives but, so many people wants you sort of build that muscle, right? Whether it’s flying, or social skydiving, or selling, or whatever it might be, whatever...once you build that muscle, things that once seems scary and uncomfortable now become…first sort of less scary, less scary, you become good at it and then almost  becomes boring ultimately, and what happens is that bubble around you that comfort zone? It grows and expands. And once that comfort zone has kind of bubble up and expanded, and you broaden your comfort zone beyond it what you ever thought it was possible.

At the frontiers of your new fear of discomfort you now have all of this other things that seemed uncomfortable. But, these are the kind of things that you'd never could have seen or perceived in the world where you were sort of limited by your original fears, your original things that made you uncomfortable and it's kind of an iterative process because now you have all these new frontiers you can explore, you have an even broader array of things that you could do, right? And that goes back to the Tim Ferriss quote that we opened up this podcast with: "A person’s success in life can usually be determined by the number of uncomfortable conversations they're willing to have", right? And the more you have those uncomfortable conversations, the sale pitches, the tough business negotiations, whatever that may be, the better you get and the broader that sort of sphere of comfort expands to, and to tell a story within my own life even about this podcast, this podcast started out as a PowerPoint presentation that I had made for one particular friend who wanted me to share some of his ideas with him. 

He knew that I loved psychology and performance and all that stuff and he said, "Hey Matt, can you just take some of this stuff and share it with my corporate team?" And you know I was a little bit hesitant because some of this stuff is kind of out there and, you know, they're gonna think I'm a weirdo or whatever but, I pushed into the discomfort and made the PowerPoint and I shared with them and I had a great time. And then about six months elapsed and didn't tell is all or show is all anything about this PowerPoint, and eventually one day I was talking to someone and they were like "You really have to share this," it was like "Do you think these ideas are really important?" And I was like, "Absolutely." He was like, "You have to share this with the people that you work with, you have to share this with your team and your employees, the key people in your business." and I was like, "[Laughs] Absolutely not! They're gonna think I'm a weirdo. I'm gonna sit down and talk to them about…you know, about their subconscious and this fear of discomfort and all of these things and they're gonna say ‘Man, I thought he was kind of out there but, now I know he's out there,’ right?” But eventually, I overcame that sort of uncomfortable emotion and cultivated…you know, a series of one on one, really, really enriching conversations with all of my key team members and it really took our relationships to a level that I never thought was possible, and we can now have conversations about things that I couldn't even imagine before, looking back to having...you know, been terrifying sharing this all, let alone to all this other people. 

Fast forward another six or eight months and I started to say, "This is something that I need to share with people who I value and people who I think would really enjoy some of the lessons in this presentation". Eventually I stumbled across sharing this with a friend of mine and that led ultimately to this podcast to what I'm now sharing this with everybody who is listening. Which is amazing to me that it’s a very sort of small example but, it’s also a very concrete example of leaning into that discomfort. Something that I was very terrified of sharing even with one or two people has now kind of morphed into something that I'm thrilled to be sharing with an audience of people and really helping them to understand all of these concepts that I think are so critical and so important.

So, that's kind of the lesson for today, is understanding and embracing discomfort and leaning into it and being aware when you feel something that's uncomfortable and actively cultivating, and embracing of discomfort instead of a fear and running away from discomfort.

The Biological Limits of the Human Mind

November 03, 2015 by Austin Fabel in Emotional Intelligence, Decision Making, Mind Expansion

On this episode of "The Science of Success", we explore one of the fundamental underpinnings of psychology: the brain itself.

Your brain is a roughly million-year-old piece of hardware, designed to operate in the world of hunting and gathering, where dangerous animals and competing humans may lurk behind the nearest bush.

While our society has changed massively in the last 10,000 years (or even the last 500 years), our brains have not had time to catch up.

As a result, you and I are equipped with a tool that is riddled with shortcuts and processing errors, which can manifest themselves in mistakes, calamities, and all around terrible decisions.

To find out how you can get around these and make life a little easier, listen to this week's episode "The Biological Limits of the Human Mind".

Also, continue the conversation by following Matt on Twitter (@MattBodnar) or visiting his website MattBodnar.com.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

We’re going to start our discussion today with a story of a turkey. A mother turkey, to be precise. Turkeys are very caring parents. Research has actually shown that there’s a certain sound - a “cheep cheep”, or a “chirp chirp” sound that’s an automatic trigger built into turkeys by evolution. What happens is when a turkey hears this sound, it’s almost like a switch goes off in the turkey’s mind. And it immediately goes to nurture and take care of its young. That makes sense, then. The vast majority of the time, that works out perfectly. But here’s where it gets really interesting: If you take that sound and you record it, and you put it on a stuffed polecat. A polecat is an animal that’s one of turkey’s natural predators. The turkey will immediately go out to the stuffed polecat and begin to nurture it, just like one of its baby chicks. Which is a pretty surprising reaction, especially when you consider the fact that if you don’t have a recording of the “cheep cheep” sound with a stuffed polecat, the turkey will go absolutely insane and ruthlessly attack the stuffed polecat with its life. Why is the turkey doing that? The biological shortcuts are programmed into the turkey’s mind by the process of evolution. This is called by psychologists a “Click, Whirr” response. 

The famed psychology professor Robert Cialdini, author of the book Influence, has shown us that this sort of Click, Whirr response, which sounds kind of ridiculous, right? You know, what, how are these turkeys so dumb that they’re literally taking care of their arch nemesis one day, then if they don’t have this particular sound, they’re suddenly flipping and attacking them. But what happens is, as Robert Cialdini has shown, and many other psychology researchers, this phenomenon is actually a biological shortcut that’s programmed in the turkey’s mind, and humans have many of the same biological shortcuts.

So, let’s back up a million years. I want to talk about the selective power of evolution, and really understanding the mechanics of evolution and what it means. A lot of people when they hear, or when they talk about evolution, they think that “the strong survive”, or “the best survive”, whatever that means. But really what evolution is talking about is that the most well-adapted to their environment happened to survive more often, and thus happened to reproduce. And so, the environment selects, kind of the optimal characteristics for survival. So, through evolution these turkeys happen to - the turkeys that happen to have sort of a natural trigger that when they hear the “cheep cheep” sound, they go and take care of their young. Those turkeys took more effective care of their young than turkeys that had other behavioral patterns. So, those turkeys reproduce more often and more frequently. And thus, that trait, over hundreds of years, over millions of years, over thousands of years, was slowly embedded into the turkey’s behavior. Similarly, human beings have many of the same biological Click, Whirr responses as turkeys. And if you think about it, human beings most of our evolutionary history has taken place in a hunter-gatherer society. And within that hunter-gatherer society, or even pre-hunter-gatherer society, evolution naturally selected a number of behavioral traits that are embedded in the human mind, into our psychology, that are completely non-optimal for living and existing in today’s society. In fact, if you were to compress the four million year evolutionary history of human society into just twenty four hours, the advent of agriculture would take place at 11:55 p.m., just a shade before midnight. So, if you think about the fact that the evolutionary time scale of our development was nearly four million years, and that agriculture, which was even thousands of years ago, was only at 11:55 p.m., on that 24-hour window. You really get a sense of how much time we’ve sort of had to adjust to the constraints and stresses of modern day society. What happens is the things that are naturally selected in a hunter-and-gatherer environment were you’re, you know, foraging for food. You’re living in a small tribal society, you’re dealing with predators, you’re dealing with all different kinds of dangers. The behavior patterns that are selected by evolution that are optimal for survival in those circumstances are not the same behavior patterns that are optimal for succeeding in today’s society and in today’s world.

Society has changed massively in the last two or three hundred years, let alone the last several thousand years, let alone the last several million years. So there’s a couple key ways that these changes manifest themselves. One of the first examples is the idea of seeking explanations for things. Wanting to understand, wanting to put an explanation to something that isn’t necessarily always right, isn’t necessarily there, doesn’t necessarily fit. This is kind of a pattern recognition which humans are incredibly effective at recognizing patterns. So much so that sometimes we recognize patterns that don’t even exist. 

Another way that this manifests itself is through fear and anxiety. When you think about it, if you’re living in kind of the world of the hunter-gatherer, if you have all of these stresses taking place, if you have a predator lurking behind a bush, if you eat these berries and they’re poisonous, you may not live, right? All of these different things in that world – it pays to be very cautious, it pays to be very skittish, it pays to avoid taking risks and to be very anxious about what might happen to you if you were to take a certain course of action. In reality, that sort of behavior is deeply engrained into us. Some people use the term “lizard brain” to describe that type of behavior. 

Another way this manifests is in fast classifications. If you’re living in a world and you see something, hunter-gatherer sight, and you see something? You need to be able to classify it immediately and people that work really quickly at classifying “that’s a threat, that’s dangerous, this is safe.” The most quickly they could do that, the faster they could make a decision, and the higher probability they have of surviving. But the reality is a lot of times those fast classifications in today’s society, we end up making the wrong classifications, or are evolutionary programmed mental shortcuts end up short-circuiting. 99% of the time, those shortcuts are designed to be incredibly effective, right? To the point that there’s so much information that deluges us every day that we get hit with. Nonstop ads and e-mails and all kinds of things, that we have to have an ability to filter out a lot of that junk. But the reality is, occasionally, these fast classifications and these mental filters, will let something in or classify something in a way that’s completely inappropriate, and you have this sort of outsized event takes place there a massive mistake happens, that you never could have foreseen because your mental shortcuts essentially misfired.

Another thing that was preprogrammed to us in this hunter-gatherer world is the focus on society and the tribe. If you think about, you know, from a reproductive standpoint, somebody who gets exiled from the tribe, loses food, lose potential mates, lose – it’s pretty much a death sentence in many ways to get exiled from a tribe in a hunter-gatherer world. So, people naturally develop the traits that led them to wanting to please others, and many of these traits are incredibly beneficial. Occasionally they misfire. But focusing on not wanting to – not wanting to do something that’s not socially acceptable. Wanting to get the approval of other people. All of these things were essential in survival in a world where being exiled from the tribe means your death. 

But the reality is all of these different filters manifest themselves in a way that is completely counterintuitive and unproductive in many of the contexts we find ourselves today in the modern world. The same sort of Click, Whirr psychological shortcuts that are essential to survival in the hunter-gatherer world, in today’s high-pressure business and social situations, can give us exactly sort of the wrong impulse, exactly the wrong way to think about how to handle these situations. And so this idea that there are sort of hard biological limits on your mind, your subconscious, your mind, your ability to process things, your innate, built in biases and the way you perceive the world. Every single human has a ton of inherent challenges and problems inside their mental machinery. It’s been pre-programmed to us for millions of years where, evolution, the hunter-gatherer society, has essentially sculpted the human brain into a tool that, while perfectly optimized to survive and reproduce in the world of a million years ago, has a number of shortcomings in today’s society. 

This is kind of one of the most critical first things to understand if you really want to understand the psychology of peak performance. You have to understand what the physical limits of the brain are. You have to understand that these limits exist so you can start to realize and see the patterns in the ways that it plays out where your biological limits within your mind naturally cause you to make certain judgements - to feel certain ways - to think about things in a certain fashion that are not the right ways to think about it, that are not the optimal ways to think about it. And so, throughout the course of this podcast, I’m going to teach you a bunch of different cognitive biases, a bunch of different ways that you trick yourself, that your mental circuitry short-circuits and give you the tools and capabilities to be able to overcome these problems, be able to understand and see your own mental limitations so you can achieve the goals you want to achieve, so you can be successful, so you can master your own psychology. 

Warren Buffett has an analogy where he talks about the mind as a motor. Your IQ, or your innate intelligence or talent, represents your horsepower. Right? Say, an engine has 500 horsepower, whatever it might be. Your IQ sort of represents that raw potential. But your output is what actually counts, right? Do you have the toolkit mentally and the mindset and the ability to use that 500 horsepower engine to go 10 miles an hour, or to go a hundred miles an hour? And the biological limits set in place by evolution over millions of years of human history are going to naturally constrain in many ways your ability to do that, and without the sort of self-awareness and knowledge of what those biases are, you’re inherently limiting your ability to maximize the output of your engine. So, I want to teach you the tools. I want to give you the framework to think about all of these different pieces of the puzzle so you can really understand how am I lying to myself? How is my mind tricking me? What are the shortcuts that are naturally misfiring in my mind, that are causing me to have these challenges, or issues, or preventing me from achieving the goals that I want to achieve?

And so that’s what we’re going to talk about throughout this series, Science of Success. And this is really one of the cornerstones, kind of fundamental pieces of understanding what is necessary to sort of grasp the depths of the human mind, and grasp and understand how performance really functions, and how the mind truly functions.