The Neuroscience Behind Einstein and Isaac Newton’s Biggest Breakthroughs

In this episode we will talk about the incredible neuroscience behind the biggest breakthroughs of some of the world’s smartest minds, how those same principles apply to a world champion’s "daily architecture," and how you can design your day the same way to harness this powerful strategy. 

This episode goes deep on:

• The neuroscience behind Einstein and Isaac Newton’s biggest breakthroughs

• How one world champion structures his entire day around this one key principle

• Simple steps to structuring your day in the same way to harness the untapped power of your subconscious mind

• How to harness the subconscious mind for huge creative insights

• How to break through challenging questions and problems

• The 4 Phases of the Creative Process

• What the science says about cultivating creativity and creative incubation

• 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!).  

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• Creativity—the unconscious foundations of the incubation period (see here)

• Enhancing Creative Incubation (see here)

• The Incubation Effect: How to Break Through a Mental Block (see here)

• The Science of Creativity (see here)

• Incubation and creativity: Do something different (see here)

• [Electrical Current Study] Noninvasive transcranial direct current stimulation over the left prefrontal cortex facilitates cognitive flexibility in tool use (see here)

• [Wallis Model] Wallis' model of the Creative process (see here)

• [The Real Neuroscience of Creativity] (see here)

• [Understanding Research Studies] Battling Bad Science Ted Talk (see here)

• [Importance of Meta Studies] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (see here)

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

In this episode, you're going to learn the secret behind both Einstein and Isaac Newton's greatest insights; how a world-champion martial artist and national chess champion structures their daily architecture; how to harness your unconscious mind for huge, creative insights; the science behind creativity; and much more. 

Have you ever had that aha moment (the eureka moment, as they sometimes call it)? I'm sure you've heard the stories about famous eureka moments throughout history, whether it's Isaac Newton, one of the most prolific physicists of all time and many ways one of the founders of modern physics has a famous story about an apple falling from a tree and hitting him on the head and giving him some of the insights into gravity and physics and how it worked. Another classic story is that of Archimedes and his bathtub. That's actually the origin of the eureka moment. Another one is Einstein and his insight about relativity. But I'm sure you've had some of these moments in your own life, too. Have you ever had that situation happen, where you're dealing with something that you're kind of stuck? You know, you're grinding away. You can't overcome this challenge or you can't put this thing together, or you can't... Maybe it's even sometimes if you're playing a game and you get stuck against this boss and you can't beat them, and then you go have lunch, you go step away for an hour, and you come back and boom — you immediately do it. You fix it. You achieve it on your first try. I think we've all had that moment, and that's connected with the same kind of idea, the same theory of these aha moments, these eureka moments, and it's a concept that's rooted in science. It's something called creative incubation. Creative incubation is defined as a process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas at some point later in time. Today, we're going to explore the science behind creative incubation and how we can use it in our daily lives.

Remember Josh Waitzkin? We've talked about him on a number of other episodes of the Science of Success. Josh is a multi-time national chess champion; the person who was featured in the documentary *Searching for Bobby Fischer*; a child chess prodigy who then went on to be a two-time world champion martial artist; and now is a performance coach for some of the most successful people on the planet. 

Josh talks about an idea of building a daily architecture around maximizing your creative process, leveraging the concept of creative incubation. To paraphrase him, you want to create rhythms in your life that are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity, and then tapping it. And I want you to remember creativity shapes everybody's life. Even if you're not an artist; even if you're not a creative; even if you're an accountant; even if you're a CFO; even if you're an engineer; you don't think that creativity applies to you... It fundamentally applies to everything. Everybody has an art. Everybody has a craft. Business could be your art. Accounting could be your art. Engineering can be your art, can be your craft. It can be something that you're constantly refining, constantly applying. Creativity is such a broad and important topic, and it often gets kind of shoveled into a certain realm of sort of marketing creativity, art, all that kind of stuff. But the reality is every single businessperson, every single teacher, every single engineer, every single accountant... Whatever it might be, you can benefit from creativity. You can benefit from leveraging the process of creative incubation to make yourself smarter and to solve difficult challenges that you encounter along the way.

We're going to start by looking at the four phases of the creative process as it's defined by the Graham Wallas model in neuroscience. This was uncovered in the 1920s — a framework that neuroscience and psychology have since used to think about and understand the creative process. And there are four phases. There's preparation, incubation (which we're going to focus on today primarily), illumination, and verification. All four of these phases are relatively straightforward. 

In the preparation phase, it's all about defining the problem; understanding the problem; gathering the information that you need, sometimes from unique and disparate sources; and feeding all the information into your mind so that your subconscious can then process it and put it together and recombine it in new and unique and different ways. 

The next phase, incubation—which we're going to get into the weeds on here in a minute—is about taking a step back from the problem. It's about focusing on something else. It's about letting go of the conscious focus on the issue and then returning to it in a structured way later on to kind of tap that unconscious power, to harvest what your subconscious mind has processed, and then bring that to the forefront — and that's what illumination is about. 

Illumination, the third phase, is where these ideas arise in the mind and, based on what the subconscious has processed, you start to see the challenge from a new perspective, from a new light. You start to gain a new insight. 

And, lastly, verification is kind of fact checking. It's thinking, okay, does this new insight make sense? Does it apply? Testing it out and figuring out if you can actually use it to solve the challenge that you're dealing with.

Those are the fundamental components of how science defines the creative process, but incubation in itself is still not very well understood. Researchers know the effect exists, but they're not 100% certain what neural networks are involved, what parts of the brain are involved. They don't know exactly how or why the process functions, but they do know that is exists. And we're going to look at a couple different studies that kind of describe or examine the process and the effect of incubation, and sort of show that it's true and that it's real. 

The first is a study from 2003 titled *Incubation in Problem Solving and Creativity*. This was a meta-analysis, a meta-review of a number of different studies, and I want to pause for a second and talk about this concept. If you've ever done much digging into the different kinds of studies, science, good science, bad science, how bias an affect the conclusions of research studies, et cetera... It's a deep rabbit hole and there's some interesting topics on it, which I'll include some articles in the show notes, that you can really kind of dig into that if you want to. And I'm going to include, also, all this research in the show notes as well, which you can access just by going to scienceofsuccess.co/show-notes or just scienceofsuccess.co and you can click the "Show Notes" button.

Anyway, meta-reviews or meta-analyses are, in many ways, sort of the king of studies. They're studies that look across many different other studies that have taken place and they kind of say, okay, if we have 30 different studies that have examined this topic, what are the shared conclusions? What are the things that we can kind of pull out of this and say, okay, maybe a couple of these studies had biases, maybe a couple of these studies had flawed methodologies, but we can pull out some real learning, some real information from this? So, the first one—the 2003 study—was a meta-review of 39 different studies around incubation, and what they concluded was that 29 of those 39 experiments found a significant incubation effect and that one of the major findings across all those studies was that preparation activites substantially increased the effect and the power of the incubation effect. So, that's something we're going to talk about once we talk about how to leverage and apply this concept to build a daily architecture, but just keep in mind that preparation is an essential component and that across 40 different studies, essentially, they found a very strong and significant effect from incubation.

The second study in 2009, titled *The Incubation Effect: Hashing a Solution*, was another meta-review of 117 independent studies across all kinds of different aspects of incubation and the incubation effect, and, again, they found a strong, positive correlation. They found strong evidence of the incubation effect existing across the majority of the studies that they looked at. So, this is something... This is not just a colloquial idea. It's not something that is sort of woowoo or made up. It's something that you can tap and harness and leverage the science to apply, to make yourself more effective in your daily life. And, again, both of those studies are meta-reviews. They're meta-studies, and that is often kind of considered the king of research studies because it draws from so many different areas and it helps sort of mitigate and filter out a lot of the biases. Think of it in the same way that you'd think of the power of diversification from a financial standpoint. Similarly, having a vast array of studies, you kind of cancel out some of the errors in many ways and you're able to really let the cream rise to the top.

The last study—and this factors, again, into the importance of how do we structure daily architecture around this—looked at the importance of sleep. This is a 2001 study titled *The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving and How You Can, Too*. This was an interview study focused around artists, scientists, even Nobel Prize winners, and it looked at everything from math, music, business, all kinds of different elements. Again, this is an incredibly important point. Just because you don't think that creativity necessarily applies to what you're doing, it absolutely does in many different ways. Even in contexts that you wouldn't necessarily think about, you can leverage these creative tools to empower and improve your decision-making and your problem-solving abilities. And what they found was that sleep was a very important factor in the creative incubation process and that sleep was a vital tool to kind of fueling and empowering the subconscious in a way that enabled people to solve these challenges using creative incubation.

Now, let's look at structuring your daily architecture around these principles of creative incubation. The first important step is preparation and conscious focus on the question or the challenge that you're dealing with, and I can't understate this enough. There's a study titled *Creativity: The Unconscious Foundations of the Incubation Period* in the journal of *Frontiers of Human Neuroscience*, and this is one of their findings. "Although unconscious processes can be a powerful source to facilitate creativity, only engage in daydreaming or sleeping to produce groundbreaking discoveries or great artistic creations will not do the trick. A plethora of raw materials has to be available to be connected and one has to be able to focus on some options out of an array of options. In this sense, conscious processing is needed to establish a knowledge base, to know what problems to tackle, and to verify and implement new ideas."

What does that mean? It means you need to feed your brain. It means you need to constantly be picking up and use the conscious elements of your brain to focus on both the problem and the challenge that you have, but also potential solutions, potential alternatives, and even sometimes things that you wouldn't necessarily consider as possible alternatives because your subconscious is able to combine, recombine, use distinct and different elements to create something that you would consciously not be able to do, to connect things that you consciously wouldn't be able to connect to form a novel and unique solution.

The next step is to let go, right, is to focus on something else, and this is a critical component. You have to be able to release yourself from that challenge or from that focus, from that question. If you are trying to creatively incubate a problem and you sort of consciously turn your focus to it, and then 15 minutes later you're checking your email or you're thinking about it again or whatever, you're not going to gain the benefits of creative incubation. You have to let go. You have to focus on something completely different. You have to just let that problem melt away. And in the context of structuring a daily architecture, one of the ways to think about this is... We'll talk about this in a second when we get back to how Josh Waitzkin thinks about his daily architecture and how you can structure it, but you want to end your day with quality. You want to end your day with a focus on whatever problem or challenge is most relevant, is the biggest hurdle in your life right now, the biggest challenge that you're dealing with right now. You want to, at the end of your work day, consciously turn your attention to that question, to that challenge, and even to the extent of writing it down and saying, you know, "How am I going to deal with X?" 

And then you have to let go. So, let's say at the end of your work day, you end it with quality, you end it with that focus, again, feeding the brain, preparing the conscious mind to give the information to the unconscious. And then you release the problem and you let go. You cease your focus on your work, you spend some time with your family, maybe you read, watch TV, play video games, whatever is your cup of tea, right. The next critical component in this daily architecture, after you've had that sort of unwind period, the period of letting go, is to sleep, and we talked about before the study, the importance of how critical sleep is. But sleeping really enables you to kind of fuel and supercharge that processing power.

The next step of this daily architecture is when you wake up, you want to return to the problem, but there's a key distinction. When you return to the problem, you want to do it in a way that's pre-input. You want to do it in a way that you're not getting up, laying in bed, checking your emails, suddenly you have seven different things bombarding your mind that you need to deal with. You need to get up and to really kind of harness this daily architecture. As soon as you wake up, before you check your email, before the world sends all of its demand to you, spend ten or 15 minutes just journaling or addressing or coming back to that problem or that challenge, and the critical component here is you have to do it in a state of mind where you're still proactive. You're not reacting to everything, and this is something that Josh Waitzkin is incredibly adamant about in the way he talks about leveraging creative incubation to structure your daily process, you have to have that space before the world interrupts you that you can really untap and really let the subconscious mind kind of flow into solving the problem. As he says, if you don't do this, quote, "Your creative process becomes dominated by external noise instead of internal music." End quote. 

And to sum things up, here's how Josh Waitzkin himself describes this entire process. "What I work on is feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity. Feeding it information and then tapping it. For example, ending the work day with high-quality focus on a certain area of complexity where you could use an insight, and then waking up first thing in the morning, pre-input, and applying your mind to it, journaling on it, not so much to do a big brainstorm but to tap what you've been working on overnight." End quote.

That's, in essence, how you can sort of structure a simple daily architecture around leveraging the creative incubation process. But there's actually another thing you can do in sort of a short mini-burst to capture the same effects of creative incubation in a different context, and that's if you're going to lunch, if you're going to the gym, if you're taking a break, if you're going for a walk, whatever it might be, you can do the same thing. You can post a question or a challenge to yourself and then go to lunch, and then go for a walk, whatever it might be. Come back an hour or two later and do the same sort of mini-journaling and tackle the question again. Often, these short sort of mini-bursts will enable you to, throughout the day, multiple times tap your subconscious processing power and really leverage the power of creative incubation to be able to solve challenges and problems that you're facing. 

So, while the biggest use of this—and again, we talked about how important sleep is as part of this process—the biggest and best use of this is to structure your daily architecture in a way that you're ending the day with a quality question of focus using the conscious mind to feed the information to the subconscious mind, letting go of the problem, sleeping, then waking up and returning to it before the world has had a chance to hit you with all kinds of inputs. That's the overarching way to leverage creative incubation for your biggest challenges, but you can also do it on a smaller scale with smaller issues or challenges by using these sort of mini-bursts or mini-breaks with things like lunch, gym visits, going for a walk, et cetera. 

There's two or three other considerations to think about when you're structuring your daily architecture like this. One of them is that flow states, especially our play states, with something that's really engaging and engrossing, where you're totally focused on it. Enable you to kind of break from the conscious focus on that problem. So, even something like taking a break for 45 minutes to play video games, often you can return back to the problem you were dealing with and, because you've been so engrossed in that, your conscious attention is completely focused on it. Your subconscious will be able to process all that information using creative incubation. You can return and have a new insight into whatever you're dealing with.

Another thing that can sort of supercharge, or be a powerful factor in improving the quality of your creative incubation, is to use meditation as a tool and to build that into the daily architecture, end the day with quality, let go, go to sleep, wake up, meditate, and then go to journaling on that process. Meditation is a force multiplier when you factor it into the process of creative incubation. We talked about meditation. We have a recent episode about it that's awesome, and if you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend checking it out. It gives you a very simple way to get started a framework, and talks a lot about the science behind why meditation is such a powerful tool. But meditation can be something that can exponentially increase the power and the ability of your daily architecture structured around the power of creative incubation.

That pretty much sums up the topic of creative incubation and creativity. This daily architecture, or even just using mini-bursts, is something that you can apply in your daily life that can help you become much more effective and help you solve some of the biggest problems and challenges that you're dealing with. I really think you should give it a shot. Try it for a day or two. Try it with a specific problem or challenge. See if it works for you and let me know on Twitter or in the comments or send me an email, whatever you want to do. I'm really curious to see how creative incubation works for you. 

Hacking Sleep, Improving Creativity, and Research Backed Strategies for Success with Gregg Clunis

In this episode you’re going to learn how a few tiny leaps can help you achieve your goals, how to optimize your day around your biorhythms, the truth about the difference between night owls and early birds, how to invest in improving your sleep, practical steps to increase your creativity, and much more with our guest Gregg Clunis. Gregg is the creator and host of Tiny Leaps, Big Changes - a rapidly growing podcast that shares simple research backed strategies to get more out of your life.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

The Surprising Data-Backed Truth About Achievement with Business Psychology Expert Peter Shallard

In this episode you’re going to learn the surprising data-backed truth about achievement, the one personality test that can predict success in the real world, the incredible importance of willpower, the ultimate indicators for personal growth, and much more with our incredible guest Peter Shallard.

Known as “The Shrink for Entrepreneurs” - Peter is a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade, he works with entrepreneurs from around the globe to help them master the psychology of reaching their goals of success faster, better, and with a bigger impact.

We talk about:
-What Peter Learned from More Than 10,000 1on1 Phone Calls with High Achievers
-Why A Select Few Have Advantages In Achieving Their Goals
-The Amazing Finding of the “Marshmallow Experiment"
-How to Refuel Your Willpower
-And 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  

Today, we're excited to have an incredible guest on our show, Peter Shallard. Known as the shrink for entrepreneurs, Peter is a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade. He works with entrepreneurs from around the globe to help them master the psychology of reaching their goals of success faster, better, and with a bigger impact. Peter, welcome to The Science of Success.

Peter:	Thanks for having me.

Matt:	So, Peter, tell us a little bit about your background.

Peter:	Yeah. So, as you just said, I've got a background in psychotherapy and psychology. I started out actually running a private therapy practice working with civilians back in the day, and since then I've kind of specialized and I found myself as a specialist working with entrepreneurs, which has been a really fascinating experience for the last... almost ten years now, I think. And the practice that I've built, it has me really get this incredible insight through one-on-one consultation some of the brightest and best people doing some of the most crazy, high risk venture pursuit in the world. Along the way I started another company called Commit Action, which is really about helping people who are starting out in business overcome a lot of the psychological obstacles that really prevent them from getting started, and that's been kicking around for the last two years and has gotten me obsessed with, you know, pretty much the title of your podcast: the science of success. We're trying to really look into empirically what is it that moves the dial for helping people turn their intentions, their hopes, that desires, their dreams and all of that into actual concrete results and what really you know makes a difference in a tangible, measurable way. So, yeah. That's the world that I play in.

Matt:	So, you work with some of the smartest minds in neuroscience as part of what you're doing at Commit Action. What have you picked up from kind of running in those circles?

Peter:	Yeah, that's right. So, along the way, we figured out that we wanted to put together a solution for these entrepreneurs who are starting out. You know, the hundreds of thousands of people who are joining the self-employment kind of movement every year. We know that number is growing and growing and we realized to really get into the science of it we needed to approach some of the folks who are working at the absolute cutting edge in the academic world and who are doing some of this research. So, we worked closely with the professor of positive psychology at NYU. We've worked with some Harvard neuroscience folks to try to really get an insight into the vast wealth of knowledge that these guys have with the research that they're doing, and so, you know, I have all sorts of exciting little nuggets to talk about that we've picked up from some of these people are on our company's Advisory Board. And also, you know, that we we've used to inform the work that we do it Commit Action with our members, and we've actually become a bit of a statistical force to be reckoned with, because in the last, I think, three years, we've conducted of over 10,000 one-to-one phone calls with entrepreneurs all around the world, and when we're doing that, we're collecting all sorts of data about how these people are accomplishing their goals, you know, what sort of intentions they're setting, what the follow-through looks like. We're basically empiricizing the science of achievement and tracking all of this stuff, and so, our long-term intention is actually to be working with some of these incredible academics who are figuring out amazing, amazing stuff through these studies, that to be honest, primarily revolve around undergrad students coming into a lab and playing various games and doing kinds of examinations to figure out these different hypotheses. We're really hoping to be able to take some of the stuff and apply it to the business world, where there's this bottom line metric, which is, can you help somebody who's made it their mission to build a business, who's maybe quit their job with the intention of starting a web design company or finally creating that widget that they've always had as a hobby and they want to see if they can bring it to market and make that their source of income and whatnot, and can these insights into the psychological science that really show that, you know, at least in the lab, this is how you can predict someone's performance, this is how you can improve someone's performance, this is how you can make a goal more achievable. Will this stuff actually move the dial in the real world? We're starting to see some really exciting signs of that happening, and then as we grow our business and get to even more of a significant statistical sample, we'll be working closely with these guys to hopefully be running efficacy studies of our own.

Matt:	That's fascinating. So, over 10,000 one-on-one phone calls collecting all kinds of information.

Peter:	Yeah. I mean, at this point, we're also... you know, we have a proprietary web app, which is an amazingly powerful tool that our members use to plan out their goals. I mean, I don't want to talk too much about what the actual business does because I don't want to just pimp it out here. It's not my intention. But the thing that we do is we meet with our members every week over the phone and help them essentially plan their goals to the next week, so at a primary level, the service we provide is kind of like personal training for productivity. Just like you'd go to the gym and have someone yell at you and spit in your face to make you do push-ups, we're actually providing a service where these entrepreneurs, many of whom incredibly isolated, they feel, in the real world at least, that there's not too many people and their friends and family groups who sort of understand or get what they're going through. They'll meet with one of our coaches over the phone and also through this virtual experience that our app facilitates, and they'll plan out the week ahead, you know, create incredible clarity around what they should be focusing on, and then leverage the accountability of having a pro help them with all of this to actually make sure that they get it done. So, we've created this kind of revolving seven-day ritual. Now, the exciting thing about that from a scientific point of view is it gives us this amazing snapshot of people's lives and really gets solid data on how many things are people actually accomplishing that they articulate as clearly defined actions, and what is the effect of applying more specificity to go setting, and things like that. You know, any particular question you might have about how an entrepreneur goes about accomplishing a goal, we can basically run a survey out to hundreds and hundreds of people within seven days and get, like, a 99% response rate and have some really interesting data to play with. So, we're really trying to figure out what is it that really matters, what is it it really helps people succeed in an area and an industry, honestly, that I believe there's just so much noise, there's so much BS, to be honest. There's so many people peddling all kinds of, like, we can help you be successful type products and services, and yeah, it's our mission to be the one that actually works.

Matt:	So, what are some of the take-aways that you've seen from kind of diving into those snapshots of people's lives?

Peter:	Yeah. So, this is the whole reason I was excited to talk to you, and I think that the place that I'd like to start the conversation is to say that what the science tells us is--and this is going to be a big let down for everybody here--is that the truth about achievement, about I guess the science of success, is that it's deeply un-sexy. There's a lot of really cool ideas that are out there kicking around the personal development industry. 
You can go out on a retreat. You can pay thousands of dollars to go to some retreat where you do a sweat lodge or some incredible heart cracking wide open ceremony where you're going to have an epiphany and maybe cry like a little baby and have this amazing, almost psychedelic insight into what's been holding you back, uncover limiting beliefs, and really examine the very essence of your soul. What we've discovered is that that stuff very rarely actually makes a difference. The things that really help people actually simply get more done or accelerate progress towards a clearly defined outcome, you know, literally things like increasing profitability of a small business, that sort of stuff, that is actually really deeply un-sexy, that it has to do with a lot of basic psychological concepts, which I'm happy to talk about in a lot more depth, that at first look seem really kind of intuitive and boring and kind of like, "Oh, yeah, I know I should be doing that," but when you look a little deeper I think that where it gets exciting is that a lot of these concepts and ideas are, I guess, things that we might think we know about but that so few people are applying, and that's what we've really discovered. I mean, one of the most shocking things that has kind of come up as sort of a hypothesis that we're brewing and that we're seeing a lot of evidence for is that, initially, when I started this business, when we started working with these beginning entrepreneurs and new folks to entrepreneurship, I sort of believed that success was a spectrum, right. I thought that, you know, just intuitively there was probably people who are really struggling and there's people who are, you know, really, really crushing it, hitting home run after home run, serially successful entrepreneurs, and then everyone in between all the colors of the rainbow. Once we started looking at these psychological dynamics, these kind of core ingredients that seem to really make up, you know, the ability for someone to be able to set a goal and achieve it, I guess as easily as possible. We found that there was an almost binary difference, or at the very least there was a big chasm, a huge gulf between the kind of haves and the have-nots, that there's a huge number of people, the vast majority of people who are aspiring entrepreneurs, which is the only the sample population we deal with. They actually are totally lacking a lot of this stuff that seems very intuitive, and then there's a very tiny fraction of a percent of really high performers who have what I kind of think of as the psychological equivalent of a silver spoon in their mouth, right. Like, they've got this incredible advantage, whether they've picked it up from, I don't know, their parents, their education, something in their life has conditioned them to think about goals in a certain way, to manage their own performance in a certain way, to sort of measure their expectations in a certain way, and they have this ability that helps them from the outside look like absolute wizards, look like people who are capable of just taking a dream or an idea and blowing it up into something extraordinary. But yeah, that was one of the most kind of shocking things, but when we really look at the individual pieces of the puzzle what we actually find is that, yeah, it's pretty un-sexy stuff. There isn't any magic bullet in here that's going to feel like an epiphany to your listeners, so I want everybody who's listening now, as you got through this podcast you're going to probably learn a whole bunch and it's going to be very real and tangible, but there won't be any moment where your mind is blown by some completely foreign and alien concept, because what actually works is the most un-sexy and real sounding stuff, advice, tactics, strategies of all.

Matt:	So, I'm very intrigued. Tell me more about these, as you call them, deeply un-sexy concepts that underpin some of the highest achievers' results.

Peter:	Okay, cool. So, yeah, the first thing is, you know, one of the things I've always been obsessed with, anybody who's kind of interested psychology loves personality profiles, personality tests, that kind of stuff. Myers Briggs, there's all kinds of... There's a whole spectrum of these, ranging from the ultra-spiritual woo-woo, totally unscientifically validated, but, in my opinion, still sometimes genuinely very interesting systems for splitting up personality and figuring out who you are, right through to the ones that we think of as more scientific. In... I believe it was in the '80s but I'm not totally sure, though, actually, off the top of my head. There was a group of psychologists and social scientists all around the world who got together to try to kind of figure out... They ran a global symposium to figure out, well, what is it about... You know, what is the real personality type? Like, let's get rid of all the noise, let's try to scientifically really dig down and find out what are the traits, what are the fundamental building blocks of personality, and this is the key that we can use to actually predict success, because if you can't use a personality trait or personality type, a label of some kind, to predict anything, then what's the point? Is it actually real? So, these guys got together and they eliminated a huge amount of different systems and basically boiled it down to what are now known as The Big Five personality traits. You're familiar with The Big Five, right?

Matt:	A little bit, but tell me more and kind of explain it so that the listeners can really understand the Big Five or, as I think it's also known, the Five Factor model.

Peter:	Right, yeah, the Five Factor model. So, the five factors that we're talking about here, and what's really important to preface this with, these are not "types" in the Myers-Briggs sense where you can sort of be one or the other, extrovert or introvert, and it's about what kind of unique beautiful snowflake are you. These are almost like... I think of them as levels, like in a video game when you have a character who levels up. So, we're looking at a high score being, you know, implied as superior and higher-functioning and a low score being implied as lower-functioning. The five factors are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and then the last one is neuroticism, what is kind of a reverse score. I'll explain that. We'll go through them a little bit. Openness, number one, is basically openness to experience. It's really fundamental curiosity. It's the idea that, you know, some people are more just genuinely open to variety, to the experience of the new in their life, and what these guys figured out is that this trait is really, really important for things like self-actualization, at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's really a big part of that we believe people's ability to ultimately be happy, because seeking out new experiences and being open to new experiences is what really gives us a lot of emotional fulfillment. The second trait, conscientiousness, is the one that I really want to talk about today. Conscientiousness is the big success predictor. You know, at the base level, it can really be looked at as just a tendency to be kind of organized and sort of very deliberate. You know, self disciplined in a lot of ways. But when we look a little bit deeper into it, we start to associate conscientiousness with somebody who's incredibly good at an understanding of and an appreciation for delayed gratification. So, conscientiousness is the hard-working personality trait. People who have high levels of this are incredibly good at present moment sacrifice in pursuit of a long-term outcome. And, of course, as you're listening to this, this sounds like an entrepreneur. This is somebody who is willing to work 16 hours a day so that they can really create something for themselves or make some kind of a big impact down the road. Extraversion. This is an important one to kind of clarify because a lot of people are obsessed with this idea of extrovert/introvert that comes from Myers-Briggs. Extraversion in the Big Five is a little bit of a different concept. It's less about how you sort of recharge your batteries, which is the phrase thrown around in the Myers-Briggs world a lot, and it's more about how outgoing and energetic you have the ability to be, how well you cope with the stimulation of others, of groups of people. The thing about Myers-Briggs is that there's a lot of introverts who have the ability to be quite highly extroverted.  They just get really exhausted by it. For the purposes of the Big Five, how your energy responds to being extroverted doesn't really matter. It's about whether or not you have the ability to do it. And so, extraversion is really powerful in predicting things like people's ability of salespeople, all that kind of stuff, and also just predicting help people socialize and play well with others. Agreeableness. These last ones, I'm not... I'm more interested in conscientiousness, but just since we're giving a little bit of a dictionary definition here, we'll power through them. Agreeableness is basically a tendency to basically get on well with others, to be cooperative. It tends to really kind of resonate with people who find themselves matching conversationally with people. So, when they chat with others in a social context, they're more likely to search for shared experiences. They're more likely to say a lot of yeses and make a lot of, literally, agreements in a conversation, rather than seeking to criticize where the other person may be incorrect or sort of analytically pick apart someone's arguments as though conversation is some kind of Socratic dialogue. So, people with a low score in this area are often perceived as very highly competitive, very argumentative people. And then neuroticism is kind of a reverse trait. We actually want to have a really low score with neuroticism. Neuroticism is basically just kind of how solid our grip on reality really is. You know, how well, how good we are at emotional self-soothing, we good we are at kind of controlling our negative emotions and being resilient in that sense. It has a lot to do with emotional stability and impulse control. I often think it's a bit of a shame that they've called it neuroticism. It's because there's a beautiful acronym, OCEAN. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Really, it should be emotional stability with a positive score, right, so you want to be really good at that. So basically, these five factors... You know, what these these social scientists and psychological scientists figured out, this is the stuff that really, really matters. This was a while ago. These are the traits that we can say pretty empirically that when people have high scores on all of these and a low score on neuroticism, they're going to be a successful person, they're going to be more likely to maybe make a lot of money, maybe stay in a long-term relationship, maybe raise healthy, well-adjusted children, or whatever it is that you really care about. Now, to finish this massive soliloquy that I'm giving here, where we get really excited is in some of the developments that have happened the last ten, fifteen years, particularly in the positive psychology field, breaking down this idea of conscientiousness and really proving that to be one of the most powerful predictors for success in any particular area of life that really matters. And yeah, that's kind of what we're seeing right now, is that conscientiousness and a bunch of associated traits and synonyms for essentially that thing, that ability to appreciate delayed gratification, that ability to work hard, is something that just straight-up predicts phenomenal success, and probably where this began and was with the famous marshmallow experiment, which I wouldn't be surprised if you've had other guests on this podcast talk about. This is a guy called Walter Mischel, who basically had a bunch of kids come in and do this experiment where, really, the challenge was for them to succeed at resisting immediate gratification. So, what they did is they put a marshmallow out in front of these kids and they told them that if they could wait--I think it was something like 15 minutes--in a room alone with a marshmallow sitting on the table in front of them, they would have two marshmallows. They could wait 15 minutes and not eat the first marshmallow. Now, what they found is that the kids who were able to hold out the full 15 minutes... These are very young children. I forget the exact age, but I'm thinking five, six, something like that. These kids who held out for the full 15 minutes did 210 points higher on their SATs down the road than those who caved within the first 30 seconds. Not only did they perform better academically as they grew up, they were also more popular, and in these studies that tracked kids going through into adult life, they earned higher salaries. They also had lower BMIs. They were physically healthier people. And this all comes from an experiment that just basically measures how conscientious are these kids, how good are they at delayed gratification. So, it's through the Big Five and then narrowing down into conscientiousness that we're starting to see in the last few years the science of psychology and performance psychology be able to actually tell us what are the things that really matters, and this is an exciting time because up until very recently, almost all psychology was theoretical, was based on really, really smart guys, admittedly, having a lot of bright ideas and basically writing down incredible theories and just thinking stuff in an armchair. It was almost, you know, the philosophy of psychology, so it's exciting to be able to see this stuff actually create results in a lab.

Matt:	Well, that whole thing is fascinating, and I think that this is definitely the conclusion that people may not agree with or like this message, but the outcome of the marshmallow experiment alone, which I don't think we have talked about before on the podcast, is staggering. How can people really understand or measure their own scores on this test? Is it something you can go out and take, or how can you take a look at yourself as you are today?

Peter:	Yeah. It's a good question. It's funny because, you know, the Big Five... This is the thing that's so un-sexy about it, is that when these guys figured out the big five and conscientiousness and all this stuff, they really realized that they had distilled down personality traits to the point where it was no fun anymore, and there really isn't a test anymore. They actually say, I think... I'm not sure. I'm sure if you look up the Wikipedia for the Big Five or whatever, you'll find that it's kind of widely agreed that if you want to get a measure of the Big Five in adults, you literally just ask people to self-score. You know, there are tests out there, but they're not like these really fun personality tests that people really enjoy where they ask you these sort of [00:25:13] questions, right. Like, it's like, do you prefer pineapples or mangoes? Oh, you're an extravert. These are really questions more along the lines of how do you feel about working really hard for a goal that's down the road, that's in the future? So, because they've distilled it down to these fundamental basics, it's gotten to this place where there isn't any mysticism anymore. So, I think just knowing about these things is the real take-away here. Certainly, you can look online and take a test to figure out what your Big Five score is, but I think it's more useful to really think of these as the ultimate indicators for personal growth, and if our mission is to be happy and successful in life, one of the things that we can look at doing is increasing our openness to experience, increasing our conscientiousness, our ability to do this delayed gratification, working to increase our extraversion, our agreeableness, and just generally lowering our neuroticism and increasing our emotional stability. And so, I think that using them as a guide for growth rather than a place to pigeonhole yourself is really important, because that's what the Big Five have really evolved into. It's not like Myers-Briggs or some of these other personality profiling systems, a method for figuring out your identity. That's really the big difference that folks have to understand, is that when you find out you're an ENTP or whatever in Myers-Briggs, it's really telling you, this is your particular unique, beautiful snowflake. Enjoy this. These are your strengths. Maybe you might behaviorally try to, once you find out you're really extraverted, maybe you'll do a little bit more of that, or whatever. But the Big Five is different in that it's more of a recipe, a guide for us to tell us what to improve. So, I think it's less about asking yourself what you are, because I think that at a fundamental level, in our bones, we know if we have a problem with conscientiousness. We know if we have a problem with extraversion, you know. It's more about using these tools to figure out how you can improve.

Matt:	So, I really like the kind of description, that these are indicators for personal growth. It's kind of the road map in pointing you in the direction of where you need to be thinking about, in terms of how you can kind of level yourself up.

Peter:	Right.

Matt:	And so, do you think that... And I guess, what does the research say about how fixed are these traits? You know, I can hear somebody now saying, well, how can I change my neuroticism, or how can I shift to being more conscientious? Is it something that can actually be kind of improved and leveled up, or is it something that's unchangeable?

Peter:	Yeah. So, the science of conscientiousness is something that we're obsessed with at Commit Action. You know, myself and everybody at the organization, this is the number one thing that we're focusing on, because, as I said, where conscientiousness has been proven several times over to be one of the only accurate predictors for success, and particularly for financial success, and obviously we're working with entrepreneurs that care about this stuff. So, we're obsessed with it, and what we're actually doing, you know, we provide a service that's designed to level up conscientiousness, and there are a lot of ways that you can go about doing it. The best and brightest minds who are studying conscientiousness and associated traits, there's a lot of synonyms for it that are kicked around the psychology world like willpower, like grit, determination, that kind of stuff. These guys all kind of agree that this thing... The best metaphor for it, I guess, is a muscle, and a lot of the best researchers are really happy with that as a metaphor, and what that means is that it's a part of our personality. It's a mental faculty that we have that becomes stronger the more we work it out. And to be clear, that also working it out makes it really exhausted, right, as anybody who is a big kind of gym junkie knows. If you go to the gym and you do some crazy leg day workout, tons of squats, that sort of thing, the next day your legs are going to feel incredibly shaky, right? Like, you're going to have trouble getting out of chairs. But if you do this over a period of months, you're eventually going to be able to be objectively stronger. You're going to be able to squat a far bigger weight or deadlift a much bigger weight. That's pretty much exactly how conscientiousness in particular really works. It's something that we can work out, and the way we work it out is by hitting it like we would a muscle, by hammering it, by demanding of ourselves that we use this ability. And so, it doesn't really matter where you are with conscientiousness. What matters, I fundamentally believe, that we approach this, that all of us approach this with a fundamental optimism. You know, that we can, in fact, go and build this skill. 

Matt:	So, what are some of the practical ways that either you guys use at Commit Action or maybe some of the listeners could employ in terms of actually kind of building that muscle and really working it out?

Peter:	Yeah. So, that's a great question. It depends a little bit on where you're kind of at with it. Like, where you feel your ability lies with conscientiousness. I think that it's always best to start small, particularly if you feel like you're a very undisciplined person, that you struggle with delayed gratification. It's something that you can begin to actually exercise with something as simple as actual exercise. Like, working out, at a fundamental level, is an exercise in delayed gratification. You know, going for a run, going to the gym, it doesn't feel good in the moment. It does feel good afterwards, but what you're pursuing is a long-term result, like in a year you get to have a six pack or you get to lose a bunch of weight or whatever it is that you're looking for. You get all of the benefit much further down the road. So, if you've never really done anything like that before, that can often be a really good place to start. Now, for the entrepreneurs we're working with, we're trying to directly apply this to business pursuits. So, we'll do a lot of different things. I mean, we have a one-to-one service. We put one of our incredible productivity and accountability coaches one-to-one on these phone calls with our members. But we'll have them do things like dedicate a certain portion of the day, you know, five days a week, they'll do something that is incredibly scary to them. Like, a really common one, because we have so many folks who are starting businesses, they're in the first few years of getting going, they need to be doing something called cold calling, which is literally jumping on the phone and prospecting for business. Particularly common for people who have business to business businesses that they run, where they're selling things to other companies. And so, this is a terrifying exercise for a lot of newcomers to entrepreneurship, a lot of people who don't have sales experience. I mean, to be honest, it's terrifying even for people who do have that experience sometimes. And so, it meets the criteria of that delayed gratification exercise, right? Because it's painful up front. It's very difficult to pick up the phone and call a stranger and run the risk that you may be horribly rejected in pursuit of maybe opening up an opportunity when one in ten calls is maybe going to go your way, and even if it does, you're not actually going to sell something to that company that you just called, you know, for another month or two or three or six. Right? So, it's this incredible slow process, yet we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it actually works. You know, billions of dollars of business are done this way all around the world every year. So, we'll play little games with our clients. We'll have them do things like take an hour out of every morning where they do nothing but cold call. We'll build an entire ritual around that. We'll have them understand that if they narrow the scope of the challenge down to 60 minutes, or even 30 minutes to get started, or even just kind of making one call, if they're really resistant, that they can build up a habit of sort of doing this thing that hurts, of doing the delayed gratification thing, of conscientiously applying themselves outside of their comfort zone. And what actually starts to happen is this extraordinary thing where the person does it and then creates a psychological feedback loop that gives them this incredible sense of confidence and well-being because ultimately, they feel great because they've started doing the thing. Now, this is the same thing that you'll see when somebody without an exercise habit spontaneously develops one. They start running. You know, a couple of weeks in, they're not getting the results yet, but they really start to feel incredible. I think, because of the internal narrative that we have of, like, "Hey, I'm doing this. I'm finally taking action on this." So, I'm trying to cook this down into a sort of a practical take-away for your listeners, but I think that if you've got something that you're horrifically procrastinating... And that's fundamentally why everybody who works with us comes to us in the first place. They know that there's something they should be doing, and they know they should be doing it. They need to do it. If you've got something like that, you can begin to build your conscientiousness muscle by creating a highly specific challenge as sort of a daily ritual or a very, very short-term implementation goal, but I'm tapping into all sorts of other psychological science, you know, using these sort of buzzwords here, and when you really just focus on that one thing, it demystifies the enormity of the project, right? I mean, just thinking about making ten cold calls a day for the rest of your life is horrifically... You know, it's terrifying, right? But when it's sort of like I just have to pick up the phone today, you look at this from a different perspective and you'll do it, and it will engage that willpower muscle, that conscientiousness muscle, and you'll be depleted at the end of that hour or that half hour. You'll be really worn out. But if you do this enough, you'll come back and get stronger and stronger and stronger before you become, in the case of our members, the kind of entrepreneur who eats cold calls for breakfast. And that's really what it's all about.

Matt:	I love the phrasing, kind of thinking about it in terms of the idea of embracing discomfort. That's something that we've talked about on the past on Science of Success. We actually have a whole episode about the concept of how to embrace discomfort, and we actually kind of tie in another thing that we call the sphere of discomfort, which is a very similar sort of concept, that the more you kind of play at the edges of your comfort zone, the more that that expands and broadens, and then you can really kind of create... You know, open up new frontiers and new opportunities that would have been essentially invisible to you before you kind of built that muscle.

Peter:	Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is fundamentally... This is the un-sexy truth about real personal growth, about real... You know, I almost sort of wince to say this, but real personal development. Not in the epiphany sort of seminar, raise your hands in the air and scream about it sense, but in a tangible, can you measure this in your business's bottom line, can you measure this on your scales, can you measure this in some way that actually matters. And it does have to do with leaning into these ultimately painful experiences. One of the things that I think is very counter-intuitive that a lot of people sort of don't understand about this is that there is a real drain. There's a real psychological drain that some researchers have kind of pinpointed and described as ego depletion, and this is the draining of the fuel tank. This is the wearing out of the muscles, and one of the ways that we see these entrepreneurs over at Commit Action really kind of shooting themselves in the foot, tying themselves in a knot, creating self-sabotage of all kinds, is that they have these phenomenally high expectations of themselves, and this is true of, I think, anyone who sets out to be an entrepreneur. Almost universally, they have these enormous expectations. A lot of folks in the world have these very high expectations for themselves, and it becomes a problem because the high expectations are 24/7. They sort of think to themselves, if I can do this once, I can do it whenever. I should be performing at this high level. I should be working, you know, maybe 16 hours a day while I'm really building this business, or whatever it may be. What this doesn't account for is this phenomenon, well studied and measured and quantified at this point, phenomenon of ego depletion, and what ego depletion is is when we engage that psychological muscle, we're actually really draining... I sort of hesitate to use the word energy, but that's kind of what it is. We're really draining this mental energy. Now, this has actually been backed up and validated by all sorts of brain science. It's been understood... There was a study out at the University of Toronto, I think, that showed that ego depletion causes a slow down in the anterior cingulate cortex. So, the brain area that's basically cruicial for regulating self-control. And what is actually going on is that when we engage it, when we wake up in the morning and make ourselves go for a run and it takes a lot of willpower, it takes a lot of effort, we have to sort of grit our teeth and go do it, we now have less of that. We are now depleted, in a sort of metaphorical, energetic capacity, and in a real, neurological capacity, and we have less of that fuel to pour into other activities throughout the day. And so, it's this science that is at the heart of every entrepreneur's favorite story about entrepreneurial Jesus, a.k.a. Steve Jobs, and his decision to wear the same black turtleneck and mom jeans every single day, because one of the things that we've discovered is that ego depletion happens at a massive rate whenever we engage our mind in decision making. So, if you find yourself staring into your closet perplexed at what to wear today and thinking about, Well, I'm going to go out, I have this meeting, what should I put on, what temperature is it, blah blah blah, you're actually using this valuable mental fuel to make that decision. If you've ever found yourself low blood sugar, really hungry, trying to figure out a late lunch, and you're gazing into the fridge and you just can't possibly figure out what you should eat, what's going on is that you've had so much ego depletion throughout the day, you've been engaging this mental muscle so much that you now have none of it left. You're kind of running out of that juice, and that's that brain fuzz that people experience in the late afternoon and the evening where even the smallest decisions just feel completely overwhelming, and it's in that state that you're not going to be able to engage your mind to do that cold calling exercise or go on that workout. You know, the thing we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that people who build a habit of working out early in the morning, at least when they're high-performing executive types, they tend to have a lot more success than folks who try to make it happen at the end of the day, and it's for a fundamental reason. Ego depletion happens all day, every day, because of all the different stuff we have to make ourselves do with conscientiousness, with willpower, and the only thing that really resets it... Well, two things. The biggest one is sleep. We get a new tank when we wake up every morning. And the other one is food, but it's vastly less effective. So, there's all sorts of studies that have happened that show that when people consume a bunch of calories, it does give them a boost in terms of decision making willpower. It gives them that mental kind of function back. But the problem is it's temporary and it follows what we are figuring out about nutrition science, which is that if you have a bunch of sugar, you get a short-term lift but then ultimately you pay the price later on. So, really, it's sleep, which means that we have a day's tank every single day and we have to wake up and choose to spend it the best that we can, and this is why you'll see these high-level entrepreneurs who work very systematically to eliminate decision making, superfluous and unnecessary decision making for their lives, for the reason that they're trying to save up, whether because they know the science and they've talked to me or they just intuitively do this, they're trying to save up all the mental juice they can for the ego depletion that really matters. They want to spend that willpower, they want to engage that conscientiousness muscle on making those cold calls or really performing in that negotiation meeting, or whatever it may be.

Matt:	And I think another name for ego depletion is also the concept of decision fatigue, which we've, I think, talked about in one or two episodes in the past, and I think it's a critical point and something that's super important.

Peter:	Yeah. Decision fatigue is absolutely a part of it. Ego depletion encompasses also what happens when we simply engage conscientiousness, right? Like, when we engage our conscientiousness skill. So, if you need to... You know, decision fatigue happens to... Everybody who goes shopping for their wedding registry, right, like go and talk to any salesperson at Macy's or Sachs or somewhere like that, and they'll tell you that the couples really struggle. It burns them out. They have little fights. They get glazed eyes and they're just zombies by the end of a shopping experience, and the reason is you're basically putting yourself in an environment where you have to go and pick hundreds of things. You have to make hundreds of individual decisions. That's decision fatigue. Ego depletion includes decision fatigue, but it also includes the drain to our willpower that we experience when we try to do anything that involves delayed gratification. So, when the kid at the marshmallow experiment table is trying to resist eating that marshmallow for a full 15 minutes, there's some phenomenal ego depletion taking place because it requires willpower for that kid to literally be good, to be the best version of themselves, right, to follow through and do this good thing, and so it's constantly draining muscle while he's doing that, and a lot of these really fun experiments they do with these undergrad students and whatnot have shown that if you have... There's a great one. I'm going to butcher the paraphrasing of this here, but there's a great one where they had people resist eating... Like, they had people starve themselves so they'd be hungry. They'd come to the lab. The lab would be filled with the aroma of freshly baked cookies, and they'd have these folks resist eating the cookies. Like, you're not allowed to eat the cookies, but they'd just be sitting there looking good, smelling good, and then they'd say, "Now you go watch this movie in this comfortable lounge and there's all these snacks there and you can eat whatever you want. This is your reward. Just chill out." Now, of course, what they're actually measuring is how many of those snacks do people really eat, and what they've found is that the control group, the people who didn't have to sit and watch the cookies and smell the cookies but resist eating them, they would snack. They would have a few chips and M&Ms and that kind of stuff while they watch the movie. But the people who had been forced to engage their willpower and resist the cookies for half an hour, whatever it was, they would just go to town on these snacks while watching the movies, because their willpower had been depleted. This ego depletion thing had happened and they didn't have any of that juice left.

Matt:	Fascinating. So, what are some ways that people might be able to kind of eliminate random or superfluous decisions throughout their day?

Peter:	Well, to answer that question, I think we should talk a little bit about what we really do at Commit Action and the sort of philosophy behind it. Our hypothesis and the point of our service is to create a weekly ritual for our clients that becomes the place that they make decisions about their implementation intentions throughout the week. So, that's a fancy way of saying we help people set goals for the next seven days on one recurring point, one time, one date throughout the week. Now, the reason that this is important is that it drains us, it engages decision fatigue and ego depletion, to sit down and try to do some work, whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, or an artist or anything. If you're sitting down at your desk and thinking, Now what should I do?, everything that we know about the science is telling us that that's a really wasteful use of your mental faculties. So, probably the best place to get started for people who are interested in the science of success is by doing exactly what we do, by building a really solid ritual of planning out what it is that you're going to be doing, what objectives you're going to be chasing, with a solid level of specificity every single week. And so, that's the ritual that we do to try and eliminate some of that wondering what to do next, and we've found that this is incredibly helpful at helping people move forward, pick up the ball and move it forward on their most important projects.

Matt:	So, what books or resources do you recommend for the listeners who want to dig deeper into the Five Factor model or ego depletion or some of the other topics we've covered today?

Peter:	That is a good, good question. I mean, the first... Trying to think of a book before I give a shameless plug here. I'm looking at my bookshelf. There's a lot of different stuff. Look, honestly, the thing that... If you want to learn more about this, if you're interested in particularly the science of success in the sense of helping yourself really move forward, eliminate any procrastination or self-sabotage or overwhelm or anything like that, and basically turn all of your goals and ideas into actual concrete progress, that's exactly what we do at Commit Action. Our marketing philosophy is a pretty simple one. We believe in generosity, so I've given away basically the best nuggets of all of our research and the stuff that we've figured out. We have a series of videos that are a tutorial training program, and it's absolutely free for everybody to come and check that out, and these videos will detail exactly how you can built these kind of concepts--we call them the pillars of this stuff--into your life to become an extraordinarily productive and effective person. Particularly if you're a business owner or you aspire to be a business owner, this stuff is going to be really useful. But arguably for anyone who is interested in success and high levels of achievement, you guys should come and check this out. So, I was excited to come on the podcast today and what I've actually done is set something up special just for the people who are listening to this podcast, because I know that this audience is probably a little more obsessed with the science of all of this than everybody else. So, we have a video training series that's available to the public. You can go to commitaction.com and sign up, but if you go to commitaction.com/science, which is a page that only exists for listeners of this podcast, you can pop your email address in there to get access to the video training platform and unlock all of these videos that we have that are free, that tell you how to do this stuff in your own life. We're also going to send the people who opt in there, the listeners of this podcast, an extra training that will focus on just the best nuggets, the best kind of psychological pieces of the puzzle that have come to us from our advisory board, and yeah. So, you'll get a bit of an insight into the actual research itself and go into a little bit more detail, and also the practical implementation steps, what you can take away from this science and really build into your life. So, I'm really excited to go into even more detail with the folks who are interested in that stuff. So, go to commitaction.com/science, and you'll also hear in that video series from Dan Lerner, who's the professor of positive psychology at NYU. He's going to chime in and talk a little bit about some of the science stuff as well. All and all, it's a really kick-ass program and the intention of it is that you can use that to walk away and build this stuff in your life and be more effective absolutely on your own, and, of course, we do it because we want people to know about our science and our technology and how we might help them, but it's a great resource for everybody anyway.

Matt:	Well, that's awesome, and I think the listeners are going to be really excited to check some of that stuff out, so thank you very much for putting that together for everybody.

Peter:	Absolutely.

Matt:	Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that pretty much wraps up the episode, so thank you so much, Peter, for being on The Science of Success. I think this has been a fascinating discussion and I think everybody's really going to want to dig into some of the science and the research behind this, and in some ways, you might call it an un-sexy conclusion, but at the same time, kind of a surprising twist about what really predicts success and what really people should be focusing on in terms of trying to achieve results in their lives.

Peter:	Yeah. And that's ultimately the message that I want to share and what our mission is all about, is understanding that an incredible amount of personal development, personal growth stuff that most people are chasing is a bit of a misnomer. There is a lot wrong with it. But when we look at the science of what actually works, what it presents is this optimistic view that the things that really make humans superhuman achievers are simple skills that we can work to level up and strengthen, just as you would a muscle in the gym. And to me, that's exciting. That's the most optimistic kind of view one could take, because it means that we all have a shot at doing better.

Matt:	Awesome. Well, thanks for being on The Science of Success.

Peter:	Thanks for having me.

Unleash The Power of Meditation

This episode we are going to talk about Meditation – we’ve had a lot of listeners ask about this and I am really excited to cover this topic!

It’s something that I’ve done nearly every day for over 2 years and something that has a ton of research-proven benefits.

In this episode we will talk about the myriad benefits of meditation, look at a few different ways to meditate, discuss a simple and easy way to get started on meditation – that finally got me into a daily meditation practice- 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!).  

SHOW NOTES, LINKS & RESEARCH

• Meditation Improves Your Ability to Be Introspective (see here)

• Meditation Decreases Depression (see here)

• Meditation Decreases Anxiety (see here, here, and here)

• Meditation Decreases Stress (see here and here)

• Meditation Increases Compassion (see here and here)

• Meditation Increases Immune System Function (see here and here)

• Meditation Improves Your Ability to Regulate Your Emotions (see here)

• Meditation Increases Grey Matter (see here)

• Meditation Increases Brain Size In Areas Related to Emotional Regulation (see here and here)

• Meditation Increases Positive Emotions (see here and here)

• Meditation Increases Cortical Thickness In Areas Related to Paying Attention (see here)

• Meditation Increases Your Ability to Focus & Multitask (see here and here)

• Vishen Lakhiani's Envisioning Method (Description + Guided Meditation here)

• Vishen Lakhiani on Mixergy (see here)

• The Reality of Perception Episode (see here)

• The Power of Compassion (see here)

• Understanding e=mc2 (see here)

• "We Are All Connected" (see here)

• [Meditation Music] Zen Garden (pt 1) by David & Steve Gordon ( see here)

• [Meditation Music] It Shall Be Beautiful by David & Steve Gordon (see here)

• [Meditation Music] Ravi Shankar Sitar Music (see here)

• [Meditation Playlist] Matt Bodnar's Zen Garden Spotify Playlist (see here)

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I'm really excited today because we're going to talk about meditation, which is something that I am really passionate about and something that, as I mentioned in the intro, I've been doing for more than two years on an almost daily basis. And I wanted to kind of open with an old Zen proverb that I really like, which is: If you don't have 20 minutes to meditate, you need two hours. That's something I think we should all think about. Meditation, as we'll discuss on the podcast and I'm sure that many listeners are already aware of, is something that is incredibly beneficial to you. There's tons of research about the benefits of meditation, but a lot of people get sometimes kind of caught up or confused by the fact that there are so many different ways to meditate; there's so many different methodologies; there's so much noise. It's hard to kind of distinguish the signal from all of that. So, what we're going to talk about today: I'm going to give you the way that I got started meditating. I'm going to give you a really simple method. It's very easy. It takes between five and 15 minutes to do, typically in the morning or at night right before you go to sleep, and it's something that really... You know, I kind of intermittently meditated for a year or two when I first became interested, and I'll kind of tell my whole story about how I got started on meditation. But once I discovered this methodology, it gave me sort of the framework and the guidelines that enabled me to meditate on a consistent and ongoing basis, and start to really reap a lot of the real benefits of meditation.

So, let's start out with a couple of my personal favorite reasons why meditation is so important. I think, in a meta sense, meditation enables you to view your own thinking and capture and be aware of what's going on in your mind; being aware of the dialogue that's constantly running; being aware of the things and the thoughts that sometimes kind of appear in your mind almost on autopilot. And that awareness, that self-awareness of your thought patterns, of what's happening in your brain, being aware of that gives you the ability to effect so much more change in your life. And, you know, going back even to the last episode where we talked about NLP and we talked about the software running in the back of your mind with Andy Murphy, meditation is the tool, in many ways, that enables you to kind of pause to see those patterns, to see that language in your mind that's telling you that you can do something or that you can't do something or that's kind of a script on autopilot from your past. Another episode, we talked about limiting beliefs. One of the best ways to kind of catch limiting beliefs in your mind is with meditation. When you meditate, you're able to kind of pick up on that chatter, that mental...those mental messages and you're able to say, hey, hold on. What was that feeling? What was that thing that I just had, that I just felt? That sort of twinge of doubt or that little phrase that just fluttered through my brain. And you can say hold on a second. That's something that I need to write down. That's a limiting belief, something that's been lurking in the back of my subconscious, that's been stopping me from doing what I really want to do. And the episode we did on limiting beliefs really drilled down into that, so if it's something you want to explore more, I highly recommend checking that episode out.

Another incredible benefit of meditation is, and the way it kind of ties into being able to grow and to challenge yourself and to push yourself... We talked a lot more about this in the episode on embracing discomfort. But one of the ways that you grow and improve is by expending and playing in the edges of your comfort zone, playing in the places where you're uncomfortable. And meditation gives you, again, that same kind of mental ability to sort of flag a thought and say, you know what? This is me hiding from this uncomfortable situation and this is an opportunity, instead of hiding, to step up to the plate and say, I'm not going to let...I'm not going to back down from this situation. I'm going to force myself to do something that's uncomfortable and push myself outside of my comfort zone.

So, here are a few more benefits of meditation. And, trust me, there's literally a laundry list of things, and all of these are research-backed and we're going to include a bunch of them in the show notes. But meditation has been proven by psychological research to reduce stress, reduce depression, and reduce anxiety. I know that that comes as a shocker to many people. Another interesting benefit is that meditation has been shown in research to actually boost the function of your immune system. Another one: Again, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but meditation improves your ability to regulate your emotions, right, to control your emotional state. Meditation increases the gray matter in your brain. This is a pretty amazing finding. It literally increases the size of your brain and, not only your brain as a whole, but it increases the volume and specifically in areas related to emotional regulation, positive emotions, and self-control. Meditation also increases the cortical thickness of your brain in areas specifically related to paying attention, which yields dividends and increase in your creativity; increase in your ability to focus; increase in your ability to multitask; and so many other things. Again, I'm not going to drill down into all that research. We could spend hours talking about every single one of the studies that showed how powerful and beneficial meditation is. But I think you already know, deep down, how important meditation is and how powerful it really can be.

So, let's dig into some of the different kinds of meditation and some of the different ways that people meditate. One of the biggest misconceptions that I want to clear up is that there are many different meditation methodologies. There are many different ways to meditate and there's no right way. There's no right way to get started. You don't necessarily have to sit in a Lotus Position. You don't have to have a mantra. You don't have to have a certain kind of breathing. Part of the reason people get intimidated and don't start meditating is because they get overwhelmed with the deluge of information on the internet. You know, you can google how to meditate. There's 15 different methodologies or more in any given blog post that you're going to look at. The key is to just find something simple, find something easy that can help you get started. You know, that is always the hardest part. You want to just figure out what's the easiest, simplest thing I can do to begin on this path.

And I'll tell you the story of how I started meditating. It was kind of almost on a whim. It had been something that I'd been interested in for a long time, and even when I was when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough... I traveled to Southeast Asia and I randomly bought this book on Buddhism and I read it cover-to-cover. I didn't really understand most of it, but it was just something that was really fascinating to me. I've always had kind of a fascination with Zen and East Asian religion and Buddhism and all that stuff. And I read about meditation--that book--and I tried it once or twice, but it really didn't take hold. It didn't really have any effect and I kind of forgot about it. That was when I was 16 or 17. Years and years and years later--it was probably four or five years ago--I was just sitting in my office, working, and I got this urge to search for something on Pandora, and I just searched for the phrase "Zen garden". I don't know why, don't know what prompted me to do that, but I searched for the phrase "Zen garden" and just created a Pandora station that was sort of this chill, like, spa music. And I was just working, kind of listening to it. It was early in the morning and, you know, that's of my favorite time of day. And I listened to three or four songs and then suddenly I just got this really powerful urge to just sort of sit down and sit in kind of a Lotus posture and meditate. And I didn't know what I was doing, but I just started doing that and it was really enjoyable and I kind of started seeing... I didn't do it every day. I would do it once a week, couple times a month. Whenever I sort of got this urge, I would just pop on some kind of chill spa music and I would meditate. But I couldn't really establish a daily practice with that. I was... Sometimes, it felt really fruitful, it felt really engaging and enlightening in some ways, but oftentimes I would just feel like, what am I doing? What is this? What going on? And it wasn't really until I stumbled upon the particular methodology that I use to meditate now that I really was able to build it into a daily practice.

But before we dig into that, there's a couple just rough considerations I want to talk about. One of the biggest buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot when you're talking about meditation is the difference between guided meditation and unguided meditation. And, again, there's no right or wrong answer here. The best way... The best analogy that I've ever heard for thinking about the difference between guided meditation and unguided meditation is that guided meditation is like riding a motorcycle and unguided meditation is like riding a bike. Both will get you where you need to go, but only riding a bike you actually build the muscles that you need to get there yourself. So, if your focus is solely on the destination--you know, anxiety relief, stress relief, that sort of stuff--guided meditation can get you there. And there's a ton of apps and YouTube videos and all kinds of stuff based around guided meditation, which is essentially someone walking you through each phase of some sort of meditation process. I'm sure many of you have either used some of these apps or heard of these things, or tried guided meditation at one point or another. And, again, there's nothing wrong with guided meditation. Actually, guided meditation, in many ways, is how I started down the path of getting a daily meditation practice.

Unguided meditation basically means meditating on your own. Now, you can still meditate with sort of a framework that's been predetermined, or you can focus on what's called mindfulness meditation. That's another buzzword. That's another thing you hear a lot when people talk about meditating. Mindfulness meditation is essentially the idea of focusing your thoughts on one particular thing. The reason people talk about mindfulness meditation or the things that people think about when they talk about mindful meditation, a lot of times, it's focusing on breath, right? We've heard that again and again. Focus on your breathing, that kind of thing. Another thing that people think about or do when they're talking about mindfulness meditation is focusing on either a single thought, a single word, or a mantra. That's where you get into things like transcendental meditation, et cetera. Again, if you want to do mindfulness meditation, it's totally fine. It's a very valid form of meditation, but you don't have to do that. There's other kinds of methodologies, other ways that you can meditate that don't have to be just focusing only on breathing, focusing only on saying "om" over and over and over again. But, you can also incorporate parts of mindfulness into another meditation framework or another meditation methodology.

But one of my favorite sort of quotes about meditation, specifically around the idea of focusing on breath, that... I think people get really, really discouraged when they try to meditate. They sit down five minutes, ten minutes, and their thoughts are just racing, things pinging back and forth. Oh, I've got to do this. I've got to call so-and-so. Oh, I've got this thing to do. Oh, I need to write this down. And it seems very stressful. And then, you know, maybe eventually they'll kind of come back and be like, oh, I'm supposed to be meditating and I'm terrible at this. I can't clear my brain. I can't get all these thoughts to stop bouncing around. And this this quote really helps kind of clarify that. If you sit down and you do that, you haven't failed at meditating. Meditation is the return to breath. That's the quote. Meditation is the return to breath. Think about that. It's not focusing on your breathing. It's not focusing on that thought or whatever it might be. It's returning back to that after you've been distracted, after you've had your mind racing and running around. It still happens to me to this day. I've been meditating for years and my mind will drift, it will wander. Even this morning when I was meditating, I started thinking about all this stuff, and then [deeply inhales and exhales] returned to my breath. I just returned back to that place. So, meditation cultivates kind of that ability to not be frustrated. Remember, we talked about this, actually, in the episode about dealing with setbacks. It's not about being frustrated and angry that your thoughts kind of went astray; it's pulling back, it's remembering to just return to breath, return back to the methodology that you're using.

So, with that in mind, again, it's about getting started as easily as possible. Pick something, start something, and just begin there. And I'm going to give you a methodology that we're going to talk about now that can help you get started, and this is the methodology that I used, that helped me get started with meditation. The method that I use to meditate is something called the envisioning method. This is a meditation framework that was created by a guy named Vishen Lakhiani. He's the founder of the company Mindvalley, and I originally discovered his framework from an incredible talk that he gives on the website Mixergy. If you've never listened to it, I would highly recommend checking that out. This framework is also very similar to the daily meditation routine that Tony Robbins follows and many other people recommend. And we'll include a link to this in the show notes as well, but if you look Vishen Lakhiani up on YouTube, you can find him. There's about a 20-minute clip where he actually walks through every piece of the envisioning method and then does, at the end of that clip, a 15-minute guided meditation where he actually walks you through each of those steps. And, remember, guided meditation is a lot like training wheels It's something that can help you go through the various pieces of a meditation practice with someone else walking you through. And once you've used guided meditation to kind of get started to follow the process, eventually you can build the muscles, build the skills to meditate on your own without some sort of guided practice.

The envisioning method is a six-part framework. The total time it takes to meditate using the envisioning method is approximately between five--if you're really in a hurry--and 15, maybe 20 minutes. It probably takes 10 to 15 minutes on average if you do sort of a normal run through of each of the six pieces. So, if you're thinking 10 to 15 minutes, six pieces, it's approximately two to three minutes on each different piece of the framework. The first piece of the envisioning method--the first one which I honestly think is the single most important piece of the entire framework--is a focus on gratitude, is a segment about gratitude. So, what does that mean? Basically, you take two to three minutes and you focus on a few things that you're really, really grateful for in your life. You focus on maybe some big things in your life. You focus on even the smallest things, you know. Just tiny, little things. One of my favorite quotes from Tony Robbins is: The key to happiness is to trade your expectations for appreciation. But the crazy thing about gratitude... And, actually, the majority... Not every piece of the envisioning method... Again, it's a six-part framework. Not every piece of it is it scientifically-backed and totally rooted in research and we'll talk about that when we get to the piece that isn't, but the majority of the sort of legs of this framework are rooted in the science and the research of positive psychology.

So, gratitude, for example. This is one of my favorite studies they did a research study where they had two groups of people. They had the research group and the control group. The research group, they had them write in a gratitude journal for seven days. They had them write three things that they were grateful for for seven days. That's it. After the seven days, they stopped. They didn't do anything else. The control group did nothing. Six months later... And they measured them for a six-month period. Six months later, the people who had spent one week writing down three things they were grateful for each day were 10% happier than the people who had done nothing. Think about that. That was one week. They stopped after a week of doing that. That's the power of gratitude. Again, it's research-backed. And I think everybody knows, fundamentally, gratitude is one of the most important pillars to happiness, one of the most important pillars to living a fulfilled life. And gratitude is something that is, to me, the single most important piece of the envisioning method and the thing that brings me back to doing it every single day. Now, if you think about that, if you think about somebody doing that for seven days, it has an impact on their happiness six months later. Imagine if you do it every single day. Imagine the compounding effect of that focus on gratitude every single day. You start your day. The first thing you do is focus on how incredibly grateful you are to be alive, how incredibly grateful you are to have the blessings that you have in your life. There's no better way to start your day. There's no better way to begin your meditation, either.

The second piece is compassion or connectedness, and, to me, there's a couple things that I focus on in this segment. And, again, these things are actually more rooted in kind of the ideas of physical science, physics, and biology, but they're things that, to me, just sort of resonate very deeply. The goal of the compassion segment or the connectedness segment of the envisioning method is to cultivate a deep sense of care, a deep sense of empathy, a deep sense of compassion for the other people in your life, for those around you, for everyone that you interact with. We talked about this a little bit in the episode on perceiving reality. We also talked about compassion and how important it is in-depth in the interview that we did with Chris Cook. It's an incredible episode. But compassion is so important and the idea is, basically, you think about how interconnected all life truly is and it really kind of ties you back into a deep sense of compassion for others and for those around you.

And I think about a couple different things that sort of root and really ground this for me. And, again, these...all three of these, as crazy as some of them may sound, are rooted fundamentally in physical science. The first is an incredible quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I'm sure many of you know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is. If you don't, he is the narrator of the most recent edition of the TV show Cosmos. He is a very prominent astrophysicist and scientist. But this quote really resonates deep with me and it's something that I focus on every time that I come back to the idea of compassion and idea of connectedness. And the quote is: We are all connected to each other, biologically; to the Earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe, atomically. If you really think about that at each of those different levels, that's a fundamentally true statement from a scientific standpoint, right. We are all connected to the universe atomically. What does that mean? If you really think about it, at an atomic level, the atoms in your body are the same as...the components of the atoms in your body are the same as the components in the sun; the components in the planets in our solar system; the components in the stars throughout our galaxy.

Another thing that I think about is energy-mass equivalence. E=mc2 -- everybody's heard that equation. What does that actually mean? Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That's a core component of physics. It's an equation that's incredibly well-known. But what it actually means is that mass is energy. All mass is nothing but energy. Everything around you. You. It's all just energy and, to me, that really helps kind of ground me and connect me to not only other people in my life, but the entire universe.

The last is one of my favorite quotes. It's from Carl Sagan, who I'm a big fan of. "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies, were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff." Again, this is something else that's rooted in physics, rooted in physical science, and is a true statement. Every atom in your body, except for the helium and the hydrogen, was formed in a collapsing star, and the reason that's the case is because helium and hydrogen--which are the two most common elements in the universe--can only fuse together at such great temperatures to form other elements that it has to be in a supernova--it has to be in a collapsing star--for those elements to form together and form everything else on the periodic table. So, the vast majority of not only your body, but everything around you was formed in the explosion of a collapsing star. You and everything around you is literally made from stars. You were born out of a star.

Again, this stuff sounds kind of crazy. It sounds a little bit woo-woo, but all three of those things are fundamentally true, scientific statements. And the reason I like those statements is because they're true, they're scientific, but they really kind of create this sort of unique feeling that makes you kind of think about the universe. It ties you back in. You know, whatever your religious beliefs are, those statements kind of tie you into the idea of, hey, there's an underlying connectedness here. There's an underlying kind of need for a root cause of compassion. And we talked about how important compassion is on the episode where we interviewed Dr. Chris Cook. But, you know, that's why you have this compassion segment as part of the envisioning method.

The third component of the envisioning method is forgiveness. One of my favorite quotes about forgiveness is a quote from Gandhi. "Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong. The weak cannot forgive." And one of the things that took me a long time to come to grips with about the idea of forgiveness is that the reason forgiveness is important is not because someone else deserves to be forgiven; it's because it's bad for you to hang on to that bitterness, to hang on to that anger. They actually did a research study at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Karen Schwartz says, "There is an enormous physical burden to being hurt and disappointed. Chronic anger puts you into a fight-or-flight mode, which results in numerous changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and immune response. Those changes then increase the risk of depression, heart disease, and diabetes, among other conditions. Forgiveness, however, calms stress levels, leading to improved health." Again, this stuff isn't made up. This is backed by research. It's backed by medical studies. The reason it's important to forgive is not because someone else deserves it if somebody has wronged you; it's because the only way to truly move forward, the only way that you can ever really reach happiness, is by letting go, is by forgiving. It's because you will benefit from forgiveness, not because they deserve it. If you think about people like Gandhi, people like Nelson Mandela, their incredible power for forgiveness is what enabled them to create such incredible results. It's what enabled them to achieve so much. And that's why... The part of the forgiveness practice is basically not only to forgive yourself, which often is the hardest part--it's often the hardest to forgive yourself--but it's to forgive other people who have wronged you even for this smallest things. You want to forgive somebody who cut you off in traffic. You want to forgive somebody who was rude to you. I'm reminded of, again, another Tony Robbins story that he tells or a thing that he talks about is the idea of it's easy to be nice to people when they're nice to you. The way you build the muscle of compassion is to be nice to people when they are mean to you, when they are rude to you, because we know that the vast majority of the time, the reason that they're being mean, the reason that they're being rude -- it has to do with them. It doesn't have to do with you. It has to do with the situation they're in. It has to do with the mood or the state that they're in. It has to do with a lot of things, of which probably none of that has to do with you.

And so forgiveness... And the reason you practice this every day is because, you know, when you start getting into this practice, you're going to be really searching and thinking for...thinking about forgiveness for things that maybe are some big things in your life that you've been really holding on to, some grudges, some things you're angry about from your past, et cetera. You want to slowly work through all that stuff. But you once you've done that, you can start forgiving people even for the most minor, trivial things that happen in your daily life. And the ability to let go of those things during your meditation practice also enables you to let go of them in real time. In your life, when something happens, you can step back and be like, you know what? I forgive this person. It's not worth...It's not worth it for me to hold on to this anger, to hold on to this grudge, to hold on to this bitterness. I'm just going to let go because my happiness is more important than being right or than being bitter or angry at this person because of some sort of wrong that they did to me. And I think the forgiveness segment is, in many ways, one of the hardest parts of the envisioning method, but it's something that I think is incredibly important. And, again, all three of the segments we've talked about so far are rooted and backed in research. These are not made up, woo-woo ideas. All of these things are grounded in research or science that shows how this is practically beneficial for you.

The next two parts of the envisioning method--part four and part five--are both around the idea of positive visualization. The first--part four--is about positively visualizing your day, visualizing how the day is going to unfold, and kind of really creating a vision in your mind of everything going perfectly, everything going the way that you want it to go, everything going...everything being ideal. The second part, five, is about visualizing your life three years from now. And Vishen Lakhiani talks about the concept that we can accomplish less than we want to in one year, but we can accomplish much more than we believe we can in three years. And so the idea is to look three years in the future and envision your perfect like, envision everything that you want, all of your dreams coming true, your goals coming true, everything that you're working towards--the best-case scenario--and then double it. And the reason you do this both with your day and with your kind of ideal future is because positive visualization has been shown by research to open up new neural pathways, to open your mind's eye to the possibility of some other alternate route, some other journey, just the same way that... And we talked about this in-depth in the episode about the reality of perception and how the way we perceive reality doesn't necessarily mimic, don't necessarily actually represent what reality really is. We also talked about this in the episode about limiting beliefs. But the concept that the way...the map that you use to understand reality, the belief structure that you have that tells you what reality is can be flawed. It can be based on faulty assumptions or imperfect assumptions, and that map interprets all the information that you get from the world. And so positive visualization helps reshape that map in a positive way, in a way that opens the door for new opportunities, new possibilities, and things that you might never have seen before; doors that you might never have thought about before; paths that you would never have taken before. That's why it's so powerful.

There's an incredible study around the idea of exercise. There's a doctor named [INAUDIBLE 00:31:05], who's an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, and he did a study where he had one group of participants actually lift weights and do physical practice. He had another group simply mentally visualize that they were lifting weights, that they were doing practice every single day. The group who actually lifted weights had a 30% muscle increase. The group who only conducted mental exercises of weight training increased their strength by 13 1/2%. Think about that. This is three months after the experiment, when they took these measurements. By never going to the gym, only visualizing the fact that they were going to go to the gym, that they were lifting weights, they increased their muscle mass by 13 1/2%. It's incredible when you think about the fact that just using your mind can physically reshape your body, just visualizing physical training can grow your muscle mass. If you think about that when you apply that to the rest of the areas of your life, positive visualization can help you improve, can help you grow, can help open up new doors and new possibilities for your reality.

The last part of the envisioning method is something called the blessing, and this is the one...this is not scientifically-based, but it is something that Vishen recommends and something that I think is a worthwhile component of the envisioning method. It doesn't matter necessarily if you're religious, if you're an atheist, but the idea of the blessing is that you sort of imagine a positive energy flowing through your body and supporting and healing you. And it sounds kind of woo-woo, but, again, think about the fact that we talked about earlier, that energy is mass, right. Everything around us, including ourselves... We are nothing but energy. So, the idea is you envision...you sort of visualize a positive healing energy flowing into your body to heal you, to support you, to bless you, and to kind of help you along the journey, help you along your path. And, again, if you want to get more details and you want to get an actual guided walk-through through the entire envisioning method, Vishen has a YouTube video where he does the entire thing and we will link to it in the show notes, or you can just search his name or you can search the envisioning method on YouTube and you can find all that stuff.

The last piece I want to talk about is the environment, that how do you meditate, through some of the sort of specifics and the logistics. Personally, I like to meditate first thing in the morning when I get up, and I think that, to me, either first thing when you get up or right before you go to sleep are the two most important times to meditate. And either or. I mean, you can do both if you want as well. But the reality is the day gets so busy, it gets so hectic that if you don't carve out and set a time and really say, I am going to do this every single day at...you know, as soon as I wake up, you're not going to do it. And it's not a huge time commitment--again, 10, 15 minutes; five minutes if you're really in a rush--but the power of meditation is that doing it every single day is what builds that mental muscle. It's what increases physically the gray matter in your brain. It's what changes the structure of your brain -- building that practice every single day. Think back to the gratitude journal, the idea that just doing it for one week has that powerful of a benefit. Imagine stacking that every single day for years. It can completely transform your life.

In terms of what I physically do when I meditate, I, personally, typically sit in a Lotus posture, but it doesn't really matter. You can sit in a chair. You can lay on the floor. Most people recommend that you don't meditate laying in bed simply because often you'll just fall asleep. But sometimes I'll just lay on the ground. But, you know, I like to sit in a Lotus posture and one of the things that really kind of helps me get in-state, helps me get into my meditation zone and block out whatever might be going around--I've meditated on a plane before; I've meditated all kinds of places--is having a sort of meditation playlist, and I have a couple songs and artists that I recommend personally that I love to listen to when I meditate. But it really helps me kind of get in the zone and get to the place of being calm, being centered, and get back to that kind of meditation state of mind. One of them is the song Zen Garden by David and Steve Gordon. I absolutely love this song. There's a couple different versions of it, but there's about a 30-minute version, so you're not going to run out of time, you're not going to run out of song if you're only meditating for 10 or 15 minutes. But it just, to me, personally, it really centers me, brings me to that kind of place and that space I want to be when I'm meditating. The next is there's an album by the same artists, David and Steve Gordon, called Gratitude that's incredible. That really helps me kind of get centered and meditate. And they're some of my favorite artists kind of in this segment that really have some awesome music. Another one is sitar music by Ravi Shankar. And if you're not familiar with Ravi Shankar, he's a fascinating guy. But if you kind of have... If you're in the mood for something to kind of get a little bit more of an Indian vibe, that sitar music is really, really cool to meditate to. And, actually, I meditated to sitar music this morning. But if you want to find some of this stuff, I created a Spotify playlist titled "Zen Garden". If you want to follow that, you can get all those songs. You can just look me up or look that up on Spotify. You can find it. All the music is on there or you can find a lot of it on YouTube, SoundCloud, something like that.

But, again, the key about meditation is just get started. The benefits are there. You know the benefits are real. The question is: Can you commit 10 minutes a day to all these amazing benefits? Can you commit 10 minutes a day to this kind of framework? Find the easiest, simplest way for you to get started and just do it. Try it for a week. Try it for two weeks. You'll start to get addicted to it and realize that it's awesome and that you look forward to it and it's something you really enjoy.

Uncover The Software Running Your Mind with Andy Murphy

In this episode of The Science of Success, we dig deep into how to uncover the software running in the back of your mind and how to re-wire your brain by understanding your neural pathways. You will get a helpful definition of the term “peak state”, learn how to create a better Alter Ego of yourself and much more with our guest Andy Murphy.

Andy Murphy is a performance coach who has worked with VIP clients including Saudi Arabian Royalty, TV producers, and world champions, he’s a master practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming or as it’s commonly known “NLP” - and he's also the host of the podcast Mindset by Design where he talks about NLP, Self-Improvement, and World-Class Mind-Hacks for Peak Performance.

In this episode you will also learn:

• All about NLP (and what it is if you've never heard of it)

• How the concept of "peak state" works and why it’s so important

• How the patterns in your mind can shape your reality

• How to change and interrupt those patterns

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today we're excited to have a guess on the show, Andy Murphy. Andy is a performance coach who has worked with VIP clients including Saudi Iranian royalty, TV producers and world champions. He's a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming or as it’s commonly known as NLP, and he's also the host of a podcast Mindset by Design where he talks about NLP, self-improvement and world class mind hacks for peak performance. Andy welcome to the Science of Success.

Andy: 		Hey Matt! So nice to be here, is so nice to be here, thank you for having me on.

Matt: 		Yeah, we're really excited to have you as a guest today.

Andy:		 I'm excited to be here, mate. This is going to be fun.

Matt:		Great! Well so, Andy, tell me a little bit about kind of neuro-linguistic programming, maybe some of the key tenants and…you know we have…we’ve mentioned once or twice it’s come up in a few interviews on the Science of Success but, you know, we’ve never really dug into it and I thought this would be a great opportunity to share some of the lessons of NLP with our listeners.

Andy:	Yeah, for sure, for sure, it’s…I mean…it’s a buzzword right now and it’s taking [Laughs] a long time to get here for sure but it’s use right now, and Frank Kern obviously is taking about, and NLP in video marketing and all over the internet, and it’s right through every type of industry now and it’s…I love it, it’s one of the things that I really look to teach because it’s one of the biggest things I’ve found and available in the world today, to be able to catch this old patterns, break them, rewire your own brain for new beliefs, new attitudes,  and really for world class performance, you know? In general but, what NLP really is a derivative from psychology from the seventies. But, what was really…it looked out as…I use this as an example, right? And the classic difference between psychologists, is someone you use NLP for example, is that classical psychologies don’t want to look all the reasons why someone is doing something, right? The root cause or the depression, or why someone’s making that same mistake, and the challenge is, is they take you back to that root cause and go over and over, and over old patterns but, when you begin to understand that neural nets or mind muscles, or your unconscious mind, nerve system, whatever the hell that you want to call it, it’s all the same thing. 
When you start to understand that work it’s just like a muscle then you got to understand that by repeating these old patterns you’re making the muscle a beggar. So, what NLP does is gives you a system, structure to recognize this things and start building the patterns that we do want, which would be the confidence, excitement, drives that leads to focus, that self-talk and when we can start to build those patterns that starts to form a new habit and that’s how we begin to think, feel and act a different way.

	Does makes sense to you, sir? It was a bit of a random example [Laughs].

Matt:	No, I think that makes a ton of sense and I don’t have some of those science right in front of me but, I know that there’s a bunch of research that backs that commonly idea of the more you use a neural network or a neural pathway the more you reinforce it and that’s you can build and reinforce connections.

Andy:	That’s absolutely right. That straight neuroscience and that’s great to seek and I’ve been doing this for thirteen years over the world, and with a lot of industry leaders, you know, a world champion, athletes and clients like Saudi Arabian royalty and the top into that markets in the world and it really is, if you start to look at the brain is that...well, the difference is this you have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. And that unconscious mind is a lot more of what people think about, think it really is but, people use it in the wrong way, again, with normal therapy and normal self-development or personal development what they trying to do is, they trying to give you lots of tools to…yeah, try and control this conscious mind but, this conscious mind is just this bit of the mind that me and you are talking in right now. 
	So, what we really need to do is give you a toolbox, and that toolbox is to hack this patterns with just your focus, to change this internal dialog to be able to change this kinesthetic, the feelings and the moment. That’s the toolbox you need, and then you got to understand what this unconscious mind is. Now, my definition behind it and…yeah, I’ve perhaps said this a thousand times before but, my definition of the unconscious mind is that is this software that plays in the background of the computer. What does that mean? Well, it runs automatically, it gets outdated, and it makes you perform a certain way.
	Now, this is the same with your brain, and another way to look at the unconscious mind is also called your body-mind. That’s the bit of your mind that blinks you, breaths you, affects your lymph system, your adrenal glands. So what you think else effects, yeah, your motivation, your drive, your belief system, your attitudes, how you value yourself and all of these things are running in autopilot back there in the background of your head. So, if that muscles on auto-pilot then that muscle is also getting thicker which means, it gets hard very for entrepreneurs to break these patterns but, when we develop a system around it then we can rewire it, which mean we can build new muscles new ways of thinking and acting.  Again, does that make sense, Matt? I’m dancing all over the place today, mate.

Matt:	No, I think it makes a lot of sense and I think that’s a very good kind of crystallization of what NLP is and why is such an important concept, especially…you know, I love the analogy of it’s the software that’s running in the back of your mind…

Andy:	Right.

Matt:	And, kind of what is…what has you autopilot that you might not be aware of.

Andy:	Exactly, exactly and the thing about this…I mean, people talk with classical psychology again and everyone talks about the imprints day, which is zero to seven years old in your life and that’s when you form like a blueprint for life. So, when we look on mentals or different stages of our life, these mentals that we look at are our parents, right? And when your parents argue about money, stress or relationship, or whatever it is, we think those people are one hundred percent right so, we have to model them, copy their thoughts patterns, and we think that this is right, and as we get older we realize that [Laughs] hey, people are just doing their best, our parents don’t know everything for sure, right? 
	This leaves us with a certain blueprint, right? That can help us or hurt us. It was the same thing like…people like Richard Branson, and why Richard Branson, Richard Branson well, we all come into earth saying we are all the same way so, what’s the difference? Well, his neural nets, the way he’s thinking, what he’s producing neurochemicals and affecting your central system and all of this stuff. But, he was reinforced to have a certain belief, certain way of looking at the world and the thing about that is that people don’t have that, right? We got to take control of this, and that’s the whole point with NLP and neuroscience and all these cool stuff, it’s about taking control of your mind, so you can control the way you feel. 
Once you can control the way you feel then you’re able to step in and out of these peak states, which means you begin to learn to control your results, and that result could be use it sit down in that computer and write in a blog or step into a video, in a business merger, or whatever the heck is, right? This…again, Matt this is making sense?

Matt:		Oh, it makes a lot of sense and I think there’s really two kinds of offshoots from that I’d love to dig into more.

Andy:	Sure.

Matt:	One is how do people…you know, I think everybody is kind of on board with the idea that we got the software in the back of our minds that’s running everything. How do we tune into that? How do we become aware of that?

Andy:	Beautiful. I love it, that’s a direct question and that’s the point, right? Why I try to do in the thirteen years is get rid of all the BS, the full off and really work out what exactly creates new connections, and what exactly creates performance. So, the first thing people has got to understand is that you’re…another way to look at your unconscious mind  besides the body mind is also your nervous system, right? That’s really what we’re training reformat these habits of your system.
		So, realize this, when we’re born our mind is blank canvas. Now, is that strictly true? No, because we have genetics and epigenetics and all of this other stuff but let’s just pretend your mind is like a blank canvas, every single time we have an experience whether is good or bad, what happens is, is that we form the neural-net or the mind muscle, whatever you want to call it and at the end of that, that piece of software there’s like a movie, okay? And that movie is about the experience that we made and that movie is something we make a decision about and that can direct us into completely different ways, like me and you Matt, and somebody walk into the room and that person reminds me of somebody and I don’t like them, that person reminds you somebody and you love them, right? So, the end of the day these decisions we make about certain experiences start to form different patterns in the way we believe the world in ourselves.
So what I’m trying to say, mate… [Laughs] I’m trying to say your brain and everyone’s brain listening it just has thousands and hundreds of thousands of millions of these movies. So, what does that mean? That’s the first place we have to start. Is by becoming consciously aware of what’s playing unconsciously, right? So, what does that mean? Well, if I say to the listeners or whatever. Where are you? And, what are you doing in six month time on this day?…not on this day but,  on this date and this time. Most people would have a vague idea or they go “oh, I don’t know” what is going on in your business in five years? What is going on in your business in two weeks? most people won’t really have a clear picture, or a picture they comment and is not what they want is like, overwhelmed and is creating anxiety and fear. 
Well, then end of the day that’s just the neural-net or brain movie that’s playing, right? So, that’s the first step to understand, is that every time you have to think about the future or the past a movie or a memory is coming up. Could be future memory or past memory as I call them but, still a memory right? That’s what’s on autopilot so, when people start to think about the businesses in a certain way in the future, anxiety, and pressure, and stress and fear coming up. Well, guess what? That’s what beginning the programming, that’s what is installed in your head.
	So, what we have learn to do then, is something called a pattern interrupt. What the hell does that mean? It means we got to start to catch what’s playing. How do we do that? Well, there’s two ways to do it, I’ll teach you one today. Nice and simple, I want people to start getting used to and catching what feeling is playing, that’s the kinesthetic, something I call a drive and we’re talking about changing states, and you talk about in a few minutes but, once people can start to become aware of what feeling it is, then the next step for them is become aware of what memory or what movie is playing in their head. From there you can start to use different systems and change, and change it. 
	But, does this makes sense, Matt? First of all.

Matt:	Yeah, I think that makes a lot sense.

Andy:	Awesome. And that’s what we want. So, the next step is to them once we’ve interrupted it we become consciously aware of what’s playing. So then, what we have to do is change it. Now, the biggest way to change it and the fastest way is…no, there’s different ways but, a nice way to do is start to use our internal dialog, right? Because this is an amazing thing that… I had a client once that…I remember this, they were like “Andy I nearly shut up the self-talk! I nearly shut it down I’m so close, can you help me get rid of it” and I’m like “why the hell you want to get rid of it, man? This is…this is your best friend” because what we got to understand is that internal dialog is that, is on constant autopilot and we actually say around fifty thousand words to ourselves inside of our own heads every day, right? And if you’re saying fifty thousand words to yourself inside of your own head every day and each one of those words is connected to an emotion then, often you got to stop understanding that…is like someone saying in your ear “[vocal sound] you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck” [Laughs] right? So, that’s the feeling that you’re playing, that’s your belief that is going to be playing, is it anyone of that people that’s stuck, is it anyone of that people that think about the future and go “I’d love to do that” and there’s a little voice that’s on autopilot saying to yourselves “you’re not good enough to do that, you couldn’t do that” is that anyone that we got stuck inside its boundaries, of course it’s not. 
So, to be able to use this internal dialog right in the moment, to guide or navigate ourselves to the image of what we exactly wants. So, when we can start to understand that, if we look at these two different versions of you, there’s an old you and a new you, or a daily you and a very specific version of you. Now, this is something I call states, not peak mental states or alter egos this is all these other stuff but, for now you just have to understand is state.
What’s a state? Well, that’s a version of you and what I do with professional fighters and I’ve work with a lot of professional fighters is for example, I use them is an extreme example in the entrepreneur world, right? Because an extreme example of a state for a fighter is when I put them into a ring or a cage, right? [Laughs] and that’s a very unique experience, that breathing rate, the heart rates, their adrenal glands, the focus, the belief system. All of these is a…like a tightly wound neural net, or peak states, or a hat, or a role that you put on to perform a very specific way.
Now, that isn’t the same state as when you’re talking to the [coughs] moment, or they’re going on a date, or you’re trying to relax and also, is not the same as the working on a business, right? So, understand this is the same for entrepreneur, the version of you that’s picking up a sales call is not the version of you that’s sitting down and writing a blog, is not the same version of you is going to be onstage, is not the…the are different versions so, when we can start to understand that each one of these versions is entirely one neural-net with its own belief systems, with the same emotions, with the same internal dialog and it’s on autopilot unless we’re able to change it.
Then what happens is, we can get so stuck in patterns and there’s an old version and new version example, right? The old version is doing everything that it was done and giving you the results that you’ve got right now. So, every decision, or every aspect or every moment that you do next is going to lead you forward, it’s going to build a neural-nets and mind muscles that we want so, when we can start understanding that all these movies are on autopilot, all these conversations are on autopilot and so, we pass and interrupt it, catch it and then we can start to use, this is the best thing that entrepreneurs can apply today, is than guiding themselves through situations using that internal dialog so, instead of going “okay, I’m stressed. What’s going on? I don’t know what to do. I’m freaking out” right, that’s because it’s on autopilot so, the next step is to go “oh, I’m stressed [deep breath] Okay” we cut the pattern now you can start to use internal dialog to guide yourselves back to what we want so, the first question should always be what is it that I want? Because what that does is it that points your unconscious mind or your focus to that key moment in time when you know what you’ve want. And when we start to do that we start to forming new pattern or new version and then by talking ourselves into the emotions that we want and the belief systems that we want. How would the future…How would [snap fingers] the world class version of me deal with this situation right now? How would the world version of me…what would that beliefs be? What would that dominant emotion be? Right? How would they stand? How would they breathe? 
When we can start to create that new image, the new version we start put this neural-nets and then, this million different systems that got guide us from the old to the new but, when people don’t understand this, as a lot of entrepreneurs out there have a little idea but really not understanding in depth, the challenge becomes…is that they’re bringing emotion from your home which is stressful maybe, and you’re bringing that into work and then you work becomes stressful, and then you don’t want to train at night because you don’t want to be fit because of stress, right? If we don’t learn to separate these states we’re not going to interrupt these patterns, we’re not going to be coconsciously aware, what happens is everything just gets wide and messy just becomes a messy ball of emotion rushing inside your head, and then we have to ask the question, you wonder why people get overwhelmed and procrastinate, right?
Making sense, Matt?

Matt:		It makes ton of sense. There’s so many jumping off points from that, you know? I love that…the description of that kind of peak state time and back to that physical neural network, I think that’s something that some listeners may have heard of the term peak state tossed around a time or two, and if you’re familiar at all with Tony Robbins, talks a lot about that concept but, I’ve never heard it articulated in a way that peak state is…you know, a different hack or a different version of yourself and it’s actually…I was never quite sure it...you know, is there one peak state? Is peak state…you know other multiple peak states and I think the description that there’s kind of a different peak states for different kind of versions of yourself, and bringing the best self to different situations.
 I think that’s a great way to thinking about it and look at it. Then time that back into those peak states what they really are from a very a physiologically stand point, and neurological stand point, there are literally patterns and neural networks in your brain that are kind of buildup and strength and together and fire as one.

Andy:	You got it, that’s exactly it. Then the challenge with that is it…I did a podcast recently called the twenty one day habit, right? Because for one reason I got sick of people talk and try to talk to create change so fast. People that been lied to, media bias wise for long, long time. It talk about twenty one days to form a new habit well, it’s not true, right? The studies are showing that simply, simply the studies are showing that the…from London University that the average is sixty six days to formulate a new habit but, they even…I have issues with that is not true as well, it actually takes between sixteen and two hundred and sixty eight days to form a new habit, right? And I hold a forty five minute podcast around this.
The challenge is…people because of the society  and the way we’re conditioned, and the belief systems we’re pointing to, society trains our brain a very different way and you got to understand, society is also a business, right? And it’s designed to make money so, when we can start to look at the culture behind society and why we are taught certain things. Well, it also begins to understand that the brochure or the magazine right? The media bias, isn’t anything all the information in the world. It’s just it what’s in…on that brochure to hook you in, that’s also the same thing that withhold these days from very instant gratification.
We’re taught this way because the media shows, these companies or these people that incredible results but, one we don’t show all the people that try to create the results and failed, or they don’t show the journey of this person or all the pain they’ve been through, they just show that end step. The end moment, it was like when WhatsApp got sold , right? Everyone started creating communication apps. Why? Because WhatsApp, “Oh, I’m going to be the next WhatsApp” Really? Not that’s done, right? So, understand this is the same thing with life. We’re taught in a certain way and things take time.
If you build a muscle on the outside you don’t certainly expect to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? In 21 days, no, of course you don’t, right? Or whatever it is. So understand you brain is functioning the same way, the difference is as you reconnect this neural-net you also get…your brain gets flooded with chemicals, right? And this is a chemical cocktail and if we get these chemicals…because wrong we’re firing the wrong thoughts and this is what leads to depression, this leads to lack of self-worth and all of this because I always say this, I like extreme examples, Matt. If like if you’re…if you’re thinking about your dog that died when you were a kid, right? And you kept thinking about it all the time how you going to be feeling? Not too good.
That’s the same with anything, if your thought is focus on a certain thing what’s emotion that that thought is bringing to you. Is it going to make you take action? Or is it going to keep you where you are? And this is the same when you got to stop thinking about the future, we stop thinking about the future and the emotion that’s coming through is either fear, procrastination, anger, overwhelmed, stress and guess what? You need to address this, you need to start looking at this so, the best thing that people can do besides catching patterns and changing internal dialog, changing states and all of that stuff is why I call my company [Laughs] mindset by design. The reason, the academies are for reasons is designed to build the patterns that they want and at the end of the day that’s all that this life is. 
	Its building the patterns that we want until the momentum takes over and starts to flow in that direction and does that means there’s not ups and downs? Of course! Does it mean that hitting the gym building muscles in good days and bad days? Of course, it’s the same thing but [snap fingers] what makes ‘em world class or not is the ability to catch that pain and redirect in the moment to who and how you want to perform. 

Matt:	So, this kind of segues into that…one of the things that you mention earlier is sort of creating the world class version of yourself so, how would the class version of myself handle this challenge…

Andy:	You got it.

Matt:	How do you go about sort of cultivating or creating, or saying… what if somebody’s stuck and they don’t know what the world class versions of themselves would be? Or maybe  they’re…you know, they don’t know what their goals might be. How do you kind of build that infrastructure so that when you have that moment you can direct your emotions and you can use NLP to kind of get to the state you want to be in?

Andy:	I love it. Well, there’s different ways to keep it simple for everyone listening today but, there is a reason why I call my brand mindset by design. You have to sit down and design what you want. Now this comes back to this period of my life that I was twenty seven, twenty eight years old that…just gone into bankruptcy and just been a nervous breakdown because I’ve been ripped off by my business partner because we put in together a fifty million dollars resort in Fiji, this is what we were doing, the top peak person in the country and investments real state sales and everything was going good until that moment. And I lost everything, yeah, I lost everything and it sent me to a bad place, and the reason right there I rebuild my life I was living in New Zealand at the time, I’ve lived in Australia, New Zealand, California, Bali, I’ve lived everywhere. 
I’d lost everything and a professional model is a girlfriend, second five series BMW and beautiful house blah, blah, blah, to basically living in the basement of a gym and training and fighting everyday ‘cause I do these martial arts and what happened was, it was from there that I rebuild my life, and this is why the whole brand and everything is built around this because I had to sit down and truly work out what the hell I wanted. Because I said to myself okay, Andy you seen over two thousand people face to face, you know you got this sales,  you know you’ve got to do, so what do you truly want? Is in that moment that I really sat down and wrote pages and pages of my perfect day, and every vivid detail as vivid as you can possibly make it so, the description are which handmade. I move over, which part of my hand hits the bottom and automatic blind that open up, to one eighty ocean view. So the call it to the texture, to the feelings, once that becomes really clear…well, guess what? In NLP we called something been associated, what does that mean? That means being inside the emotional, the seen and that is the same that I want everyone to start doing with their business, right? What’s the end result in these periods of time? What’s that exact moment? How vivid can we make this? It’s also something with designing everything and if you don’t know what’s the business you want. Well, guess what? You need to write down the options because how the unconscious mind works is [Laughs] if you give it one option? It would do it! If you give it ten options it will find the one that excites it the most.
	So, when I’m thinking about new ideas for anything I put around with possibilities, constant possibilities, options, options, options because the unconscious mind would find the one that excites it most and when you can do that, when you can start writing something in such a vivid detail it associates in your brain, your neural-net starts to build and your belief system and the emotions towards the start to grow.
Does that makes sense Matt?

Matt:	It makes a ton of sense and I think that’s such a critical thing is the importance of starting with your goals and I think Neil Carnegie says “learning beginning with the end in mind”…

Andy:	You got it, yeah.

Matt:	And that’s the exact same approach that I use to when I’m working with the company, when I have some kind of strategic challenge or issue? Immediately you have to figure it out what are your goals? What do you want to achieve? And once you answer that question everything else sort of cascades and flow into that kind of definition that you set originally. What is the end state? Whether is a mental state or a physical state or whatever that be, that you want to get to and how can you channel you actions so that you do that.

Andy:	That’s it, that is what exactly that moment that ends step. And now, the thing about all of this is part trickery with the brain because what we do is…this is the other mistake that entrepreneurs I find make, those set a certain image of themselves around a certain goal, whatever it is, right? And then become obsessed with it, okay? Now, this is counter intuitive to probably every other coach is going to tell you this but [Laughs] they’re wrong and I don’t care who they are, right? And this goes from a couple of different examples but, in experience… but, when we become obsessed with it in external thing, right? We come obsessed with it and unless you’ve tried that path before what is the generally the emotion that’s being blasted every day for the average person? it’s not confidence and excitement, it’s not. It’s stress, is fear that you never going to achieve it, you’re not there, not feeling good…you know, whatever it is, right? is the pressure and the anxiety and the stress of getting there. So, from my sight, from rewiring brains, what do you think that does? That’s bad wiring, to get there so, what happens is, we have to use the obsession in a different way, we have to use it internally to make yourself world class. 
To make yourself world class…and I teach this all the time, you make yourself world class your business and your life will mirror it, when you become externally obsessed, the challenge is that image or those things can change. They’re supposed to change but, what we do is we build this goals or we build the character version of us to kind of trick ourselves, it pull us forward and that’s what we want, and then when we’re growing ourselves into being world class and that evolution, then what happens is those external things? Well, they grow and evolve with us, which means new people would come in that we don’t even know they can present opportunities, new places, it all start to change around us. But, what happens is, and this comes from mistake, you know? This is why I was obsessed about when I was twenty seven, twenty eight years old those resorts, building those companies and that’s because I changed my focus to obsession externally instead of [Laughs] OCD and obsession internally which allows what I love. Then, what happens is, is we don’t allow what’s around of us flow and adapt and change which is the definition of the evolution.

Matt:	I think that’s awesome. So, I want to change gears a little bit and…I mean I think we still can layer in some of these lessons from NLP but I’m curious…what is some of the commonalities that you see among the world class performers that you coach and that you work with?

Andy:	You know, one of the biggest things…the biggest thing that I’ve taken away [Laughs] and I love my job for this reason, I get to hang out with people like you Matt, I get to hang out with people…just superstars, I think that are earning like millions a year and they come to me and I learn from them business stuff but, I learn from them how they think, because then I take that blueprint and I can install the approach or do whatever with it but, the biggest thing that I’ve found is was this client,  one of the top internet marketers in the world, very, very famous guy and for…in the amazon world that’s just say that. 
	He came to me and he was very interested because is many different things I learn here, he came for this one day, we had a meeting in like five o’clock and he brought his business partner because he was trying to make a decision, and he was trying to make a decision that was about some…It brought some people and connecting with family it was a messy situation. So, we spoke of five and we finished by six o’clock, I message him at nine o’clock the next day…the next morning and was “hey, how did it go?” and he went “oh, that? Oh, yeah. Oh, that’s been done, these people were allocate in this and change this, I did this contract, hire this person, did this…” That was by nine o’clock the next morning. So, the biggest lesson or one of the biggest lessons I found is taking immediate action, right? There is no procrastination it is immediate action. There is no dimmer switch [Laughs] it’s on or off, and that the biggest thing that I found with  people that perform at that level is that the hesitation goes away because they make decision fast. Does that help?

Matt:	Yeah, I think that’s great and I think it was super important, and I was actually at the National World War II museum last weekend and I was looking at some stuff about general Patton and I think he has a quote that “a good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed next week”.

Andy:	[Laughs] right, right. I love it, I love it and then, the other biggest thing I’ve found is that being very clever at putting the right people around them as fast as they can and what do I mean by that? I mean, you have to put that team around you, on the wealth dynamic team or whenever you want to come from. But, they also have the ability…and I love this and I’ve learn this a lot, is not to again it’s hatch to the person. That person is coming to that team to fulfill a role, a role can’t be fulfill a person needs to go on and do something else that’s going to be happier and more money about, role can’t be inside the organization.
	What a lot of people do in growing businesses they hold on to people even though those people aren’t living up to their potential or not standing by what they say that they would do or whatever it is, a person that you know wont step up. So, when you start to understand that that the team you need around you must focus on the same vision and you’re not attached to the person, of course you care for them, of course but at the end of the day they come in to help you build your vision, not the other way around. And, when you can understand that and you take action on top of that, then starts to change things fast.

Matt:	And I think actually Elon Musk autobiography I think it must be is a great example of somebody that is so powerfully driven about a particular mission and so laser focus that if you’re not onboard with it…I mean, one…the missions are actually powerful tool in the sense that, people gravitate to him and enables him to track the talent but, when his mission is…you know, colonize mars…

Andy:	Yes, the sake of human race [Laughs] is a great autobiography. I did a podcast on his autobiography actually, amazing, amazing guy.

Matt:	Yeah, yeah but, you know he has the same kind of ruthlessness about if you’re not on his…if you’re not aligned with the mission, you know, you’re gone.

Andy:	Exactly and again, I teach this as well and I teach to a lot of different high-learned people, it goes back to that why, I know it sounds cheesy [Laughs]I don’t even me saying it Matt but, what is that wife Elon he doesn’t really cared about his family, or anything, his drive, his driving, his obsession is to become to the best version of him so he can step up and save humanity.	
		Now, we need people like Elon but, you know the happiest people that I’ve ever seen in the world? Are the people that have very little and they lived in Bali, right? And they’re just doing their daily things. So, for everybody is about your level…you want to play in your life because some people just want to earn…you know, five thousand dollars a month on autopilot and then done, that’s it. I’ll just maintain this and I’ve traveled the world for the rest of my life and you know what? That’s pretty damn amazing.
	So, for some people they want to safe humanity, some people you just want to be able to relax and enjoy life so, it simply depends on what is that person driving force. I also don’t think that everybody should be trying to change the world, right? Because that’s not my dri…my drive is to change like a hundred thousand entrepreneurs achieve that dream in my life but, that’s my vision, that’s my dream. Now, for someone else’s everything change so I think is a very personal thing and when I say world class I don’t mean trying to be the president, right? I mean, world class is your individual world class. You know, whatever makes you happy that to me…then you’re winning on this journey of life, right?

Matt:	I think that’s a critical distinction it’s be the best version of yourself.

Andy:	Yeah, because who else you’re going to be, right? What happens is that I know what drives me every day and I’m sure is the same with you Matt, I know cause you just obsessed with learning, and growing, and evolving and I love that about you, mate. And, I think is the same thing, you have to become your best version because the thing is doesn’t matter, I know this from martial arts, right? It didn’t matter how awesome I thought I was at that point, right? I’ve been training my butt off, everything that day for just beat you and you go like damn, so it doesn’t matter if you trying to earn a million dollars, there’s someone with a hundred thousand million dollars, if it trying for a hundred million dollars there’s someone with a billion dollars, right? If you try to be the fittest athlete in the world there’s someone who comes along that’s fitter. So, to me is not be in competition with everybody else, is being in competition with yourself and when you can use that you’re always creating momentum, the other side of it is when we start focusing on other peoples missions, or journeys, or what they’ve achieved it can knock you back, it can really like…give you self-doubt “oh, that person achieved that and that in that time and I’ve been doing this for this long and still haven’t got there” right. Well, what happens maybe you’re not meant to maybe, or you change your business model, or you change your balance in your lifestyle. What is it about yourself that you need to change? because when you look at other people you’re thinking like this, which is a very powerful question by the way.

Matt:	So, what is one piece of homework to do to give our listeners in terms of concretely implementing some of this stuff in their daily lives? 

Andy:	Beautiful question and its going back to real…again,  I feel a  little bit cheesy even saying this but, it comes from my own personal growth, it’s understanding anchoring and it’s understanding what that really means and what do I mean by anchoring? Anchoring is a NLP term that’s thrown around everywhere by people who [Laughs] don’t really understand what the hell it is. I heard that a real top…a top guy recently and putting courses, a really good guy, work with amazing people I’ve got a lot of love him, a lot of respect but, he was talking about anchoring and he was saying that you have to have an external anchor, or an anchor it’s a trigger and I’ll talk about that more in a second but, just to understand it what’s a trigger. So, you can only set triggers or anchors externally, well, you can, it’s also internally it’s both things and what do I mean by that, what’s an anchor? It goes back to Pavlov dog experiments it actually goes back even before that but, Pavlov made it publics and notable, and what he was he was tuning fork, dogs and food, and tuning fork, put the dogs food down and it salivates because they associate the tuning fork with food so, then what happens was take the food away to a point where just the tuning fork, the dog will still salivate because it associated the tuning fork with food.  
	So, in our lives we’ve got negative and positives anchoring you know, you could look at your phone and see someone’s name and go “oh my god! I don’t want to talk to them but, that person could be offering you a million dollars, you don’t know” That’s an anchor so, how you looking at people, places things, events, music, your office, everything they start to become anchors and going to trigger a certain emotion in you. So, the best behavior advice that I can give you, is a couple of different things, one, your routine. 
	Now, everyone talks about morning routines and all of that, yeah but there’s a reason I won’t go into the science behind it today but, we want to change those neurochemicals in the morning we want to light up the neural-nets that we want, basically we want to step into that peak state in the morning, why? Because its allowing us to build those neural-nets that we want, and so whatever you do understand is when you can settle a routine for yourself in the morning, or night time or whatever it is before you stand to pick in the phone, or before you stepping into a meeting or whatever the heck it is, you can have a little routine, what this starts to do is that starts to build an anchor, ta-da! Which does the anchor do? It starts to light up certain feelings in you and certain belief.
I put it in a less…a less…a simpler way Matt, how many times you hear a piece of music? And it instantly takes you right back to that moment, those thoughts, those feelings, you can taste it, that’s an anchor. So, we can use that in a performance enhancing way and when we can do that by surround ourselves with the right music, the right people, the right environments than those things start to become anchors and that’s how we get momentum, right? But, does that makes sense first of all?

Matt:		Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Andy:		I can go on forever but I’m sure of it, otherwise I keep talking [Laughs].

Matt:		So, what are some books or other resources that  you can recommend for people who want to learn more both about anchoring or more broadly about NLP?

Andy:		The best guy is one of the co-founders now, he’s a little crazy but, he’s amazing and there’s two different guys, John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Richard Bandler is ac…they’re both the co-inventors of NLP, now, Bandler is more simple and I find him exceptionally powerful. The other one side is Grinder which is way more technical meaning use lots of different language pans, the method model and all of this other stuff. So, anything by John Grinder or Bandler, and…but, at the end of the day the challenge is with such a deep subject that people get lost in it so…I mean, even simple things like by Paul McKenna, right? Paul McKenna is an English guy, nice and simple hypnosis but he’s very, very powerful, the other side of it for business and using NLP, well, that’s why I build my brand, you know? For that simple reason. 

Matt:		So, where can people find you online?

Andy:		Type those words in, Mindset by design the podcast, we’ve done like a hundred and fifty, a hundred and twenty episodes and so, the podcast on iTunes or simply go to mindset by design dot co. co for company or co for whatever you want to call it, right? And that’s the best way to connect with me but, at the end of the day this is why I build this brand because there’s so much people really getting into NLP right now, and it’s really about getting over, kind of weight loss or smoking and all feeling good it’s nothing specifically about entrepreneurial business acceleration, you know? 

Matt:		Got it! Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast Andy and I think the listeners are going to love a lot of these stuff is some great information about neural networks, NLP, peak state and kind of had a really understand you own emotional state. So, you know, I think this is some great content. Thank you very much we really appreciate having you on the Science of Success.

Andy:		Appreciate being here and I hope I helped out your listeners so, anytime, for anything you need me buddy, I’m always here.

Matt:		Thank you very much, Andy.

Andy:		Thank you, Matt.

The Surprising Power of Compassion with Dr. Chris Kukk

In this episode of The Science of Success, we dive into what it’s like to have breakfast with the Dalai Lama, the difference between compassion and empathy (and why it's important), and how you can harness compassion to achieve more and be a better version of yourself with Dr. Chris Kukk. 

Dr. Kukk is a former counter-intelligence agent, the founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity, and Innovation, a professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, and author of the upcoming book The Compassionate Achiever.

In this episode you will learn:

• The physical and chemical differences between compassion and empathy (and why that matters)

• How compassion can help you achieve your goals

• How to avoid emotional quicksand

• How compassion fuels creativity

• How to cultivate emotional resilience

• What we can do to widen our circle of compassion

• 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

Today we’re excited to have another great guest on the show, Dr. Chris Kukk. Chris is a former counter-intelligence agent, the founding director for the Center of Compassion, Creativity, and Innovation, a professor of political science at Western Connecticut State University. And author of the upcoming book, The Compassionate Achiever. Chris, welcome to the Science of Success. 

Chris:	Thank you for having me, I love the podcast.

Matt:	We’re so excited to have you on here. So, to start out, obviously you have a very deep and kind of fascinating background. Tell me, how did your interest at the intersection at neuroscience and social science emerge initially?

Chris:	As a political scientist, I wanted to understand why people would want to cooperate, or why would they fall into conflict with one another, or why do they just ignore each other? And I think if you exclude neuroscience, what’s happening in people’s brains, what’s happening in their perceptions. How they perceive reality. You’re never going to get to an answer if everything stays superficial. So, I wanted to blend both the neuroscience - what happens inside - to what happens inside. You know, in science, it’s not nature or nurture - it’s nature and nurture. I think we need to understand that more deeply when it comes to the social sciences. When it comes to the social sciences neuroscience hasn’t been there, and so I decided to jump in.

Matt:	I think that’s so important, and actually one of the people that we’ve talked about on the podcast, I’m a huge fan of is Charlie Munger. And he kind of explores the same thing which is basically the notion that psychology fundamentally underpins any phenomenon or any endeavor that involves human beings. Whether it’s business, psychology, economics, whatever it might be, and any understanding that doesn’t incorporate psychology is a fundamentally flawed understanding.  Fundamentally imperfect or incomplete picture of whatever that field might be.

Chris:	And I think that’s the case and I think with psychology, there’s this cool dialogue going on between psychology and neuroscience, and now the social sciences. You know, you have fields now called neuroeducation. And you have Paul Zack, who calls himself a neuroeconomist. And so, I think it’s a combination of different disciplines and I think if we take those disciplines and treat them like a combination lock, and combine them together in different ways, I think we’ll come out with not only new ways to move forward in resolving issues, and overcoming problems, but to also give us new ways to go back to research, to get a better understanding what’s happening inside the human brain. 

Matt:	So, one of the kind of core defining characteristics of everything you do is the notion of compassion. And that’s something we haven’t really talked about on the podcast. Tell me a little bit about how you were drawn into the study of compassion, and how do you even define compassion.

Chris:	Let me start with the definition of compassion. Since I found the debate team on campus, you always have to define your terms.

Matt:	I was a debater in high school, for the record, so…

Chris:	So then you know! You know! You have to have topicality, we call it. 

Matt:	Exactly.

Chris:	So, I define compassion as a 360 degree understanding of a problem or suffering of another. So it’s two parts here. That’s the first part: 360 degree understanding of the suffering or problem of another. Then, number two, is you take action to alleviate that suffering and address the problem. So that’s how I define compassion. From my counter-intelligence days all the way through my work on international water issues, to my work here on various educational settings, it’s about working through problems that I think for the most part have divided people. And where I’ve seen compassion come into it - it acts as a glue to unite people to move forward. And I even saw this in my military unit. The units that always try to find a way through a solution without leaving anybody behind were the most successful units. We still have that model, right? Leave no one behind. And we’re willing to sacrifice anything. We’re willing to do anything to get our fellow trooper back. 

	So, this is not something that’s a surprise, it’s just something that’s been sitting in front of us, and you’ve had it in a previous podcast before. It’s one of those invisible gorillas, right? And we sometimes just don’t look at it. It goes by us. So, all I did was slow down, and my kids help me slow down a little bit and ask me all those types of questions. And it’s one of the advantages of being a dad. You get to slow down and answer a lot of questions. And that was one of the questions I had in my mind. Then I was always told “Oh you’re too nice!” And by that saying - you’re always going to not succeed. You’re going to have problem getting ahead because people are going to take advantage of you. That hasn’t been the case. People come together and we resolve problems and overcome things. Building an honors program at Western Connecticut State University and a very successful CEO just donated one million dollars. So I didn’t see it that way, but other people did. They would give me that line that people like to say all the time about Charles Darwin. “It’s survival of the fittest.” And Charles Darwin did not say that. He hypothesized that in the Origin of the Species, but most of his work - a good chunk of his work, over 90% of his work, including The Descent of Man, shows that is quite the opposite. It’s really survival of the kindness. Especially in chapters 2, 4, and 5 of Descent of Man, he literally says, Matt, that “the species that has the highest number of his members” - and this is words, “that are sympathetic”, meaning altruistic, generous, or compassionate, “will move up the evolutionary ladder more efficiently and effectively than other species.” And when you take that idea and you overlay it on problems of water, and you overlay it on problems that have political and economic ramifications, you change your perspective. Survival of the fittest - it’s just survival of the kindness. You find new answers, and new doors that you can jump through. To not only help you succeed, but the people around you succeed. 

Matt:	That actually reminds me of the book called The Moral Animal. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it but it’s by a guy named Robert Right. But it basically talks about a similar idea which is essentially that evolution sort of preprograms us to be geared towards compassion because it actually has a positive survival benefit.

Chris:	It’s science. It’s inside us, too. When we think in a compassionate way, we actually activate release - outside hormone called oxytocin. Now, oxytocin activates two neurotransmitters, called dopamine and serotonin. And dopamine is that reward type of feeling we get. For me, it would be when I drink chocolate milk. I love chocolate milk, I get a high off of it. Or when I see my wife. I release a lot of dopamine. Serotonin is the calming level. If you think about a successful environment or successful person. Are they optimistic, happy, and calm? Or are they mad, angry, frustrated? Which one is going to create more success? This is not rocket science. OK, so it may be neuroscience, but - it’s in us. And we can choose to activate that path by the choices we make. We can choose to be compassionate. Or we can choose to be apathetic, or callous. That’s up to us! Then we create that environment. We can talk a little bit more about that science, especially when it comes to education. There’s a lot of great research out about what happens in compassionate positive environment in learning environments like school classrooms. What they do to a gene called DRD-4, it’s pretty awesome. I think you combine all the science together then you can see what’s happening in the real world. You combine it together you get these really amazing new insights into what we should be doing to achieve more success.

Matt:	So tell me a little bit more about the hormonal - chemical reactions that take place when we feel compassion. Talking about oxytocin and dopamine and all of that stuff.

Chris:	A lot of the work started with Antonio Damasio, one of my favorite books called Decartes Error and when we can go back a little bit further and review that in a moment if you’d like, but then I think really about five years ago, Dr. Tonya Singer from Germany did a number of studies using MRI scanners to show what happens when people thinking an empathetic way, compared to a compassionate way. And when we think in an empathetic way, when you have empathy on your mind. She found that the brain areas that light up are the same areas as pain. So your brain doesn’t know the difference right? It’s lighting up the pain areas when you thinking an empathetic way. But when you think in a compassionate way, you light up different areas. It’s the same areas as love. The reasons why this is so important for reality, for practical purposes, is that we’ve been talking about burn out in important fields, like first responders. Nurses. Teachers. Firemen. Policemen. You name it - those professions that help other people constantly. You have these higher rates of burnout. Since the 1980s, it started in the nursing area, we called it compassion burnout. But Dr. Tonya Singer’s work is really a misnomer. If anything, it’s called empathy burnout. Because in empathy you’re feeling the same emotion as someone else. You’re stepping into what I call the emotional quicksand of another person. And you can get stuck in that. You can get overwhelmed by that emotion. But compassion, I think, helps you ride the wave of emotions. You have this 360 degree understanding. This kind of multi-disciplinary look at a problem, so you can stay out of the quicksand, or you have branches to grab to get you out of the quicksand. So, the science is showing some really cool insights, especially Tonya Singer. I think we need to start applying it to the real world to help those people who are helping other people.

Matt:	So, I think a lot of listeners might basically think of compassion and empathy and synonyms. How would you distinguish between the two of them? Obviously, we’ve defined compassion. On a chemical level it sounds like you’ve talked about this, but tell me a little bit more about the distinction of compassion and empathy. 

Chris:	So. Empathy is basically, in simple terms, feeling the same emotion as someone else. So if they’re sad, they’re depressed, you’re going to be sad, you’re going to be depressed. You absorb that feeling. And compassion is this kind of understanding, it’s this acquiring of knowledge or learning of why a person is down, why they’re going through specific incidences. You can have compassion without empathy. I think empathy can help at sometimes, but empathy is not necessary for compassion. Compassion is one step - it’s this emotional absorption. You’re feeling this same emotion. Compassion you’re feeling kindness towards someone else. Not sympathy. Sympathy is something completely different. In compassion you want to try to help. You want to try to assist. We all know where good intentions could leave, right? They could leave to more problems. So, you have to want this understanding - this learning. And you want to ask these questions about why someone’s down. You’re going to address them in a way with respect that tries to move them forward so that they don’t get stuck, and you don’t get stick. And empathy that one step absorption - compassion is two step. Understanding and then you take action to resolve the problem.

Matt:	So compassion is much more action-oriented than empathy. 

Chris:	Correct. And I think we see that constantly. Compassion, I think this is one of the reason the Dalai Lama says compassion is not religious. We have a lot of people who confuse compassion with some type of religious notion. No. An atheist can have compassion, and I know plenty that do! This idea of compassion is a building process. It helps not only people get up when they’re down, but it moves towards success. And we see this in teams when those guys on baseball - Wallstreet Journal article had this great piece about - they called it “The Glue Guys” on baseball teams. They’re not the guys with the high stats, they’re not the guys that the media is looking after to interview after the game because they want the big name. But they’re the guys that keep the team together. They’re the guys that do the simple things that back each other up. So the second baseman isn’t a star, but he’s backing up a first baseman. So, if the first basemen misses the ball, he’s there to scoop it up. The stats are not really going to show up, but he’s helping his team out, and he’s always there for everyone else. The “Glue Guys” those are the guys helping everyone else, making their team succeed. And I think you look at some of the sports teams that have won the big games, especially in the NBA recently, it’s not necessarily the teams with the superstars on it. It’s the teams that play together and help one another. They know where they’re going to be at.  And I think we seem to overlook that fact a lot and so compassion, not only helps people when they’re down, but it builds success. 

Matt:	So, at a chemical level in your brain, compassion triggers the hormones that are more aligned with sort of the feelings of love and happiness as opposed to empathy which triggers feelings more about pain and suffering? Is that a good way to think about it?

Chris:	I think that’s a great description of it, yes. And basically if you look at it a little sideways equation. You have compassion to your left, compassion activated oxytocin to your right, oxytocin activates dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine and serotonin creates happiness and optimism and this calmness, right? What usually leads to success. People thinking in a happy, optimistic, in a calm way.

Matt:	So, do you think that compassion is something that is innate, or is it something that can be learned, can be trained?

Chris:	Matt, it’s both, and let me explain that. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famous for The Social Contract, he wrote that we have, in his words, “Natural compassion”, but in society, we tend to unlearn that natural compassion. And think about what we teach on the playgrounds. This really came home to me when I was teaching over in Europe in 2007-2008. I was teaching international relations class, and I was explaining realism, the theory of realism in international relations. Using the “king of the hill” metaphor that we have for kids out in the playground here in the United States. So I say “When you’re on the King of the Hill, top of the hill, what are you supposed to do?” And a hundred and nineteen European students were looking at me like “What are you talking about?” And so, I had to explain. One young lady from Poland breaks her hand and she said “Dr Kukk! What’s king of the hill?” And that explained to 119 European students that when you get on top of the hill, what our kids do in playground is push each other down so they’re on top of the hill. They don’t play king of the hill. They don’t play kill the carrier. So it was a wakeup call to me about “What do we teach our kids in society?” Do we teach them to reach down and help people up, or do keep people from pushing people down? These are practical matters. And we can change that, but we decided to focus on survival of the fittest, instead of survival of the kindness. I think it’s natural and we can unlearn it. And if we can unlearn it, we certainly can learn it. And there have been plenty of studies out there showing that we can learn it, and the United States Marine Corp has also moved in on that as well. They’ve had two studies, two different years now, one million dollars donated to each on mindful training for Marines.

Matt:	That’s fascinating. So, how can we - how can the listeners and how can the both of us kind of move towards being more consciously compassionate?

Chris:	There’s a lot of different ways to do this. Let me just go through cheap practical ways that I think made news, or even headlines recently. But I want to talk to people about it like, I didn’t see that. Cover of Time Magazine not too long ago had “Mindfulness” on the front of its cover. And I think if we take time out and for some of us, I do meditate in the morning. And I do compassion meditation. It’s quick, takes no more than ten minutes, and you’re off and you kind of just registered yourself to look at yourself to look at the world in a way that, you know, “I’m going through it, and I can help others.” But I always start with someone, for example, my grandmother, who has always helped me.  And when I’m out driving, I’m not the guy when someone cuts me off, I’m not the guy who flips them off. I actually bless myself; my grandmother raised me catholic. It’s those guys who think the guy who cut me off was like - that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever did, and it was a great conversation afterwards. It’s those little things. 

	In schools, there’s a thing called social and emotional learning that funding for it just passed with the “every student succeeds” act. Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut was a major writer of that section of the bill. That means in learning of values, such a courage, compassion, that help students become more emotionally resilient, and to also recognize and to understand the emotions of others around them. That the world just doesn’t revolve solely around them. That the world is really a combination of relationships and interconnections, and we should start learning that right in Kindergarten all the way up. So those are just two very different ways. Everything from mindful meditation to social emotional learning in school, and let me go to the business world. General Mills, this past year they were a 17.9 billion dollar company. They are famous for a mindful leadership program that they have. Google has it, too. A lot of the successful businesses know that compassion and mindfulness raises the bottom line, it makes their employees have higher intention, employees stay, employees want to stay. Because in the environment it creates more productive employees. This is not something that’s soft, something that - did you hug your dolphin today idea? This is real, this is just real ramifications, consequences, and the effects helps everyone around you. And I think it leads to success in a much more constructive way than the “king of the hill” “survival of the fittest” mentality. 

Matt:	You touched on so many different things that I want to dig into. One of the meditation obviously, I’m a huge believer in meditation personally I meditate every day for the last couple of years. And we just did a podcast on meditation where we dig into a bunch of different pieces of it. And one of the kind of core components of my personal meditation is sort of very similar. It’s kind of a forgiveness component. And that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time which is from Gandhi, which is “The weak cannot forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.” Kind of the notion you’re talking about when you get cut off by someone when you’re driving, the idea that you should forgive people not because necessarily that they deserves it, but because for your own emotional wellbeing and there’s research that backs a lot of this up, it’s bad for you to hold onto grudges. It’s bad for your blood pressure, it’s bad for all kinds of things. The more you can go through life kind of forgiving people and even when we talked in an earlier podcast episode about how to, not necessarily understanding or seeing every piece of reality, right? You might not understand why that person might be in a bad mood today, and so there’s so many different reasons that I think forgiveness is so important. It’s not just about being right or getting revenge or whatever, it’s like you gotta forgive them for your sake, not because, not for their sake necessarily. 

Chris:	That’s so true and I also just want to build up that you’re right, Matt. The other is self-forgiveness, or self-compassion as well. And there have been plenty of studies as well on self-compassion and how that boosts creativity. So you’re right. I always think when there’s an older woman or older man in front of me, that’s someone’s grandpa, that’s someone grandmother, and you know I can be a minute or two late to where I meant to go. I should have left earlier, it was my issue. But it also builds compassion. And when you step into a place that has compassion flowing through its halls and in its rooms, you can feel it. You can feel the energy. You can feel the electricity and the creativity that’s flowing around. 

	And speaking of flowing, this is another thing that gets me that I had one mom when I was speaking to a school saying - she literally said this, I don’t want my son to learn compassion, because I don’t want him to be weak. So I asked her, we were in the state of Washington. We’re surrounded by rocks here. Washington State has a lot of rocks. So it’s one of the hardest elements that we have, but the softest element can actually cut through rock. And that’s water. Water with its perseverance and it’s gentleness can still cut through some of the hardest materials we have. We just have to sometimes do some intellectual judo on our own selves to look at the world in a more constructive way. It’s right in front of us, but a lot of times we don’t either see it or want to see it because of the thing that happened to us. Your idea of forgiveness is really key for that. I think it moves us all along and then people are quite surprised when you do do it, and then it leads to better relationships and a better community. 

Matt:	I love the analogy of water and I think there’s so many I don’t want to go down this road at all but there’s so many different ways you can think about the power of water and energy flow and all of that stuff. It’s such a powerful metaphor for so many different things. But I want to change directions and actually touch on something you brought up a little bit earlier. Tell me a little bit more about the idea of emotional resilience and how can we teach children to be emotionally resilient. We talked about dealing with setbacks and embracing discomfort and some of those other topics in earlier podcast episodes and that’s something that I think is probably one, if not the most important traits that someone can have is kind of the ability to deal with hardship. Tell me a little bit more about that whole kind of concept and how that ties in with compassion as well. 

Chris:	I think what we’ve done throughout society, is we created this fear of failure. And failure, as you know, [INAUDIBLE 00:25:28] businesses. Some of the major successes come from failures. Right? Because they failed and then they see another door and they’re like “OH!” When they’re down, they can look up and they see the door differently and they can walk through that door and it becomes highly successful. Well, the way we have our focus on tests in schools, kids are afraid to fail. And if we create a place where — most business fail and then they succeed! But when we do it in school? The kids are - they’re just flattened by the idea. Even the idea that you can fail. And have projects that don’t work the first time, but then maybe you have a secondary plan to teach them to look for a secondary way to achieve whatever goal they want to achieve. That’s going to help them in life. In many different ways. 

	When I was growing up, only the top team received a trophy. And you worked for that trophy. But our coaches didn’t put us down, he’ll build us up. And one of the things that I do with my kids is I have them try things first, and if they don’t succeed I talk - I ask them, I don’t talk. I usually question them, I use a lot of questioning. I question them - how are THEY, not me, how are they going to solve the problem? The more they do that, the more practice they have in finding new ways, new solutions. I tell you, our conversations around the dinner table are awesome because they’re always challenging me from different perspectives. I have so much fun trying to field their questions because they’re constantly coming at me from up, down, sideways, diagonally. And that skill will allow them, I believe, to become resilient in any situation because when they’re down, which they inevitably will - we all get down - I’ve taught them to literally, when you’re down on the ground you look up for that door. Because now you see something different. And that is so much fun to see my kids, my oldest now, he gets excited when something goes wrong because something better is going to happen. You know, maybe that’s a little too far on one side, but that’s what we’re looking to do. 

	And compassion, if you look at compassion. Dopamine. Oxytocin starts dopamine. And dopamine, in cognitive terms, you know John Medina in his book Brain Rules he has this great analogy for dopamine. He called it the Post-It note for memory. When you have a lot of dopamine flowing around, you tend to remember whatever it is that you’re studying. It’s a brilliant metaphor. I use it all the time with my kids and my students. So, generating oxytocin, generating that compassion creates neurochemical systems in their brain that all of a sudden starts bringing back memories that they think, wait a minute, that’s the answer that I can move forward on to the next thought. And that dopamine increases their feeling of reward. So all of sudden you’ve created - by establishing compassion in an environment - not only something that’s better for them cognitively, but something that will make them more emotionally resilient in finding ways forward. And then serotonin kicks in so it keep them calm so they don’t go flying off the handle or flipping out. That’s how it happens! That’s how it moves forward. That’s how I think you can create emotionally resilient kids. This is something that, I remember my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Peck, this is exactly what she did, her classroom - I couldn’t wait to go to school even when I was sick. She made me love learning just because of the environment she created. She might get arrested now though, nowadays. She used to massage every one of us for ten seconds during a test. I don’t think she’ll be allowed to do that right now in our day and environment. But I couldn’t wait to go to school because she made learning a life-long love of every student she ever touched. That’s what we need. We need more Mrs. Pecks around the world. 

Matt:	It’s amazing that, when I think about some of the stuff we’ve talked about on earlier episodes whether it’s the growth mindset. You know, earlier before we started recording, Chris was showing me the book Mindset which we’ve talked about on the podcast. Whether it’s stoicism, these two thousand year old lessons. There’s this - the more you study a lot of this stuff, and it’s amazing that the more you find, it’s all rooted in Science. It’s just these fundamental lessons that span thousands of years in human generations that you know, it’s sort a core kernel nugget of truth that you have to be resilient and you have to be focused on overcoming your failures.

Chris:	Yes. And life’s about that. If you think about it — I love white water rafting. Life is a lot like white water rafting, or surfing. There are different rocks, different bends in the river, or in surfing - the waves come t you. You can’t choose what waves come at you, but you certainly can choose which waves you’re going to ride. And helping people find those waves that they want to ride to the shore of life? Oh my God, it’s a beautiful thing. Watching them choose their own waves as they get older? That’s what it’s about. And creating an environment where they feel safe enough to do that. Where they’re willing to take chances. If they’re willing to take chances, they’re willing to fail. And if they’re willing to fail, they’re willing to get themselves back up. They’re willing to get themselves back up - watch out for the society that that’s happening in because it’s going to take off.

Matt:	I totally agree. I think that stuff is so important. So, I’m curious, in your Ted-X talk, you talked about - again, this ties in a little bit back into the idea of parenting and dealing with children. You talked about the idea of - I think it was even about talking to your kids about why there’s so much evil in the world, right? And how can we kind of widen our - I think you used the term “circle of compassion” to sort of deal with that, or counteract, or — you know, I don’t remember the exact terminology. But tell me a little bit more about that concept and how from a broader perspective we can start to widen that circle of compassion.

Chris:	Yeah, thanks for that. The Sandy Hook town is less than 15 minutes away from our house. And so they knew what happened. And I came home early from school so I made sure I took them off the bus and we just sat in the living room and talked about what happened. Even though they were very young, you can’t hide it, they know. They’ve heard. And so I wanted them to talk about it and their concerns about it. But that comes from a visit from the Dalai Lama at Western Connecticut State University, we hosted His Holiness for two days of talks here. And it was pretty amazing, hopefully we’ll get him back again. And what I wanted, and what we’ve done, I didn’t want just a one-and-done event, I wanted an event that would carry on and have ramifications and effects and consequences in a good way after he left. So we started putting together - there were quite a few - the Center for Compassion, Creativity, and Innovation. And he loved it so much, saw what our mission was, what we wanted to do. And he donated the first $107,000 dollars to move the center along. And basically what the center does is widen that circle of compassion. Because we go around and help towns and cities and universities and schools become school and university and towns of compassions. And what we try to help them do. We help the chart for compassion which was started by Karen Armstrong, she wanted that Ted Talk one year, I’m forgetting - I think it was around 2006. For the charter for compassion, creating charters all around the world and - we thought that was a great idea. But we wanted every single community to tailor-fit that charter of communication for them. Because every community had its own issues, its own problems they need to solve. So there’s no kind of one compassion suit to fit all. There’s different ways to get there. And so what we do is, we help those schools and universities and cities and towns move forward in that direction. And that is one way that we do it. 

	We also do it on the practical on a very local level. I’ve combined high school students with college students to address the homeless problem in our area. So, in the past year, we had 50 backpacks that the students, high school and college students, found donors for. Getting dental clinics - got toothpaste and toothbrushes. Went to the hotels in our area. So everyone else pitched in and they see the kids try to overcome the problem. And so they donated more than what we asked. It just kind of rolled. And became bigger. It’s kind of like when you create a snowman, and you’re rolling that little snowball becomes the base. That’s exactly what happened - we created this whole compassion base and we can build whatever snowman we want, and by the way, it gets pretty cold here so it won’t melt away. And it’s so awesome to see that it started with kids helping adults find their compassion. So everything from helping policy happen, to helping address the homeless issue. Now we even have a project - we convinced the Mayor of the city of Danbury to give us the land all around city hal to create a compassion garden, representing all the ethnicities in the city of Danbury. So, high school students now even elementary school students, we got women’s gardening club wanting to help. Some corporations are donating the flowers and the whole areas are going to have a walk-in path representing all the ethnicities in that city. And they’re calling it a compassion garden. So, everything from gardens, homelessness, to creating policies to move policies along. That’s how we’re doing. That’s how we’re widening the circle of compassion.

Matt:	That’s fascinating. And you kind of spoiled one of my questions - I was going to ask you, I was very curious. About how you had met the Dalai Lama.

Chris:	We invited him to come to campus, and we thought he was going to come for a day - but he stayed for two! Which was amazing. It’s up, recorded, on our website. And the Center for Compassion, Creativity, and Innovation are linked to those hour - little over an hour long presentations by His Holiness. 

Matt:	Well, I’m curious, for listeners that are really interested in compassion and learning more about this, what are some of the resources or books that you would recommend that they check out?

Chris:	Wow. There’s so many. Just looking at my bookshelf right now. I have - one of my favorites. I used it quite a lot, was the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom. 

Matt:	I love that title.

Chris:	It is a great book, as well. The Compassionate Instinct is another good one. Buddha’s Brain is a great one. Anything by Dave [INAUDIBLE 00:36:51] fantastic. On the more social learning side, the newest book out, it was published this year, 2016, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Fantastic book. The forward is written by Howard Gardener, and the afterward by Antonio Demasio. So, you have this great education in neuroscience book out there that I think moves it forward. How to be Compassionate by the Dalai Lama, another good book. Mindfulness, with Nurture Effect. There’s so many great ones out there, I think those are some of the top book that 

Matt:	So, what is one piece of sort of actionable homework that you would give to our listeners in terms of maybe applying compassion in their lives?

Chris:	Okay. One it to understand, to listen. The first step in compassion is to be a great listener. What I mean, listeners - you don’t listen to reply, you listen to understand. And if you want to be compassionate, you have to understand that person that you’re trying to help. We have a culture that listens to reply right now. And I think if we take a little bit longer to simply listen to understand, we’d be able to move forward together in a much more constructive way. 

Matt:	I love that, I think that’s great. There’s actually a bunch of research on the communication side that you build report much better with people when you listen with the intent of understanding as opposed to listening just so you can say whatever you want to say after that.

Chris:	Exactly!

Matt:	So what is the best place for people find you online?

Chris:	My website. It’s chriskukk.com You’ll see there also, there will be a new book coming out called The Compassionate Achiever that will address a lot of these steps and show you practically how to get there. But the first step is listening.

Matt:	Awesome. Well, Chris, thank you so much for being on the Science of Success. The audience is going to absolutely love all of this stuff. I think compassion is something that we don’t talk about enough and it’s so important. And it’s scientifically validated as kind of a chemical, neurological level, something that can create positive results in your life, and it’s something that can spread out into your community. So, thank you so much for being on here, Chris. 

Chris:	Well, I can’t thank you enough, Matt. I’m a big fan of the podcast so this is an honor for me to be on the Science of Success. Thank you. 

Matt:	Thank you very much. 

Chris:	Bye. 

Why An Almost-Empty Cookie Jar Is More Valuable Than A Full One

This is the FINAL episode in a six-part series on "The Science of Success" titled WEAPONS of INFLUENCE, based on the best-selling book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini. Each of these weapons of influence are deeply rooted and verified by experimental psychology research (of which you'll get a ton of amazing examples). 

So what are the 6 weapons of influence?

• Reciprocation

• Consistency & Commitment

• Social Proof

• Liking

• Authority

• Scarcity

Today you’re going to learn about Scarcity Bias, and what happens when you take people’s cookies away; how changing a single phrase drove six times more sales; and why open outcry auctions turn your brain into mush. Like many of the weapons of influence, this is something we intuitively know and understand, but often don’t realize how powerful it is or how much it impacts our decisions at a subconscious level through daily life.

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 what happens when you take people’s cookies away, how changing a single phrase drove six times more sales, and why open outcry options turn your brain into mush. 
	This is the final episode in a six part miniseries on the Science of Success titled Weapons of Influence, based on the bestselling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. Each of these Weapons of Influence are deeply rooted and verified by experimental psychology research which you’re gonna get a ton of amazing examples of, if you’re just now tuning in to this episode definitely go back and listen to the series because there is some amazing content in there. 
	Last week we talked about why con artists wear lifts in their shoes, how a normal person can administer lethal shots on innocent research subject, why 95 percent of nurses are willing to give deadly doses of drug to their patients, and much more. If you haven’t checked that episode out yet, listen to it after you listen to this one.
	I actually can’t believe that Weapons of Influence is already coming to an end. It’s been such a fun miniseries and I love the book influence by Robert Cialdini so, it’s been great for me to go back and really dig into somebody’s research examples and really learn about them, and it’s been awesome to share it with everybody on the podcast but, just because Weapons of Influence is ending…you know, we’ve got some amazing…really, really exciting contents an awesome interview some really deep dives and some cool subjects coming up in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned and get excited but, this week we’re going to talk about the scarcity bias. Like many of the Weapons of Influence this is something that we intuitively know and understand. But, often don’t realize how powerful it is or how much it impacts our decisions at a subconscious level or throughout our daily lives.
	Here’s is how Cialdini describes scarcity bias, note how he describes something psychological reactive theory, this is a key part of the scarcity bias and also something that Charlie Monger touches on by another name, he call it deprival super reaction syndrome. Anyway, here’s how Cialdini describes it “according to the scarcity principle, people assign more value to opportunities when they are less available, the use of this principle for profit can be seen in such complainants techniques that limited numbers and deadline tactics. Where in practitioners try to convince us that access to what they’re offering is restricted by amount or time.
The scarcity principle holds for two reasons, first, because things that are difficult to obtain are typically more valuable, the availability of item or experience can serve as a shortcut queue to its quality, second, as things become less available we lose freedoms.
According to psychological reactions theory we respond to the loss of freedoms by wanting to have them, along with the goods or services connected to them more than before.
	The scarcity principle is most likely to hold true under two optimizing conditions: First, scarce items are heightened in value when they are newly scarce. That is, we value those things that have become recently restricted more than those that were restricted all along. Second, we are most attracted to scarce resources when we compete with others for them. Compliance practitioners’ reliance of scarcity articles as a weapon of influence is frequent, wide ranging, systematic and diverse. Whenever this is the case with a weapon of influence we can be assured that the principle involved has notable power in directing human actions.” 
	One of the most interest things that Cialdini mentions in that quote, is the fact that we want scarce things even more when we are competing with other people for those goods, and we’ll dig into a couple pieces of research that kind of showcase that but, lets dig into the research now and look at how the scarcity principle can impact your behavior.
	Let’s start out with an experiment that showcases the scarcity principle at work on kids as early as age two. A study in Virginia had researchers take two toys and place them in a room divided by a Plexiglas barrier. For half the kids the barrier was one foot high posing no barriers to the child ability to access the toy. For the other half of the kids the barrier was high enough that they were obstructed from reaching the toy without going around it. 
With the small one foot barrier children showed no preference for either toy. However as you would expect, once the barrier went up, children went for the obstructed toy three times faster than to the easily accessible toy, as the researchers said “the boys in this study demonstrated the classic terrible two’s response to a limitation of their freedom, outright defiance”.
	I think the fascinating thing about the two year old Plexiglas experiment, is the fact that the behavior starts to manifest itself at such an early age, right? And this ties it again to the thing that we heard again and again, is that these biases are built into our minds, they’re ingrained into our bodies, in our brains by our a society, by evolution, by all kinds of different factors very, very deeply ingrained and that’s why they have such a powerful effect on shaping human behavior.
	The next study takes a looks at how we perceive items that are banned, limited and restricted from us, and this result has been repeated across several other and different banned items with the same results. But, in this particular study it was in Dave County, Florida. The government imposed a ban prohibiting “the use and possession of laundry and cleaning products that could contain phosphates.” Cialdini described how the residents of Dave County reacted in two parts. “First, in what seems a Florida tradition, many Miamians turn to smuggling. Sometimes with neighbors and friends and large ‘soap caravans’, they drove to nearby counties to load up on phosphates detergents, hoarding quickly developed and in the rush of obsession that frequently characterizes hoarders, families boasted of having a twenty year supplies of phosphate cleaners.”
	That behavior looks pretty ridiculous and shows the lengths that people go once they perceive something scarce but, that’s only really scratching the surface of the underlying subconscious shift the people had towards the phosphates cleaners products after the ban is to me the most striking finding. This passage also helps to explain the concept of psychosocial reactive’s that we talked about at the top and how it underpins the scarcity principle. “The second reaction to the law was more subtle and more general than the deliberate defiance of the smugglers or hoarders. Spurred by the tendency to want but no longer have, the majority of the Miami consumers came to see phosphate cleaners as better products than before, compared to Tampa residents who were not affected by the Dave County ordinance, the citizens of Miami rated phosphate detergents gentler, more effective in cold water, better whiteners and fresheners and more powerful on stains. 
	After passage of the law they have even come to believe that the phosphate detergents poured more easily. This sort of response is typical of individuals who have lost an established freedom and recognizing that it is typical, is crucial to understanding how psychological reactions and the principles of scarcity work.
When something becomes less available our freedom to have it is limited, and we experience and increase desire for it, we rarely recognize however that psychological reactance has cause us to want the item more, all we know is that we want it. To make sense of the heighten desire for the item we begin to assign it possible qualities”. 
This is an extremely important finding and a very, very relevant distinction that Cialdini makes in that piece of research, psychological reactance theory…the fact that we have the freedom of having that detergent that was taken away, that’s what a subconscious level makes us want it even more but, what happens is we start inventing this conscious justification for it, we started inventing this imagine that changes of the trades and the characteristics of that item that we want and this is all taking place at a subconscious level and consciously this justifications make a ton of sense and we believe that, “oh, yeah, phosphates cleaners they’re better in cold water, they’re fresheners and whiteners, they’re better and even pours more easily.” All these things sort of bubble to the conscious mind and believe them, that those are the reasons why we are mad that they took away the phosphate cleaners but, the real reason, the real thing that worked here is the scarcity principle, it’s the fact that it was taken away, creates the subconscious desire to have it back, that visceral two year old response of “you can’t take away my toys” and we consciously develop all kinds of fake justifications for why we actually wanted it.
Something that really want to be tuned to really understand, because this happens all of the time, our subconscious makes a decision often because of the psychological bias, often because we’ve been influenced by one of these Weapons of Influence and consciously we make up with a completely different justification for why we made that decision or why we happen to like this thing more than others, why it happens to buy this thing more frequently than another thing.
	The next study that we’re gonna look at takes place in a more commercial context: How do buyers respond when what they want suddenly becomes scarce. I like to call this “where’s the beef?” This experiment showed how this subtle turn of  phrase and the way that information was presented in this content as exclusive information about an impending scarcity, drove more than six times the amount of sales for buyers. Robert Cialdini explains here, “The company’s customers, buyers for supermarkets and other retail food outlets were called on the phone as usual by a sales person and asked for a purchase in one of three ways. One set of customers heard a standards sales presentations before being asked for their orders.
Another set of customers heard the standard sales presentation plus information that the supplier of the imported beef was likely to be scarce in the upcoming months. A third group received the standard sales presentation and the information about the scarce supply of beef. However, they also learned the scarce supply news was not generally available information. It had come, they were told, to certain exclusive contacts that the company had. That’s the customers who received this last sales presentation learned that not only was the availability of the product limited, so too was the news concerning, the scarcity double-whammy”.
	So, you probably see what’s gonna happen next, right? Cialdini continues, “The results of the experiment quickly became apparent when the company sales people begin to urge the owner to buy more beef because there wasn’t enough in the inventory to keep up with all the orders they we’re receiving. Compared to the customers who only got the standards sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much. The real boost in sales, however, occurred among the customers who heard the impending scarcity and the exclusive information. They purchased six times the amount that the customers who had received the standard sales pitch did. Apparently the effect of the news about the impending scarcity was it self-scarce made especially persuasive.” I love the phrase scarcity double-whammy. This experiment is such a simple and powerful demonstration of broad reaching and it impact of scarcity principle can really be.
	When the information about the impending scarcity was given to the customers, they doubled their beef. That alone is a fascinated finding, right? You double your sales just by leveraging the scarcity tactic. But, as soon as that information itself somehow become scarce they had six times more sales. That one really made me pause and think. It’s amazing how much scarcity can drive human behavior, just the scarcity itself more than double itself but, the fact that the scarcity was scarce information in its own…six times more it’s incredible. 
	This next experiment is one of my favorites and we’re gonna look it at three different parts, and I call it the cookie experiment. The first part of the experiment was simple enough. People were shown a jar of cookies. It either had ten cookies in it or it had two cookies in it, and they were asked to rate the cookies across a number of factors. Unsurprisingly, when there were only two cookies in the jar they were rated “as more desirable to eat in the future, more attractive as a consumers item, more costly than the identical cookies in abundant supply” then the experiment has mixed things up a bit, they kept the part of the experiment there were people in the jar that had two cookies in it but, the people with the jar of ten cookies had the jar taken away then replaced with the jar than only had two cookies.
	The goal of this particular twist was to measure how people reacted to a change in scarcity, instead of just a constant scarcity condition, Cialdini explains, “In the cookie experiment the answer is plain, the drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity, the idea that newly experienced scarcity is the more powerful kind applies to situations well beyond the balance of the situations study. For example, social scientists had determine the such scarcity explain is that primary cause by a political and thermal unbalance.” The researchers weren’t done having fun with cookies yet. They wanted to dig even deeper and so they looked at how suggest what react to cookies scarcity created from different sources. Cialdini elaborates here: “Certain participants were told that some of their cookies had to be given away other raiders in order to supply the demand for cookies in the study. Another set of participants was told that the number of their cookies had to be reduced because the researcher had simply made a mistake and simply given them the wrong jar initially.
The result showed that those whose cookies became scare through the process of social demand like the cookies significantly more than then those whose cookies become scarce by mistake. In fact, the cookies became less available through social demand were rated the most desirable of any in the study. This finding highlights the importance of competition in the pursuit to limited resources not only do we want the same item more when it is scarce, we wanted most when we are in competition for it. This is a key distinction and one that underpins an important learning about scarcity, we want things more when we’re in competition for them, not just when they’re scarce.”
Here’s the last fascinating bit from this series of cookie experiment, who would have thought you could learn so much from cookie jars, the one thing that held constantly through the research at no point did the subjects say the cookies tasted any better. They only rated them higher, more attractive and they say that they would pay a higher price for them. Cialdini concludes, “Therein lies an important insight the joy is not in the experiencing of a scarce commodity but, in the possessing of it”.
	It turns out that we like having our cake more than eating it as long as is scarce enough. I found the cookies experiment interesting  I think there’s so many different takeaways from it but, you know I’m really amazed that this research were be able to pull out just from using a few jars of cookies and measuring human behavior impacts the way people perceive that but, two things that I really think it’s important for you to draw out from the cookie experiment one, obviously is the idea of people wanted it more when they were competing with other people for the cookies, that’s what made it them wanted it most, and when you think about this tie that back to the idea to the biologically limits of the mind which we talked about in an earlier podcast there’s very much kind of a visceral real sort of revolutionary feel to that, right? The idea that in wild…in the times before society existed people were competing for resources and if somebody else has…you know, more resources than you, you wanted even more, you’re more fueled to go get it. And, I think the other thing that is fascinating that a not point do they actually rate the cookies any better the enjoyment of the cookies themselves was unchanged but, the scarcity bias materially impacted their desire for the cookies.
I think that’s the part that is really, really critical, the cookies didn’t taste any better but, the possession of the cookies just because they were scarce is what made people want them so much, is what the people really cared the most about. 
	Lastly, I wanted just include a quote about open outcry auctions, right? Open outcry auctions, are a great example of not only scarcity but also, many of the other Weapons of Influence and how they come together to social proof, etc...I’ll give you this quote from Charlie Monger were he kinds of talks about how multiple biases can compound together in what he calls a lollapalooza effect to basically multiply the power and the influence of all of these different biases. “Finally the open outcry auction. While the open an outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush, you got social proof the other guy is betting, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super reactions syndrome and this thing is going away. I mean, it’s just absolutely it’s designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior” and Charlie Monger get…he’s the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffet, and he and Buffet are both famous for saying that they avoid open outcry auctions like the plague but, open outcry auctions is just an interest example because they really demonstrate how all of this biases don’t just exist in a vacuum and that’s something as wrapping up weapon of influence series, that’s something I really want you to take home and think about is the fact that we’ve seen a number of instances and cases where the biases kind of blend together and interact and there’s instances were liking and social proof tied together,  and there’s instances where authority and social proof, or authority and liking tied together, or scarcity and authority tied together there’s…in the real world things are never as neat and as simple as they are when we’re just talking about an individual bias.
 In the real world all of this stuff is interplayed and intervolved and mixing together and is a lot more cognitive biases that we’re doing future episodes on, we are going to drill down and talk about that as well. This happen to be some of the biggest and most powerful ones but, in real life its much messier and the reality is that all this stuff can compound is not just edited when these things can merged together its multiplicative, its… it really stacks up and it can really get absolute result, and the crazy outcomes, and the more biases you have kind of stacking together, the more you get ridiculous human behavior and I mean…we’ve seen throughout this series a number of crazy, wacky…you know, absurd research findings of just simple little turns of phrase, or tweaks, or all kind of minors changes that can result in changes can make huge impacts. 
	If you hadn’t gone back and listened to some of the other episodes after you wrap this up, you should really check the whole series, because it all ties together and it is all so important but, as we kind of finish this series the things that I want you to think about is the fact that in the real world all this stuff is mingled together and  that makes it even harder to compound some of these biases but also, gives you the opportunity to really deep down and understand all these individually, and then how they work together so that you can formulate away to really be able to be aware of this biases, to combat them so they don’t impact into your decision making in the negative fashion.
	So, what’ve we learn about the scarcity bias? I think we’ve learn quite a bit and this quote from Cialdini sums it up nicely. One of the challenges in dealing with the scarcity bias is as a 2005 study showed, it’s a very physical bias. “Part of the problem is that our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think. When we watch as something we want become less available, a physical agitation sets in, especially in those cases involving direct competition. The blood comes up, the focus narrows, the emotions rise as this visceral current advances the cognitive rational side retreats, in the rush of arousal it is difficult to become and studied in our approach.”
	So, there’s really a couple takeaways about scarcity that I wanna make sure you understand. There’s two primary reasons that the scarcity bias is so powerful. The first is because things that are difficult to obtain are typically more valuable and so, at a subconscious level, it’s kind of like a mental shortcut, you know, is something like scarce is typically valuable. “Okay, this thing’s scarce so it must be valuable.” But, that’s not always the case right? That’s why we see these crazy outcomes. But, that’s one of the underpinnings one of the reasons why the bias operates. The second is that as things become less than accessible we lose freedom and that ties back at the idea that psychological reactance theory, it goes back to that example of the two year olds, when we have our freedom taken away, or the detergent examples is an amazing kind of studying how that takes place and when we get those freedoms taken away, that’s when that really physical emotion and scarcity bias takes place and there’s two conditions that really set the stage for the scarcity bias to be the most powerful.	
	The first is that scarce items are heighten their value when is newly scarce, that leads back to the cookie jar experiment when something is recently becomes scarce,  we want it even more and we rated and think it about as more favorable, more desirable, and the second thing is that when we’re in competition with other people for that particular resource that makes us even more prone to want whatever that is, want whatever we can’t have because somebody else’s have, when somebody else is competing for it. So both of those factors are two conditionings that if either or both are present, they really amp up and magnified impact of scarcity bias. And both the detergent example and the cookie jar experiment showcase how powerful those can be.
	And, I think the other thing that I really want you taking away from this is, thinking back to the detergent experiment, when people had the detergent taken away they rated it as more favorable, better cleaning, you know, all of these things when in reality the reason that they wanted it was because it had been taken away but, they consciously invented all this justifications for why they wanted it. That’s a very insidious, very dangerous behavior, one that you should take great care to try and be aware of and really understand what’s the real reason that I feel a certain way,  that are thinking sort of thing and is the reason that I’m telling myself a justification that I made up instead of an actual reason.
	So, how do we defend against scarcity bias? I’ll start with the quote from Cialdini. “Should we find ourselves beset by scarcity pressures in a compliance situation then our best response would occur into a two-stage sequence. As soon as we feel the tide of emotional arousal that flows from scarcity influences we should use that rise and arousal as a signal to stop short. Panicky feverish reactions have no place in wise compliance decisions. We need to calm ourselves and regain our rational perspectives. Once that is done, we can move to the second stage by asking ourselves why we want the item under consideration. If the answer is that we want it primarily for the purpose of owning it, then we should use its ability to help wage how much we would to expend for it. However, if the answer is that we want it primarily for its function that is we want something good to drive, drink or eat then we must remember that the item under consideration would function equally well while scarce or plentiful. Quite simply, we need to recall that the scarce cookies didn’t tasted any better.”
	And, I think one of the most important parts of what Cialdini says is the importance of maintaining a calm, rational perspective, and I’ve talked…I’ve referenced Charlie Monger times and I made future podcasts suggest about him and he’s such a fascinating individual and incredibly successful businessmen, but also so wise about psychology and how it impacts human decision making. But, if you look at him, but you look at Warren Buffet, the reason they’ve been so successful is…and they’ll say this many times is, partially because of the huge focus on rationality and really try to be as objective as possible. And in one of the earlier podcasts episodes of the Science of Success, we talked about the ideas of accepting reality and the reality of perception, and the sooner you have a totally objective, rational acceptance of the way reality is, the faster you can recognize things like the scarcity bias the faster that you can recognize any of these Weapons of Influence from kind of seeping into your thoughts and impacting your decision making.
We’ve seen countless examples of how powerful, how insidious, how dangerous these biases can be and the best way to combat it is to cultivate that rationality, is to cultivate that awareness, is to cultivate the ability to both see and understand your own thoughts and we think back again to the detergent example, to see…you know, why do I really like this thing, what’s really driving my behavior? Am I deluding myself into thinking one thing when the reality is something different?
	That’s it for this episode of scarcity and that’s it for the Weapons of Influence miniseries, it’s been an absolute blast to do this miniseries but, I’m also super excited about some upcoming episodes that we have. So, stay tuned, because it’s going to be awesome.	

Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash

This is the FIFTH episode in a six-part series on "The Science of Success" titled WEAPONS of INFLUENCE and based on the best-selling book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini. Each of these weapons of influence are deeply rooted and verified by experimental psychology research (which you will get a ton of amazing examples of).

So what are the 6 weapons of influence?

• Reciprocation

• Consistency & Commitment

• Social Proof

• Liking

• Authority

• Scarcity

This week we're going to talk about the Authority Bias. This bias can create some astounding effects in the real world, such as: Why con artists wear lifts in their shoes; how a normal person can administer lethal shocks to an innocent research subject; why 95% nurses were willing to give deadly doses of a dangerous drug to their patients; 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

Today you’re going to learn why con artists always wear lifts in their shoes, how a normal person can administer lethal shocks to an innocent research subject, why 95% of nurses were willing to give deadly doses of a dangerous drug to their patients, and much more. 

This is the fifth episode in a six-part series on the Science of Success, titled Weapons of Influence. And based on the bestselling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. In each of these weapons of influence are deeply rooted and verified by experimental psychology research, which you will get a ton of amazing examples of. Last week, we talked about what made a guy named Joe Gerard the greatest car salesman of all time, how Tupperware grew their sales to 2.5 million dollars a day, why uglier criminals are more likely to go to jail, and much more. If you haven’t checked out that episode yet, listen to it after to you listen to this one. 

This week we’re going to talk about the authority bias. This bias can create some astounding effects in the real world, and as some of these research studies can show, can often impact life and death decisions. Authority bias is one of the most adaptive and ingrained biases. Partially, because much of the time, listening to authorities is beneficial and the right thing to do. Just like the other weapons of influence, however, our minds can play tricks on us, and those automatic Click, Whirr responses that we talked about in the episode on the biological limits of the mind, can misfire at the worst possible times. Here’s how Cialdini describes the authority bias in Influence.

QUOTE: We rarely agonize to such a degree over the pros and cons of authority demands. In fact, our obedience frequently takes place in a Click, Whirr fashion with little or no conscious deliberation. Information from a recognized authority can provide us a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a situation. Conforming to the dictates of authority figures has always had genuine practical advantages for us. Early on, these people, parents, teachers, etc, knew more about we did. And we found that taking their advice proved beneficial. Partly because of their greater wisdom, and partly because they controlled our rewards and punishments. As adults, the same benefits persist for the same reasons, though the authority figures are now employers, judges, and government leaders. Because their positions speak of greater access to information and power, it makes sense to comply with the wishes of properly constituted authorities. It makes so much sense, in fact, that we often do so when it makes no sense at all. END QUOTE. 

Long time listeners will know that I’m a huge fan of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s billionaire business partner. Here’s how he describes the authority bias, and in particular a study using flight simulators and the authority bias. 

QUOTE: They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was going to crash. But the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot’s sitting there. And the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time the plane crashes. I mean, this is a very powerful psychological tendency. UNQUOTE.

I think one of the most important things that Cialdini said, is that authority bias is adaptive. What do I mean when I say it’s adaptive? I mean it has an extremely positive evolutionary  benefit. It’s incredibly rewarding and beneficial, especially when we’re growing up to learn to authority figures. They control our rewards and punishment. They know what’s going on. They provide us with wisdom. And most of the time, it makes a ton of sense. But occasionally, ti completely misfires. Just like the other weapons of influence, this is something that, on the surface, seems relatively obvious. Yes, authorities can exert influence over people, but when you look at some of the manifestations in the ways that authority bias plays tricks on our mind, it’s fascinating. Let’s dig into some of the research examples. 

Of course the most well-known example of the authority bias in action is the infamous Milgram experiment, using electronic shocks. In this experiment, ordinary people were asked to deliver increasingly deadly electric shock to a test subject, who was in fact a paid actor and was not receiving real shocks. The results were shocking. And defied much of what people thought about human behavior at the time. Here’s how Cialdini describes the experiment in depth.

QUOTE. Rather than yield to the pleas of the victim, about 2/3s of the subject in Milgram’s experiment pulled every one of the thirty shocks which is in front of them, and continued to engage in the last switch, 450 volts, until the researcher ended the experiment. More alarming still, almost none of the 40 subjects in this study quit his job as teacher when the victim first began to demand his release. Nor later, when he began to beg for it. Nor even later when his reaction to each shock had become, in Milgram’s words, quote “definitely an agonized scream”. The results  surprised everyone associated with the project. Milligram included, in fact, before the study began, he asked groups of colleagues, graduate students, and psychology majors at Yale University, where the experiment was performed, to read a copy of the experimental procedures and estimate how many subjects would go all the way to the last 450 volt shock. Invariable, the answers fell in the 1-2% range. A separate group of 39 psychiatrists predicted that only about one person in a thousand would be willing to continue to the end. No one then was prepared for the behavior pattern that the experiment actually produced. UNQUOTE.

Here’s how Milgram himself said it.

QUOTE. It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of this study. UNQUOTE.

The Milgram experiment is the bedrock of the authority bias. And also, one of the most controversial and talked about studies in psychology. Cialdini elaborates more on the importance and the significance of the Milgram experiment by saying,

QUOTE. In the Milgram studies of obedience, we can see evidence of strong pressure in our society for compliance with request of an authority. Acting contrary to their own preferences, many normal, psychologically healthy individuals, were willing to deliver dangerous and severe levels of pain to another person, because they were directed to do so by an authority figure. The strength of this tendency to obey legitimate authorities comes from the systematic socialization practices designed to instill in members of society the perception that such obedience constitutes correct conduct. UNQUOTE.

And again, the person in this experiment wasn’t actually receiving electric shocks. What they did was they had an actor who was the test subject, but the actual subject was the person administering the shocks, and then they had another - they had a researcher in a white lab coat basically saying “continue to shock them” “shock them at a higher level”. And they weren’t actually being shocked, but the actor was - the person administering the shocks by every right believed they were actually administering real shocks and the person who was - they would say this person being shocked and begging for release and saying “please stop shocking me” and they would keep doing it because the authority was telling them to do so.

Many of you have probably heard of this experiment. The Milgram experiment is very, very talked about. If you’ve read even some rudimentary psychology research, I’m sure you’ve run into it or heard it talked about or uncovered it. But, you can’t have a conversation about the authority bias and not have a prominent in the discussion about the Milgram experiment. At the time, it was totally ground breaking and even today the findings are astounding.

So let’s look at a few other different examples. One of them is about symbols of authority. Cialdini cites a number of actors who play tv roles, from doctors, to Martin Sheen playing the president on West Wing as examples on how people defer to authorities who have no actual substance, but only the appearance and the trappings of authority. We talked about this in the previous episodes when we talked about the liking bias. Celebrity endorsements are harping on the connection between authority and liking bias, and the fact that you have celebrities who don’t have any credentials or any credibility to be talking about some particular things, but they just happen to be an actor playing a particular role. But the symbol of that authority alone is enough to impact people on a subconscious level, and to drive that behavior. Here’s how Cialdini puts it.

QUOTE. The appearance of authority was enough. This tells us something important about unthinking reactions to authority figures. When it in a Click Whirr mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the substance. Several of these symbols can reliably trigger our compliance in the absence of the genuine substance of authority. Consequently, these symbols are employed extensively by those compliance professionals who are short on substance. Con artists, for example, drape themselves with the titles, the clothes, and the trappings of authority. They love nothing more than to emerge elegantly dressed from a fine automobile and introduce themselves to their prospective marks as doctor or judge or professor or commissioner someone. They understand that when they are so adorned, their chances for compliance are greatly increased. Each of these types of symbols of authority titles, clothes, and trappings, has its own story and is worth a deeper look. UNQUOTE.

That ties into another research study which I find really funny, but a crazy example that again kind of ties back into the liking bias, we talked about how important physical attractiveness can be. People perceive the same person to be more than 2.5 inches taller simply when their title was changed from “student” to “professor”. This is a study they conducted in 1992. Here’s how Cialdini describes it. 

QUOTE. Studies investigating the way in which authority status affects perceptions of size have found that prestigious titles lead to height distortion. In one experiment, conducted on five classes of Australian college students, a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student. To a second class, a demonstrator. To another, a lecturer, and to yet another a senior lecturer. To a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, the class was asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half-inch. So that the professor, he was seen as 2.5 inches taller than the student. Another study found that after winning an election, politicians became taller in the eyes of the citizens. UNQUOTE. 

A crazy corollary of this study is of course the reason why con artist also wear lifts in their shoes. So that they can appear taller, because it works both ways. Again, this kind of ties back into the concept of the liking bias. 

The next experiment is something I like to call the Astrogen experiment. After they conducted this experiment, they surveyed a different group of 33 nurses and only two indicated that they would have done this, they would have done what happened in the experiment, which you’re about to find out what that is. Showing off just how massive the gap between what we think we do and what we actually do really is. It ties back into this same thing. The power of the subconscious mind. The power of all of these weapons of influence. The power of the Click, Whirr responses that are biologically built into our brains. Again, when surveyed, a different group of nurses, only 2 out of 33 said they would have done what happened in this experiment. Here’s how Cialdini describes the research.

QUOTE. A group of researchers composed of doctors and nurses with connections to three Midwestern hospitals became increasingly concerned with the extent of mechanical obedience to doctor’s orders on the part of nurses. One of the researches made an identical phone call to 22 separate nurses stations on various surgical, medical, pediatric and psychiatric wards. He identified himself as a hospital physician and directed the answering nurse to give 20mg of a drug Astrogen to a specific ward patient. There were four excellent reasons for the nurses caution in response to this order. One, the prescription was transmitted by phone, in direct violation of hospital policy. Two, the medication itself was unauthorized. Astrogen had not been cleared for use, nor placed on the ward’s stock list. Three, the prescribed dosage was obviously and dangerously excessive. The medication containers clearly stated that the maximum daily dose was only 10mg, half of what had been ordered. Four, the directive was given by a man the nurse had never met, seen, or even talked with before on the phone. Yet, in 95% of the instances, the nurses went straight to the ward medicine cabinet where they secured the ordered dosage of Astrogen and started for the patient’s room to administer it. It was at this point that they were stopped by a secret observer, who revealed the nature of the experiment. The results are frightening indeed, that 95% of regular staff nurses complied unhesitatingly with a patently improper instruction of this sort, must give us all as potential hospital patients, great reason for concern. What the Midwestern study shows is that the mistakes are hardly limited to the trivial slips in the administration of harmless ear drops or the like. But extends to grave and dangerous blunders. Additional data collected in the Hawkling study, the study we’re talking about, suggested that nurses may not be as conscious to the extent to which the doctor sways their judgement or actions. A separate group of 33 nurses and student nurses were asked what they would have done in the experimental situation, contrary to the actual findings: only two predicted that they would have given the dose. UNQUOTE.

Again, this highlights the massive gap between how we perceive ourselves and our behavior, and how our behavior actually is. We have this conscious interpretation that, of course something is obvious as liking or social proof, or authority isn’t going to really impact my decisions. I’m smarter than that. I’m not going to fall prey to something so silly, right? I mean, it makes me think of the experiment we talked about last episode about judges and how they can fall prey to one of the most starkly obvious biases imaginable, physical appearance. It’s astounding. But in this research study, only two out of 33 nurses thought that they would have done that. But in reality, 95% of them were willing to administer an illegal and deadly dose of medicine from a person they had never met, never spoken to, simply because they referred to themselves as a doctor. 

This next experiment I find particularly hilarious. I call it “Give that man a dime”. They conducted a number of variants on this, but I like this one the best because the authority figure himself was actually around the corner when this request took place. I’ll let Cialdini explain the experiment for you.

QUOTE. Especially revealing was one version of the experiment in which the requester stopped pedestrians and pointed to a man standing by a parking meter 50 feet away. The requester, whether dressed normally or as a security guard, always said the same thing to the pedestrian, quote, “You see that guy over there? He’s over parked but doesn’t have any change. Give him a dime.” The requester then turned a corner and walked away, so by the time the pedestrian reached the meter, the requester was out of sight. The power of his uniform lasted, however, even after he was long gone. Nearly all of the pedestrians complied with his directive when he wore the guard costume, but fewer than half did so when he was dressed normally. UNQUOTE.

When you think about it on the surface, it doesn’t seem like anything crazy, bizarre, or weird is happening, right? Yeah, I mean, if you see someone in a security guard outfit they’re probably an authority, you should probably listen to them. But the reality of this bias is just because a total stranger happens to be wearing a different set of clothes, drastically changes the way that people react to them. Right? That’s really a great example, and a concrete way to think about the authority bias. Nothing about that person changed, except for the clothes that they were wearing. And those clothes materially impacted the way that people reacted to their statement to give that man a dime. It changed the way that people behaved and perceived that person simply by changing their clothes. Something that, in reality, had no impact on their credibility. No impact on their authority. No impact on whether or not someone should have complied with their request. 

In another research study that I call the suited jaywalker, they had somebody gross the street. They had somebody jaywalk. In half of the cases, the person jaywalking was in a freshly pressed suit and tie and looking very nice and looking very formal. And in the other half, they just had them wearing a work shirt and trousers. What they really wanted to monitor was how many pedestrians standing on that street corner would follow the jaywalker. What they actually discovered was that three and a half times as many pedestrians were willing to jaywalk following the suited man as they were willing to follow the person that was dressed in regular, every day clothes. Again, a similar instance in the fact that just changing your clothing, just changing your appearance can communicate at a subconscious level that “hey, this is somebody of authority. This is somebody we should listen to. This is someone whose advice we should take, someone who’s model we should follow.” 

So, what are some of the learnings from this episode? What are some of the learnings from this research? There are a number of major drivers of the authority bias. The first is that the authority bias is adaptive. It’s ingrained in us since childhood. And frequently, it has very positive effects. Here’s a quick quote by Cialdini on this.

In addition, it is frequently adaptive to obey the dictates of genuine authorities, because such individuals usually possess high levels of knowledge, wisdom, and power. For these reasons, deference to authorities can occur in a mindless fashion as a kind of decision making shortcut. ENDQUOTE.

Again, this is the same learning that we’re getting from many of the different weapons of influence. These are things that are evolutionary beneficial. These are things that are positive traits and positive characteristics, but occasionally they just have these wacky misfires that end up with people doing ridiculous things. The second learning is that symbols of authority, however vacuous, have the same effect as actual authority. We talked about celebrity endorsements, we talked about the research studies that backed that up. The second learning is that symbols of authority, however vacuous, have the same effect as actual authority. There’s a couple different ways that manifests itself. We talked about titles and how they have a massive impact. Thinking back to the Astrogen experiment, how just a total stranger on the phone using the word ‘doctor’ was able to drive those nurses to administer a potentially lethal dose of medicine. Here’s how Cialdini elaborates on it a little bit more.

QUOTE. Titles are simultaneously the most difficult and the easiest symbols of authority to acquire. To earn a title normally takes years of work and achievement, yet it is possible for somebody who has put in none of these effort to adopt the mere label and receive a kind of automatic deference. As we have seen, actors in TV commercials and con artists do it successfully all the time. UNQUOTE.

Another one of these vacuous symbols of authority is clothing. Clothing alone can create compliance and the illusion of authority. Think back to the jaywalker and the “give that man a dime” experiment. Right? Here’s how Cialdini sums it up. 

QUOTE. A second kind of authority symbol that can trigger our mechanical compliance is clothing. Though more tangible than a title, the cloak of authority is every bit as fake-able. UNQUOTE.

I think one of the last big learnings about authority and we see this learning across the weapons of influence. But it’s that people massively underestimate how much authority bias actually influences them.

When we think back to the Astrogen experiment, only two out of the 33 nurses said they would have done that, but in reality when actually tested in an experiment, 95% of them did that. Here’s how Cialdini explains that

QUOTE People were unable to predict correctly how they or others would react to authority influence. In each instance, the effect of such influence was grossly under estimated. This property of authority status may account for much of its success as a compliance device. Not only does it work forced on us, but it does so unexpectedly UNQUOTE.

So how can we defend against the authority bias? Something that we naturally underestimate, something that can really operate at a subconscious level. Again, the defenses for a lot of the weapons of influence really stem back to the same ideas of awareness, of asking the right questions, of being self-aware and understanding what thoughts are going in your mind, what things you’re thinking about and the way that you’re feeling. Being able to tap into that and kind of say, “Hey, something seems amiss”, right? “Why am I complying with this person’s request?” But Cialdini specifically sites two questions that he suggests we ask as a way to combat the authority bias.

The first question he suggests we ask is - “Is this authority truly an expert?” Right, and this asks us to boil down and really think about - do they actually know what they’re talking about? What makes them a real expert? And in many of the research instances we’ve cited, it’s patently obvious that if you pause for one moment and think “Okay, no, this person isn’t an expert, so I shouldn’t let their opinion or their comment bias me unnecessarily.” The second question which we really only answer if the person actually happens to be an expert, is “How truthful can we expect this expert to be?” especially given the situation, and the context of the situation. Right? And what that kind of tries to tap into, is that even though authorities, if they’re a true expert, may actually be the most knowledgeable, have the most experience, be the experts, do they really have our best interest in mind? Or are they, in this particular instance, trying to manipulate us, or trying to drive us to perform a certain action or do a certain thing. So try to keep those questions in mind, trying to ask: is this authority really an expert? Is somebody crossing the street just because they’re wearing a suit, do they know more about crossing the street than anybody else? Is this person who just called me on the phone and said they’re a doctor, how do I know that they’re really a doctor? Is this person really an expert - and two, if they really are an expert, how truthful can I really expect them to be? Again, the way that you tap into that automatic subconscious processing that’s going on in your mind is to develop the presence and the ability to understand and to see what thoughts are taking place in your mind.

Meditation is an amazing tool for doing that, which we’ve got an upcoming episode on, which is going to be awesome.

Why Ugly Criminals Are 2X As Likely To Go To Prison

This week we are continuing our new miniseries within "The Science of Success" called "Weapons of Influence". This is the fourth episode in a six-part series based on the best-selling book Influence by Robert Cialdini. 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?

• Reciprocation

• Consistency & Commitment

• Social Proof

• Liking

• Authority

• Scarcity

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 fourth weapon of influence: Liking Bias. In it, we'll cover what made Joe Girard the greatest car salesman of all time; how Tupperware grew their sales to 2.5 million per day; and why uglier criminals are more than TWICE as likely to go to jail; 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

Today, you’re going to learn what made Joe Gerrard the greatest car salesman of all time, how Tupperware grew their sales to $2.5 million a day, and why uglier criminals are more than twice as likely to go to jail, as well as much more.

Because the Science of Success has taken off like a rocket ship since launch, with more than 80,000 downloads, we made the front page of New and Noteworthy on iTunes, and much more, I wanted to offer something to my listeners. I’m giving away my three favorite psychology books to one lucky listener. Just text ‘smarter’, that’s s-m-a-r-t-e-r, to 44222 to be entered to win, and if you’ve been listening and loving the podcast, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. It helps spread the word so more people can master the science of success.

This is the fourth episode in a six part series on The Science of Success titled Weapons of Influence, and based on the bestselling book, Influence, by Robert Cialdini. Each of these weapons of influence are deeply rooted and verified by experimental psychology research, which you’re about to get a ton of amazing examples of.

Last week we talked about why news coverage makes school shootings more likely by a factor of 30 times, which is crazy; 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. The topic we covered last week was the concept of social proof and how it is so powerful that it can literally override someone’s desire to live. If you haven’t checked out that episode yet, listen to it after this one.

Today, we’re going to talk about the liking bias. Liking bias sounds pretty straightforward, but some of the research is pretty astounding. You’ll be amazed to learn what impacts our perceptions of what we think we like, and how easily those perceptions can be manipulated in a way that materially impacts our decision making. Here’s how Cialdini describes the liking bias: “People prefer to say ‘yes’ to individuals they know and like. Recognizing this rule, compliance professionals commonly increase their effectiveness by emphasizing several factors that increase their overall attractiveness and likeability.” If you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘compliance professionals’, we talked about that in the first episode of Weapons of Influence and it’s essentially a term that Cialdini uses to describe somebody who is wielding these weapons of influence to convince other people to comply with their requests. 

There are a few primary drivers of the liking bias. One of the biggest culprits is physical attractiveness. As Cialdini notes: “Physical attractiveness seems to engender a halo effect that extends to favorable impressions of other traits such as talent, kindness, and intelligence. As a result, attractive people are more persuasive in both terms of getting what they request and in changing other’s attitudes.” 

The second major driver of the liking bias is similarity. As Cialdini says: “We like people who are like us, and we are more willing to say ‘yes’ to their requests, often in an unthinking manner.” That actually brings up an interesting point. If you remember from the last episode where we talked about the idea of social proof, and we talked about how whenever there’s front page coverage of a suicide there is an unexplained uptick of more than 50 related suicides. The factor that drives that, and we get much more detail on it in the previous episode of the podcast, but the factor that drives that more than anything is when similar others see somebody like them doing something it drives them to that behavior. It’s a similarity, and a crossover, between that liking bias and social proof, but if you want to learn more and dig deeper into that concept, the previous episode does a great job of explaining that.

The third thing that really drives the liking bias is familiarity. Familiarity breeds liking in an insidious and subconscious fashion. Here’s what Daniel Kahneman says in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is another fabulous book about psychology, by the way: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” 

The fourth major way that liking bias works is via Pavlovian association, or mirror association, as it’s sometimes called. Here’s what Cialdini has to say about it: “The linking of celebrities to products is another way advertisers cash in on the association principle. Professional athletes are paid to connect themselves to things that can be directly relevant to their roles: sports shoes, tennis rackets, golf balls, or wholly irrelevant: soft drinks, popcorn poppers, panty hose. The important thing for the advertiser is to establish the connection. It doesn’t have to be a logical one just a positive one. What does Tiger Woods really know about Buicks, after all?” 

Okay, now let’s dig into some of the research examples that support and demonstrate some of these different manifestations of the liking bias. The first example is Tupperware parties. Now, Tupperware parties are something that today aren’t quite as popular, and aren’t as frequent, but in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s was a huge social phenomenon. You see it today. People do different socially themed parties to sell things, and the reason that this sort of sales methodology is still around is because it’s so incredibly powerful. I’ll let Cialdini describe it here: “In fact, consumer researchers who have examined the social ties between the hostess and the party goer in home party sales settings have affirmed the power of the company’s approach. The strength of that social bond is twice as likely to determine product purchase as is the preference for the product itself. The results have been remarkable. It was recently estimated that Tupperware sales now exceed $2.5 million a day. Indeed, Tupperware’s success has spread around the world to societies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, where one’s place in a network of friends and family is more socially significant than the United States. As a result, now less than a quarter of Tupperware sales take place in North America. What is interesting is that the customers appear to be fully aware of the liking and friendship pressure embodied in the Tupperware party. Some don’t seem to mind, others do, but don’t seem to know how to avoid these pressures.” I think that’s a really critical distinction and something to draw out of that quote, the fact that people are consciously aware of the bias, and consciously aware of this sort of awkward obligation to purchase the Tupperware. Or, if you’ve ever been to a Trunk Club show, or there’s a lot of other social sales settings, and home party sales settings, that people use to bring to bear the liking bias, and to drive sales. Tupperware showcases how they’ve used this gorilla underground marketing strategy, driven in a psychological bias that’s rooted in science, to grow the organization to more than $2.5 million a day in sales.

The next example is the greatest car salesman of all time. It’s a guy named Joe Gerrard, and he was actually named the greatest car salesman of all time by The Guinness Book of World Records. So, I didn’t just make that title up. That’s something that he was awarded by The Guinness Book of World Records. The question is: How exactly did Joe achieve that goal, right? Obviously he had to sell a lot of cars, but what did he leverage, or what tools did he use to sell so many vehicles? I’ll let Cialdini tell the story: “There is a man in Detroit, Joe Gerrard, who specializes in using the liking rule to sell Chevrolets. He became wealthy in the process, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. With such a salary we might guess that he was a high level GM executive, or perhaps the owner of a Chevrolet dealership, but no. He made his money as a salesman on the showroom floor. He was phenomenal at what he did. For 12 years straight he won the title of number one car salesman, and averaged more than five cars and trucks sold every day that he worked. He’s been called the world’s greatest car salesman by The Guinness Book of World Records.” The quote continues later: “Joe Gerrard says the secret of his success was getting customers to like him. He did something that, on the face of it, seems foolish and costly. Each month he sent every one of his more than 13,000 former customers a holiday greeting card containing a printed message. The holiday greeting card changed from month-to-month: Happy New Years, Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Thanksgiving, and so on, but the message printed on the face of the card never varied.”

 I’m gonna pause and interrupt the quote for a second because this is a critical thing to pay attention to, and it’s so simple, and so transparent, and it’s almost a no-brainer when you think about it, but pause for a second and ask yourself: What do you think the card that he sent said every month? The quote continues: “The card read: ‘I like you’. As Joe explained it: ‘There’s nothing else on the card. Nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ‘em that I like ‘em.’ I like you. It came in the mail every year, twelve times a year like clockwork. ‘I like you’, on a printed card that went to 13,000 other people. Could a statement of liking, so impersonal, obviously designed to sell cars, really work? Joe Gerrard thought so, and a man as successful as he was at what he did deserves our attention. Joe understood an important fact about human nature: We are phenomenal suckers for flattery.” Again, this highlights a very similar principle, which is the fact that people can be totally aware of the liking bias. It can be totally transparent and yet it still drives behavior. It still influences the way that people think. It still gets into your mind, and still impacts your thinking, and that’s one of the core lessons across all the weapons of influence. None of these things are totally shockers, right? I mean, liking bias, that’s not something that takes a rocket scientist to come up with. Congratulations, if you like somebody you’re more likely to want to interact with them, do business with them, listen to them, etcetera. Great, but the reality is when you look at how it impacts people’s behavior, when you look at how something as simple as a printed card that just says, ‘I like you’ drove Joe Gerrard to becoming the greatest car salesman of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. That’s a lesson that’s worth paying attention to. There’s something in there that’s worth digging down and really figuring out: What other manifestations of the liking bias are taking place in your life? What other ways has the liking bias shaped your decision making? What are some of the ways that you can use the liking bias to achieve the goals that you want to achieve?

Let’s look at another example: physical attractiveness and the judicial system. This comes from a study in 1980. Researchers rated the physical attractiveness of a number of different defendants in court cases. They had 74 people in total, but they rated their physical attractiveness. They came back several months later, after the decisions had been made, the court rulings had been made, and they looked at: How did those trials fare, and did physical attractiveness play a role in the outcome of the cases? Here are the results from Influence: “When much later the researchers checked court records for the results of these cases they found that the handsome men had received significantly lighter sentences. In fact, attractive defendants were twice as likely to avoid jail as unattractive defendants. In another study, this one on the damages awarded in a staged negligence trial, a defendant who was better looking than his victim was assessed an average amount of $5,623, but when the victim was more attractive of the two, the average compensation was $10,051. What’s more, both male and female jurors exhibited the attractiveness-based favoritism.” I don’t think there’s an example of something that we think of as more objective, more rational, more bias-free than the judicial system. Obviously, there are a lot of issues with the judicial system, which we are not gonna get into, but when you think about human institutions, obviously everyone makes mistakes, humans are fallible, but at some level, I think subconsciously especially, we hold the judicial system in high regard, but when you look at the research, physical attractiveness has that sizeable of an impact on court cases. It’s staggering.

Another study, which I don’t have in front of me, but I think we’ve actually mentioned before on the podcast- the results... I don’t remember exactly what it was, but essentially they looked at when the judge had last eaten, and basically right after the judge had eaten, like taken a lunch break, or when they had eaten breakfast, their sentences were much lighter and much easier, but then right when they were coming up to lunch time, or right when they were getting to the end of the day, their sentences were much harsher. Again, it blows my mind that something that seems so… that should be so objective, and so rational, something as base as physical attractiveness can exert that much of an influence. I think, personally I feel… probably most of the people listening to the people listening to this podcast, if you were to ask anybody: “Hey, does physical attractiveness impact the way that you feel about people?” we’re taught from the age of two to be like, “No, of course not,” right? Don’t judge a book by its cover. Well, even in the judicial system highly educated judges are making decisions at a subconscious level based on physical attractiveness, and based on the liking bias.

Another example is something called mirroring and matching. This is actually something you can try at home, and if you are a follower of Tony Robbins at all, he advocates this, and talks about this, a lot. Mirroring and matching is something that’s really fascinating, and I’ll tell you kind of an example that you can do and then we’ll talk about the research, but one thing you can do is actually… the way to build rapport with people is to mirror and match their behavior, which basically means somebody’s talking in a certain tone, match their tone of voice. If somebody’s sitting a certain way, sit the same way as they do. If somebody has their arms crossed, cross your arms. If they’re leaning forward, lean forward; etcetera. There’s all kinds of- you’ve heard that stat that X percentage of communication is nonverbal. What that really means is that mirroring and matching, and sort of doing exactly what someone does physically, is a way to subconsciously create a connection with somebody, and build rapport with someone even without ever saying anything. One of the ways you can try that is: If you’re ever at a restaurant, or at a bar, pick out somebody, like a total stranger- and this an exercise I think Tony Robbins came up with- just start mirroring and matching everything that they do. When they take a sip of their water, take a sip of your water. When they scratch their head, scratch your head. All of the activities, everything they do, mirror their activity exactly, and what will happen is a lot of times that person will come up to you randomly and be like, “Hey, do I know you from somewhere?” because their subconscious has picked up on some sort of similarity between the two. They like you at some level because of the fact that you’ve been mirroring and matching them. Because you’ve been doing physically the same thing as them.

So, I’ll just read this brief quote from Influence where they talk a little bit about how mirroring and matching ties into the liking bias: “Many sales training programs now urge trainees to ‘mirror and match the customer’s body posture, mood, and verbal style. As similarities along each of these dimensions have been shown to lead to positive results.’” Here’s another quote: “A 1970 study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, by a guy named Dr. Ray Birdwhistell”- quite the name- “concluded that 93% of our communication takes place nonverbally and unconsciously.” Mirroring and matching is part of the way, or part of the reason, that that takes place. 

Alright, now let’s take a look at a research example that talks about familiarity. Familiarity can be an extremely powerful bias. It’s something that Cialdini draws on, and that Daniel Kahneman, who we talked about before, calls the ‘mirror exposure effect’. Drawing again from Thinking Fast and Slow, here’s a fascinating experiment about familiarity that Kahneman and his associates conducted, where they showed images rapidly and then later asked participants to rate if the images were good or bad. Here’s how Kahneman describes it: “When the mysterious series of ads ended, the investigators sent questionnaires to the university communities asking for impressions of whether each of the words ‘means something good or something bad’. The results were spectacular. The words that were presented more frequently were rated much more favorably than the words that had been shown only once or twice. The findings had been confirmed in many experiments using Chinese ideographs, faces, and randomly shaped polygons. The mirror exposure effect does not depend on the conscious experience of familiarity. In fact, the effect does not depend on consciousness at all. It occurs even when the repeated words, or pictures, are shown so quickly that observers never become aware of having seen them. They still end up liking the words or pictures that were presented more frequently. As should be clear by now, system one can respond to impressions of events of which system two is unaware. Indeed, the mirror exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees.” Wow, that’s pretty crazy. Think about that. If you see an image more frequently, you’ll like it more. You’re more familiar with it and that drives you to like it more, but the crazy thing is if you see it only at a subconscious level, you actually have a stronger positive association with it. This is a really, really dangerous way that liking bias can manifest itself. It’s something that, at a subconscious level, the more you’re exposed to something- that’s why Kahneman calls it the mirror exposure effect- the more you’re exposed to something, the more times you see it subconsciously, the more that you like it. The more that it can drive your behavior. It doesn’t matter what it is. They did it with words, faces, Chinese characters, randomly shaped polygons, all kinds of different things, and the effect still held. It was more powerful when they showed it at such a speed that people were not consciously aware of it. It never ceases to amaze me that the human mind can be manipulated, or impacted, by something like that. It’s fascinating. If you don’t think about it, if you don’t understand it, it can impact you, but there are ways that you can still combat that and defend against that, and that’s one of the things that Cialdini talks about in Influence, and we’ll talk about it in the learnings and recap section of this episode. That particular experiment is, to me, maybe the most powerful, the most interesting, experiment on this episode. 

The next piece of the liking bias is something that, on the surface sounds very similar to familiarity, and there are similar undertones, but we’re gonna talk about Pavlovian association. The Pavlov experiment is the experiment where he rings the bell while he’s feeding the dogs, and he does that for a while, conditions them to do that, and then rings the bell without feeding them and they salivate. The way that’s typically taught, or the way people react to that is: “Okay, cool. So, the bell rang and the dog salivated. Congratulations.” What does that really mean? What that really means is that any two completely unrelated phenomenon can be linked together, and can drive your perception, and the way that you think and feel about that particular object. One of the most obvious manifestations of Pavlovian association is when you see an advertisement that has a celebrity endorsement, and often the celebrity has nothing to do with the product they’re endorsing, but just having the celebrity endorsement itself is what drives those sales; what drives people to like that particular product. If you like Peyton Manning and he’s endorsing something on TV, at a subconscious level you draw the association, the connection, between those two things, and you like whatever he’s endorsing more. In Influence they cite a number of examples of TV doctors, actors who play doctors on TV, doing commercials where they advocate certain medicines, or certain medical procedures, or whatever it might be. It has a huge positive impact on the sales of that particular procedure, or product, or whatever it is, which is totally ludicrous if you think about the fact that just because they play a doctor on TV, they have absolutely no medical credibility, but because of the Pavlovian association between seeing that actor on television playing a medical expert, people are driven to believe what they have to say, and listen to what they have to say. 

I want to tie this in with a quote from Charlie Munger, who’s somebody I’m a huge fan of, and somebody we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast. He really hammers home how widespread, and how relevant, Pavlovian association is, and how much it impacts huge swaths of our society in our everyday lives without us having any knowledge, or any realization. “Practically three quarters of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Just think how pure association works. Take Coca Cola, where we’re the largest shareholder. They want to be associated with ever wonderful images: heroics, the Olympics, music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with president’s funerals. The association really works at a subconscious level, which makes it very insidious. The Persians really did kill the messenger that brought the bad news. Do you think that is dead?” I love the analogy of Coca Cola advertising and the fact that, if you think about it, if you see any advertisement they’ve ever done, it’s all about happiness and ‘make the world a better place’, and ‘let’s all be happy’, and open happiness, all that stuff. They’re not running advertisements with president’s funerals, and that’s because those have a very negative, very sad association, but the reality is whatever they’re advertising with, the association that they’re drawing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what they’re actually talking about. It’s just like the dog and the bell. Two completely unrelated phenomenon, and just through repeating them over and over and over again, as the Kahneman experiment shows, you can link those things together and make people feel, and really believe, that there’s a positive association there.

One other thing I wanted to touch on briefly is the impact of flattery and compliments, and how those tie into the liking bias. They did a study in 1978, and they found that, quoting from Influence, “Positive comments produced just as much liking for the flatterer when they were untrue as when they were true.” I mean, that’s something that’s pretty simple and straightforward, but again it’s so transparent, and it’s so obvious. You can give someone a compliment that isn’t even true and it will increase, at a subconscious level, their liking towards you and how they feel about you.

So, let’s tie this up. Let’s wrap this up and talk about some of the key learnings about the liking bias. I know we touched on a bunch of research, and some of this research is mind-blowing, but there’s really four or five core drivers of the liking bias. We talked about physical attractiveness, we talked about how that impacts the supposedly objective judicial system. We talked about similarity and how similar others can- and mirroring and matching- can drive a subconscious connection, a subconscious liking bias. We talked about familiarity, how just merely seeing something, and being more familiar with it, even at a subconscious level, makes you like something more. We talked about Pavlovian association, about how just connecting two unrelated things, again and again and again, can drive somebody to like something. And we touched briefly on the power of praise and flattery even if it’s totally transparent and totally obvious. 

How can we defend against the liking bias? Cialdini cites two ways to potentially catch ourselves, or defend against, falling prey to this bias. The first thing he recommends is to focus on finding, and being aware of, the feeling that we’ve come to like something, or someone, more quickly and more deeply than we would have expected to. If you just met somebody and suddenly you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, I love this guy,” or like, “We are new best friends and we just met,” maybe there’s something at play there. Maybe that should be a trigger to just press pause and think, “Hold on a second. I need to pull back, and I need to think about this a little more deeply. Why have I suddenly jumped in and become so- why have I started liking this thing so much so rapidly?” Again, as we talked about in previous Weapons of Influence episodes, the way to cultivate the mental awareness to be able to flag those thoughts in your mind and catch on to them, is with tools like meditation, which we will talk about in a future episode. 

The second thing that Cialdini recommends is the simple recognition of the fact that we like something so much when it isn’t really warranted by the facts, or isn’t really warranted by the data, it is one of the best ways to combat that. Again, there’s no perfect solution, but it really stems from self-awareness and trying to be objective, and even if you can just catch yourself liking something more than you should, or liking something for a totally- no reason that you can rationally determine, flagging that thought in your mind is enough to start building the awareness, and slowing down and saying, “Hold on a second. Why am I falling prey to this bias?”

That wraps up our episode on the liking bias. 

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

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?

• Reciprocation

• Consistency & Commitment

• Social Proof

• Liking

• Authority

• Scarcity

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

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?

• Reciprocation

• Consistency & Commitment

• Social Proof

• Liking

• Authority

• Scarcity

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

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?

• Reciprocation

• Consistency & Commitment

• Social Proof

• Liking

• Authority

• Scarcity

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 create huge impacts.

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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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.